Aurum Foundation names Nick Patel as its RWA Relationships Advisor as tokenized real-world assets gain momentum.

Aurum Foundation has appointed Nick Patel as its RWA Relationships Advisor to spearhead its Real-World Asset strategy. This comes at a time when interest in tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) has been steadily increasing.

According to data from DeFiLlama, the value of RWA on public blockchains reached $23.6 billion in 2026, a 66% increase from $14.1 billion at the start of the year.

​Nick has built his career working at the intersection of commodities, finance, and, more recently, digital asset infrastructure. He has spent the past several years in gold trading and has built businesses tied to supply, mining, and tokenized gold initiatives. He brings more than a decade of experience in financial markets, working in stockbroking, equity sales, commodity trading, and cross-border investment.

He has been appointed to expand Aurum’s RWA strategy and strengthen relationships across global commodity markets. The foundation has positioned itself around crypto products, AI-driven financial infrastructure, and new ways to connect decentralised finance with tangible assets such as gold and other commodities.

According to Aurum CEO Bryan Benson, Nick’s appointment is part of the foundation’s broader effort to combine tangible value with the accessibility and yield potential of decentralized systems, as it focuses on widening its investment approach to include fractional exposure to metals, emeralds, and other liquid real-world assets, not just gold.

With more than two decades of experience in financial markets, Nick has worked in different departments, including stockbroking, equity sales, commodity trading, and cross-border investment.

​He is also the founder of Bank of Bullion in Dubai, a business focused on the precious metals supply chain, including procurement, refining, storage, and trading. He also leads Clinq DMCC and Clinq.Gold, a venture centred on digitising gold ownership through blockchain infrastructure and fractional access.

​These businesses center on connecting physical gold production and trading with digital financial rails. The ventures have given Nick the expertise needed to navigate a period when blockchain firms are increasingly exploring tokenised commodities, funds, and other off-chain value beyond traditional crypto assets.

Aurum’s long-term goal is to build DeFi earning opportunities around assets that are typically seen as stable stores of value. Gold sits naturally within that narrative. It is familiar, globally recognized, and widely used as a hedge in traditional markets.

Patel said he is looking forward to helping connect traditional assets with new financial opportunities and to building relationships across the sector. 

Economists are penciling in UK inflation hitting 3% to 4% by end of 2026, complicating rate cuts for the foreseeable future.

Central banks in the US, UK, and the European Union are getting ready to announce their interest rate decisions, with markets expecting that there won’t be any changes across the board.

The policy paralysis has led an analyst to suggest that it could make Bitcoin (BTC) more appealing as a neutral store of value, as shown by its recent strength against the euro and US dollar.

Central Banks Could Hold Steady As Inflation Risks Rise

The cluster of rate decisions, scheduled between March 18 and March 21, has put global markets on edge, with Lacie Zhang, a research analyst at Bitget Wallet, telling CryptoPotato that policymakers in the US, UK, and eurozone are likely to keep rates the same, given the recent surge in oil prices caused by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

According to her, this environment is already affecting crypto markets.

“With the BoE expected to hold at 3.75% and the ECB at 2%, both central banks are likely to maintain a cautious stance rather than pursue aggressive hikes or cuts,” she said.

The analyst added that this uncertainty has “supported BTC/EUR, with Bitcoin holding strong above €65,000,” which pointed to more institutions treating crypto as a way to protect themselves against fiat instability.

That expectation matches recent reporting from Reuters that the Bank of England is likely to keep its benchmark rate at 3.75% because inflation risks are rising due to higher energy prices caused by the conflict in the Middle East. Per the report, economists are estimating that by the end of 2026, UK inflation will reach 3% to 4%, therefore complicating any rate cuts in the near future.

Europe is also showing similar caution, with a Bloomberg poll done between March 6 and March 11 finding that most economists think the European Central Bank will keep rates the same for an extended period, even though inflation risks are rising.

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Expectations are similar in the US, as data shared by journalist Sonali Basak on March 16 showed only one rate cut is priced in for 2026 ahead of this week’s Federal Reserve meeting.

Bitcoin Shows Resilience

The price action of Bitcoin reflects the prevailing macro backdrop. At the time of writing, the asset showed a 5% jump from a week ago to trade at about $74,000, per data from CoinGecko. It briefly hit $76,000 in early trading hours on Coinbase, which was its highest level since early February.

Meanwhile, on-chain data suggested a change in sentiment, with crypto analyst Darkfost saying that buyer activity has started to pick up again after a lot of selling in February, as trading volumes on major exchanges also went back up.

