Augustus, a startup building a federally chartered clearing bank for fintechs and financial institutions, said it raised $180 million to expand its dollar payment infrastructure as stablecoins reshape global finance.

The fundraising valued the company at $1 billion, with Tiger Global leading the round and investors such as Hummingbird, QED and the founders of Nubank, Ramp, Circle and Deel participating, the company said in a Tuesday press release.

The investment comes as banks, fintechs and crypto firms are racing to modernize the infrastructure behind cross-border payments. While much of the attention has centered on stablecoin issuers, Augustus is targeting a less visible but crucial part of the financial system: correspondent banking.

“We think distribution breaks at the clearing bank layer,” CEO Ferdinand Dabitz told CoinDesk in an interview. Legacy clearing systems are “slow, unavailable, take two days to settle and close on the weekends,” he argued.

Taking on correspondent banking

The firm is building what Dabitz described as an “AI-native” clearing bank designed around stablecoins, programmable money and always-on settlement.

Augustus doesn’t plan to issue its own stablecoin, Dabitz said. Instead, it wants to provide the banking infrastructure that lets financial institutions move money across traditional payment systems and blockchain networks.

Arcus, a decentralized exchange backed by Robinhood Crypto, has expanded its onchain trading offering on Robinhood Chain by launching tokenized stocks alongside perpetual futures. The development signals how quickly DEX infrastructure is evolving to cover traditional market exposure, not just crypto-native assets.

According to an announcement shared with Cointelegraph, Arcus began trading tokenized equities and perpetual contracts on Tuesday. The platform also previously launched spot markets when Robinhood Chain went live on July 1, including stock token access across a self-custodial trading model.

Key takeaways

• Arcus launched tokenized stocks and perpetual futures on Robinhood Chain on Tuesday, building on earlier spot markets.
• The exchange supports more than 95 stock tokens and offers perpetual markets linked to equities, ETFs, commodities, indexes, and crypto assets.
• Arcus uses a self-custodial approach where users keep control of their wallets, with wallet integration via Privy and connectors such as MetaMask and Ledger.
• Paxos-issued USDG is positioned as Arcus’s primary collateral and settlement asset.
• Arcus restricts stock tokens in multiple regions, including the US, Canada, and the UK, underscoring ongoing regulatory fragmentation for tokenized securities.

Arcus adds tokenized equities and perpetual futures

Arcus is positioning itself as a bridge between onchain trading and traditional capital markets. The new offering includes tokenized versions of well-known US company stocks—such as Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon—alongside perpetual markets tied to equities and other offchain reference categories.

In addition to stock-linked perpetuals, Arcus’s product slate reportedly extends to perpetual markets associated with exchange-traded funds, commodities, indexes, and crypto assets. The company frames the expansion as part of a broader push to “onboard” real-world assets into decentralized trading workflows.

Arcus previously rolled out spot markets shortly after Robinhood Chain launched. Cointelegraph previously reported that Robinhood Chain saw more than 70 million in ETH bridged during its first week, and Arcus’s early spot rollout used that foundation to bring tokenized exposure to the chain.

A self-custody model built around Privy and existing wallets

A defining feature of Arcus is its self-custodial structure. Rather than depositing assets into a centralized exchange custody system, Arcus describes a trading setup where users keep control of their crypto wallets. That matters for traders because self-custody shifts responsibility for key management and reduces reliance on an intermediary to hold funds.

To support onboarding and wallet management, Arcus uses Privy, a wallet infrastructure provider. The platform enables sign-ups via email or social logins, then routes trading activity through wallet-based authorization.

For users who already hold crypto, Arcus supports connecting existing self-custodial wallets, including MetaMask, Ledger, and WalletConnect. The company also indicates support for additional Ethereum-compatible wallets.

Arcus’s trading system is also designed around stablecoin settlement. Paxos-issued USDG is described as the primary collateral and settlement asset for the platform, tying equity-linked trading to a familiar stablecoin infrastructure rather than requiring users to rely solely on native crypto volatility.

Restrictions highlight uneven regulation for tokenized stocks

While tokenized stocks are a core part of Arcus’s expansion, the company is explicit about where those instruments can’t be offered. Arcus states that its stock tokens are unavailable in the US, Canada, the UK, and other restricted jurisdictions.

Cointelegraph contacted Arcus for clarification on the restrictions, but did not receive a response by publication time. Even without additional detail, the regional exclusions reinforce a central theme in tokenized real-world assets: regulatory standards for securities representations vary widely, and product access often becomes the first battleground.