Ultimately, Zhang believes that BTC’s performance during this period supports its positioning as a hedge.

“This ‘higher-for-longer’ stance may temper short-term risk-on sentiment, but it continues to support Bitcoin’s positioning as a non-sovereign store of value,” she explained.

The CEO of crypto’s largest Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) governance platform says the Biden administration was better for his industry than its successor — and is shutting down his company to prove the point.

Tally, which powered on-chain governance for Arbitrum, Uniswap, ENS, and more than 500 other DAOs, will wind down operations after six years, CEO Dennison Bertram announced today in a blog post.

Crypto protocols are governed not by executives or boards, but by decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, where token holders vote on everything from fee structures to software upgrades.

In practice, participation is often low and decision-making slow, leaving a small group of active voters to steer billion-dollar systems. Tally built the infrastructure that made crypto democracy possible, providing the voting rails, delegation tools, and dashboards used by major DAOs like Uniswap and Arbitrum to run their governance processes.

In an interview with CoinDesk, Bertram said the twin forces that sustained demand for governance tooling — regulatory threat and a growing ecosystem of decentralized applications — have both disappeared.

Across Protocol recently proposed dissolving its DAO entirely and converting into a U.S. C-corp, arguing the token structure was actively impeding institutional partnerships. Its ACX token surged 80% on the news.

Last year, Solana-based exchange Jupiter and NFT conglomerate Yuga Labs both abandoned their DAO structures, with Yuga CEO Greg Solano calling his project’s governance “sluggish, noisy and often unserious governance theater.

“There’s a natural tension between building a collaborative, decentralized system and then founding it upon crypto economics,” Bertram said. “The crypto economics implies we can find some sort of stasis because everyone is going to pursue their own personal best interest, which is kind of a zero-sum, profit-maximizing mentality.

Gensler forced decentralization. His absence is undoing it

Under the SEC’s Gary Gensler-era interpretation of securities law, a token risked being classified as a security if a clearly identifiable group was making managerial decisions that drove its value, one of the key prongs of the Howey Test.

The industry’s response was to push decision-making outward through DAOs, distributing control across thousands of wallets so no single entity could be said to run the network. Governance systems and tools like Tally weren’t just features — they were part of a legal strategy.

Bertram sees this as the end of his company: if teams no longer believe they will be penalized for operating like traditional companies, decentralization stops being a requirement and becomes optional, many teams choose not to pay for it.

“The [Trump] administration is loudly signaling that you’re not in trouble, go forth and do what you wish,” Bertrain said. “That gives an enormous amount of leeway for existing organizations. It’s not actually clear if you need decentralization, or what decentralization looks like.”

The garden isn’t infinite

The regulatory shift alone didn’t kill Tally. The company’s business model was built on a second bet: that the Ethereum ecosystem would produce a vast, infinite garden of protocols and applications, each needing governance infrastructure.

“For Tally and organizations like Tally to exist, it’s not enough to have a Uniswap, an Aave, one or two L2s, and that’s it,” Bertram said. “That’s a very different kind of enterprise consultancy business.”

That infinite garden thesis was central to Tally’s $8 million fundraise last year.

“A big part of our thesis in our last round was, look, there are going to be thousands of L2s, which was an idea that no one pushed back on,” he said. “There are not, in the near term, thousands of L2s. And there may never be.”

Instead, the industry consolidated around a handful of dominant protocols.

Crypto found product-market fit in payments and speculation like prediction markets, Bertram said, but the rich consumer application layer that would have sustained a governance infrastructure business never developed.

“There isn’t a venture-backed business in governance tooling for decentralized protocols,” he wrote in a blog post announcing the shutdown. “At least not yet.”

Retail doesn’t care about crypto

Beyond the governance crisis, Bertram sees a more existential problem for the industry.

“AI has really become the new narrative of the future, and its narrative is actually much larger and much more encompassing than crypto,” he said. “What that does is it sucks away the best and the brightest. The most exciting opportunity is not here, so we don’t get the most exciting founders, we don’t get the most exciting builders.”

Bertram said he still believes in the industry but no longer buys the argument that it is early.

“People always say, it’s still early,” he said. “I’ve been in this since 2011. I don’t know. It doesn’t feel early.”

Vietnam is reportedly looking to tighten restrictions on overseas cryptocurrency trading as authorities move to bring more activity under domestic oversight.

According to a Reuters report, Vietnam’s finance ministry is drafting rules that would prevent local residents from trading on foreign crypto platforms, in a bid to curb capital outflows and improve regulatory control.

Vietnam currently maintains strict restrictions on cross-border capital flows, even though it does not explicitly ban owning cryptocurrencies or trading them. However, digital assets are not recognized as money or a legal means of payment under existing laws.

As such, locals are often known to rely on overseas centralized exchanges such as Binance, OKX, and Bybit, the report said.

Vietnam is among the most active crypto markets globally and ranks as the fourth-largest market in the Global Crypto Adoption Index compiled by Chainalysis.

Regulators are concerned that the growing use of cryptocurrencies and stablecoins could lead to uncontrolled capital outflows, particularly in a market where domestic investment channels remain limited.

Local crypto exchanges seek licenses

Last month, crypto.news reported that Vietnam had begun a pilot licensing program for cryptocurrency exchanges, with oversight to be handled by the State Securities Commission.

Authorities plan to establish a regulated framework for locally operated exchanges that will allow approved firms to run compliant trading platforms within the country.

According to a Finance Ministry document dated March 12, cited in the report, five companies have passed an initial qualification round for Vietnam’s pilot licensing program.

Among the companies involved are affiliates of three Vietnamese private banks, Techcombank, VPBank, and LPBank, alongside VIX Securities, which has already moved to develop its own crypto asset exchange infrastructure, and Sun Group, one of the country’s largest private conglomerates.

Industry stakeholders believe the rollout of licensed domestic exchanges could help keep transaction fees within the country while supporting the growth of Vietnam’s digital financial ecosystem.

Robinhood’s (HOOD) newly launched venture fund has added stakes in Stripe and ElevenLabs, marking its first disclosed investments since beginning trading earlier this month.

Robinhood Ventures Fund I (RVI), a closed-end fund designed to give retail investors exposure to private companies, said it purchased roughly $14.6 million in Stripe shares and $20 million in ElevenLabs preferred stock in transactions completed in March.

The fund began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on March 6, part of Robinhood’s broader push to open private markets to everyday investors. Shares of the fund can be bought and sold like a traditional stock, offering access to companies that are typically limited to institutional investors and the wealthy.

Stripe, founded in 2010, provides payments and financial software used by businesses ranging from startups to large enterprises. The investment was made through a secondary transaction, meaning Robinhood bought shares from existing holders rather than directly from the company.

ElevenLabs, a London-based artificial intelligence firm founded in 2022, focuses on voice and audio technology. Its tools allow businesses and developers to generate speech, build conversational agents and create media content across dozens of languages. Robinhood’s investment was part of a primary funding round, meaning the capital goes directly to the company.

The additions expand a portfolio that already includes private companies such as Databricks, Revolut, Ramp and Oura, with more investments expected over time.

Robinhood has positioned the fund as a response to a shift in capital markets. The number of publicly listed companies in the U.S. has declined over the past two decades, while private markets have grown to an estimated $10 trillion, limiting access for retail investors.

“For decades, wealthy people and institutions have invested in private companies while retail investors have been locked out,” CEO Vlad Tenev said previously.

Unlike traditional venture funds, Robinhood’s vehicle does not require investors to be accredited and does not charge performance fees, lowering the barrier to entry.

The strategy follows earlier efforts by the company to offer private market exposure, including tokenized shares in high-profile firms for users in Europe, an initiative that drew scrutiny over how those products were structured.

With the latest investments, Robinhood is signaling that it plans to keep building a portfolio of private companies across fintech and artificial intelligence, two sectors that continue to attract strong investor interest ahead of potential public listings.

Shares of HOOD were up 2% Tuesday trading at $76.78. RVI was lower by 0.4%.

Vietnamese firms are racing to secure licences for the country’s first domestic cryptocurrency exchanges as Hanoi moves to restrict trading on foreign platforms.

A government resolution issued in February calls for a pilot program for locally run digital asset exchanges, with a rollout possible as soon as March.

A March 12 Finance Ministry document showed that five companies cleared an initial screening round, Reuters reported. These include affiliates of three private banks in the country including Techcombank, VPBank and LPBank, along with VIX Securities and the Sun Group conglomerate.

The move could reshape a market that has grown fast with little formal oversight. Vietnam has ranked fourth in Chainalysis’ latest Global Crypto Adoption Index, with Vietnamese users having moved an estimated $200 billion in crypto in the year through June 2025.

Officials are concerned that heavy use of crypto and stablecoins could weaken control over capital flows. Vietnam already limits cross-border transfers, and many households have few places to put savings beyond gold and property.

That has helped drive gold prices above global levels and fueled waves of housing speculation, the report points out. Vietnam passed a landmark law officially recognizing digital and crypto assets early last year, outlining a broad framework for managing crypto and fostering innovation in the sector.