In markets including the US and UK, regulators have been scrutinizing how blockchain-based representations of traditional assets fit within existing financial rules. Key questions typically include who effectively holds or controls the asset, how ownership is defined, and what market structure is created when trading happens through token contracts.

Arcus’s approach suggests it is attempting to scale onchain trading while limiting exposure to jurisdictions where compliance requirements may be more complex or where the classification of tokenized securities remains unsettled.

Competition accelerates for onchain RWA infrastructure

Arcus’s move lands in the middle of a broader sector race: crypto firms and financial platforms are competing to build infrastructure for tokenized real-world assets (RWAs). The push isn’t limited to token issuances—DEX-style trading venues, perpetual markets, and settlement mechanisms are becoming just as important as the onchain representation of the underlying assets.

As Robinhood Chain-based products expand, the DEX landscape is also seeing other efforts to bring traditional financial instruments onchain. Cointelegraph previously reported that platforms including Coinbase-backed Base have been exploring ways to deliver tokenized equities and related products onchain, showing that the “tokenized markets” strategy is no longer confined to a single ecosystem.

There is also a thematic tension in this transition. Tokenized markets depend on regulatory permissions to determine where products can be offered, yet onchain infrastructure is often built to be globally accessible. Arcus’s launch, with explicit geographic exclusions, illustrates how companies may prioritize compliance routing while still using public blockchain networks as the underlying execution layer.

The launch adds to the growing list of platforms trying to translate traditional market participation into decentralized trading patterns—particularly for users seeking exposure to equity-linked references without using legacy brokerage interfaces.

For investors and traders, the immediate watch-items are straightforward: how Arcus evolves its regional availability, whether it expands beyond stock tokens into additional derivatives liquidity over time, and how settlement and custody design choices—centered on self-custody and USDG—hold up as regulatory scrutiny intensifies across major markets.

The crypto market rallied on reports suggesting the final hurdle for the long-awaited U.S. Clarity Act may have cleared.

Eleanor Terrett, host of Crypto in America, posted on X that President Donald Trump had agreed to a crucial ethics provision for the crypto market structure bill. The specific language has been shared with a group of Senate Republicans, marking a significant step forward for the legislation.

The ethics provision is a major sticking point in holding back the bill’s passage through Senate. The legislation aims to provide a definitive regulatory framework, clearly distinguishing between digital commodities and securities to end years of enforcement-led oversight.

Bitcoin BTC$66,691.60 rallied above $66,000, gaining 3.5% in 24 hours to its highest in just over a month. Othe cryptocurrencies, including ether (ETH), BNB BNB$577.13 and XRP (XRP) posted even larger gains. Among industry, the standout is the CoinDesk DeFi Select Index, which surged 9%.

Additional tailwinds came from Asia, where the selloff in semiconductor stocks that dragged crypto lower last week reversed, fueling to a broad risk rally.

Gate Europe’s CEO Giovanni Cunti says the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) has raised the long-term operating burden for firms already authorized to serve EU customers, warning that some licensed providers may eventually decide they cannot afford the compliance costs.

Speaking to Cointelegraph’s Chain Reaction on Monday, Cunti argued that MiCA’s stricter requirements have tightened competition—particularly for newcomers—and that the market may now be too small for some businesses to sustain the resources required to operate under the EU framework.

Key takeaways

• MiCA compliance costs are increasingly viewed as a barrier for some licensed crypto-asset service providers (CASPs), according to Gate Europe’s CEO.
• The July 1 end of MiCA’s 18-month transition period forced a retrenchment in some services across Europe, while licensed firms continued under the new regime.
• Regulatory burden may push certain startups and projects to launch outside the EU to preserve room for product iteration and growth.
• Despite the pressure, ESMA’s CASP authorizations continue to expand, though at a slower pace since the transition deadline.
• As the market contracts from “thousands” of operators to “hundreds,” remaining providers may benefit from customer migration rather than losing users.

MiCA’s transition deadline changed who can serve EU users

MiCA is the EU’s comprehensive regulatory framework for crypto assets. The bloc’s 18-month transition period ended on July 1, meaning crypto firms serving EU customers needed authorization under MiCA or otherwise had to stop offering regulated services.

Cointelegraph previously reported that the deadline triggered service changes from several exchanges in parts of Europe while firms sought MiCA approvals. A notable example is Binance, which Cointelegraph said was unable to secure a MiCA license before the deadline. The result was a patchwork of restrictions depending on jurisdiction—an early sign that the authorization process would determine who could continue operating as usual.

Gate Europe warns some licensed firms may not endure

Cunti’s central concern is not simply that compliance is costly, but that the costs and staffing requirements needed to operate continuously under MiCA could outweigh the revenue potential for some firms—especially those that acquired a license expecting the broader market to remain large.

He told Cointelegraph that “quite a few” firms that obtain MiCA licenses may ultimately lack the capacity to sustain the “cost and the resources” required “in the long term.”

For investors and operators, the implication is straightforward: in a regulated environment with ongoing obligations, survival increasingly depends on business scale and risk management—not only on obtaining a license once. That can favor larger, better-capitalized platforms and reduce room for smaller providers that cannot spread compliance overhead across higher volumes.

Regulation may drive projects to other jurisdictions

Beyond business continuity, Cunti also suggested that MiCA’s stricter approach could affect where new crypto products and projects choose to launch. He said MiCA strengthens investor protections, but also leaves less space for innovation compared with jurisdictions that apply lighter regulatory requirements.

That, he argued, may lead some teams to choose non-EU markets as a first stop. “We may need to be prepared that some projects, possibly some important projects, may be looking at other jurisdictions with different guidelines,” Cunti said.

At the same time, the EU framework still appears to be gaining institutional traction. ESMA continues to add CASPs to its public register, indicating that the compliance pathway exists—though Cunti’s comments point to a tougher economic reality for firms after authorization.

ESMA licensing continues, but momentum is slower

According to ESMA updates cited by Cointelegraph, the number of companies authorized under MiCA has kept rising. On Friday, ESMA added 14 crypto-asset service providers to its register, bringing the total to 294. Cointelegraph noted that this followed the addition of 37 firms in ESMA’s first update after the July 1 transition deadline.

While the steady increase shows that regulatory onboarding is continuing, Cunti framed the broader effect as a reshaping of competition rather than a simple expansion of the market. He pointed to the difference between the pre-MiCA landscape—when, in his view, there were “thousands of operators”—and the post-deadline environment, which is now closer to “hundreds.”

From a market-structure perspective, this distinction matters. A shrinking number of compliant providers can reduce choice and increase regulatory concentration, but it can also redirect demand. Cunti suggested that customers still want access to EU-regulated services and therefore may migrate toward the remaining compliant platforms rather than leaving the ecosystem entirely.

“So definitely there is a big opportunity for all of us,” he said, adding that “there is an ongoing migration because customers do not want to lose access to this market.”

ESMA’s role also remains active as regulators oversee how major venues adapt. Earlier coverage from Cointelegraph referenced an ESMA warning that brought Binance’s EU service changes into scrutiny—another signal that MiCA implementation is ongoing, not a one-time switch.

What to watch next

The key question after MiCA’s transition is whether authorization translates into sustainable operations. Readers should watch for evidence that some licensed firms scale down, exit, or consolidate—alongside continued ESMA licensing updates and any further regulatory scrutiny over how exchanges restrict services in different EU regions.

In attempting to modernize and better meet its customers’ needs, MoneyGram has partnered with the Stellar network, which has underpinned many of the company’s blockchain initiatives over the past five years. But the company has also started exploring other ecosystems: while Stellar remains a core partner, MoneyGram has also become a validator on Solana and Tempo. For MoneyGram, the immediate payoff isn’t speculative crypto activity, it’s replacing legacy financial rails.

Today’s cross-border settlement still largely depends on banking hours and weekday processing. Blockchain-based infrastructure, Soohoo argued, enables real-time settlement around the clock, reducing operational costs while improving the customer experience.

“We believe if we do it right, we can achieve all three,” he said, referring to helping customers save time, effort and money. Instant settlement also allows MoneyGram to lower back-office costs, savings the company hopes to eventually pass on through lower prices. Currently, MoneyGram’s fees start at $1.89 and vary depending on what country you send them to.

Soohoo doesn’t believe consumers need to understand the technology powering those improvements. He compared blockchain to the processors inside Apple’s iPhone.

“I can’t tell you what processor is inside my iPhone,” he said. “I just know it’s faster.” In the same way, he argued, remittance customers care about whether money arrives quickly and reliably, not whether it traveled over a blockchain.