As AI agents increasingly transact, shop, and act autonomously online — a market that can reach $3 trillion to $5 trillion by 2030 — a key issue comes into focus: how to verify that a real person is behind the activity.

Sam Altman–backed identity project World (formerly WorldCoin) says it has the solution.

On Tuesday, the company rolled out AgentKit, a developer toolkit that allows AI agents to carry cryptographic proof that they are backed by a unique human, using its World ID system. The product works with x402, a protocol developed by Coinbase and Cloudflare that enables “agentic payments” by embedding stablecoin micropayments into the internet’s communication layer so AI Agents and software can pay each other without human intervention.

“Payments are the ‘how’ of agentic commerce, but identity is the ‘who,’” said Erik Reppel, head of engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform and founder of x402. “This is a massive step toward a web where agents aren’t just seen as automated traffic, but as legitimate economic participants.”

The move comes as AI agents are rapidly evolving, handling time-consuming and often frustrating tasks from booking reservations to surfing e-commerce marketplaces for the best deals. Some estimates suggest agentic commerce could reach $3 trillion to $5 trillion by 2030, with agents accounting for up to 25% of U.S. e-commerce, World said.

Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong said he believes “very soon” there will be more AI agents than humans making transactions. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao went further, predicting agents will make one million times more payments than people, “and they will use crypto.”

The missing piece

However, as the agentic commerce market expands, its widespread use creates a problem that payments alone cannot solve: identity.

“One person could run thousands of agents that all pay small fees,” said DC Builder, a research engineer at the World Foundation. “Proof of Human addresses this gap.”

The World spokesperson explained that AgentKit addresses this by linking multiple agents to a single verified human, which allows platforms to impose limits at the identity level.

“AgentKit allows developers to link multiple agents to the same verified human,” the spokesperson said. “This means a platform can allow someone to run several agents while still enforcing limits based on the underlying person.”

That could enable services to cap usage, such as one free trial or a fixed number of bookings per day per human, regardless of how many agents are deployed, the spokesperson added.

Another problem with agentic commerce is that most websites treat automated traffic as suspicious and even block bots outright. That approach, designed to stop abuse, is increasingly at odds with a world in which legitimate software agents are gradually acting on user’s behalf.

AgentKit allows users to delegate their World ID, a privacy-preserving proof that they are a unique human, to AI agents acting on their behalf. And World is positioning this not as a replacement for other identity systems, but as a foundational layer.

“This isn’t necessarily an either-or choice,” a World spokesperson told CoinDesk. “World ID is designed to be a proof of human layer that developers can use on their own or alongside other identity systems.”

The system uses zero-knowledge proofs so platforms can verify that an agent represents a real person without collecting or storing personal data, a design World claims is required for scaling identity in an AI-driven web.

Beyond Orb verification

AgentKit, which is currently in beta version, relies on Orb-based biometric verification, the World’s most controversial component.

But the company says it plans to expand the system to include additional credentials. That will include NFC-enabled passports and IDs via “World ID Credentials,” allowing users to prove attributes about themselves without revealing personal information.

“Beyond the beta, we plan to expand AgentKit alongside the next generation of the World ID protocol,” the spokesperson said.

With the world’s real-time human verification meter reading at 17,912,203 at the time of writing, its networks rank among the largest proof-of-personhood globally. It also makes their broader ambition clear: to become the identity layer for an internet increasingly populated not just by people, but by the AI agents acting on their behalf.

Read more: Visa is ready for AI agents. So is Coinbase. They’re building very different internets

For much of the last three years, a predictable cycle dominated the market: companies announced their intentions to purchase massive volumes of Bitcoin, watched their stock prices soar to a premium and issued new shares to buy more Bitcoin. This feedback loop made Bitcoin accumulation look like an “infinite money glitch”: a guaranteed way for public companies to manufacture shareholder value out of thin air.

As we move through the first quarter of 2026, that cycle has broken. Recent data shows that roughly 40% of publicly traded Bitcoin treasuries are now trading at a discount to their net asset value (NAV). In plain terms, the market now values these companies as a liability, worth less than the market price of the Bitcoin they hold.

This collapse in valuation has invited blistering criticism from institutional veterans. Jan van Eck, CEO of VanEck, recently dismissed the sector as a publicity-driven trend, while veteran analyst Herb Greenberg has characterized the most prominent player, Strategy, as a “quasi-Ponzi scheme.”

These critiques point to a failure in how many of these firms are managed. To remain viable, Bitcoin treasury companies must accept that accretive dilution is no longer a sustainable strategy. They must move beyond holding passively and operate as disciplined asset managers.

Competing philosophies: the promoter vs. the asset manager

Today, most Bitcoin treasury companies are divided into two camps, representing fundamentally different philosophies of corporate management: “Promoters” and “Asset Managers.”

Promoters treat Bitcoin as a passive asset to be hoarded. In this model, the company’s primary job is two-fold. First, the firm must act as an aggressive advocate for the underlying currency and its ecosystem. By investing in community projects and maintaining a constant presence in public discourse, the Promoter works to drive the token price higher and capitalize on gains from its existing holdings. Second, the Promoter must market its own stock to maintain a high premium. When the market values the company significantly higher than the Bitcoin it actually holds, the company can sell new shares at that inflated price to buy more Bitcoin at the normal market rate. This calculated financial maneuver is called accretive dilution.

Together, these strategies create a feedback loop of hype. The Promoter needs the price of Bitcoin to rise to increase its net asset value, and it needs the equity premium to be maintained to continue its accumulation strategy. However, this model is fragile because it relies entirely on external sentiment. If the price of BTC stalls or the equity premium vanishes — as we are seeing across the board in 2026 — the Promoter is left with an unproductive balance sheet and no internal mechanism for growth.

In contrast, asset managers view Bitcoin as a productive commodity akin to “digital oil.” In the physical world, an oil major like Exxon or Shell does not simply sit on reserves and hope for a price rally. They are sophisticated financial operators who treat their inventory as a productive asset. They trade the futures curve to capture premiums and monetize market volatility.

Asset Manager-style treasuries apply this same industrial rigor to the digital realm. By using their balance sheet to generate real, Bitcoin-denominated returns, they ensure growth is driven by operational skill, rather than a byproduct of crypto market sentiment. By treating Bitcoin as a commodity to be managed, the asset manager generates real yield from the skilled management of the asset, not from the continuous issuance of new stock to the public.

The era of accretive dilution is over

The distinction between these two models is no longer academic. One of them has stopped working.

The Promoter approach — relying on equity issuance to finance Bitcoin accumulation — is no longer a viable growth strategy. What once passed as financial sophistication was, in practice, a tactic that depended on unusually favorable market conditions.

Issuing shares at a premium can temporarily increase Bitcoin per share, but it does not create an economic return. It generates no cash flow, no operational advantage and no durable compounding mechanism. It exists entirely at the discretion of new investors. When that demand weakens, the strategy collapses.

For much of 2025, this reality was easy to ignore. Rising Bitcoin prices and abundant liquidity made accumulation strategies look interchangeable. Capital flowed freely, equity premiums expanded, and dozens of treasury companies adopted the same playbook: buy Bitcoin, promote the narrative, raise more equity, repeat. In that environment, differentiation didn’t matter.

It does now.

As the market matures, Bitcoin treasuries that rely solely on passive accumulation face a hard constraint: they lack an internal mechanism for growth. When every firm owns the same asset, holds it the same way and depends on the same equity-market dynamics, there is no basis for sustained outperformance. The model has become commoditized — and investors are growing sick of it.

Only the most prominent players — those with exceptional scale, brand recognition, and Michael Saylor-level fame — will be able to sustain this approach. For most treasury companies, passive accumulation without active management offers no path to differentiation, resilience, or long-term relevance.

Markets are already reflecting this reality. Nearly half of Bitcoin treasury companies have fallen below mNAV, and most won’t recover without a drastic pivot.

Transitioning from passive storage to active management

To transition from a promoter to an asset manager, companies must move beyond the simple HODL strategy and put the balance sheet to work. This means adopting the tools of professional commodity trading.

One primary tool is the basis trade, in which a firm exploits the price difference between the spot price of Bitcoin and the futures contract price. By capturing this spread, a company can grow its Bitcoin holdings even when the asset’s price is flat or declining. Furthermore, a Bitcoin asset manager uses dynamic options strategies to turn market turbulence into income.

This approach provides a “real yield” that does not rely on selling more stock or finding new investors. It transforms the treasury from a cost center into a profit center. Most importantly, it provides a clear path to increasing Bitcoin-per-share through operational excellence rather than capital market maneuvers.

Treasury companies also need to adjust the way they communicate with investors. Too many treasury CEOs posture as low-budget Michael Saylor impersonators — focusing on narrative amplification, public advocacy and symbolic accumulation. It’s an approach designed to generate hype, not project careful financial stewardship.

As investor scrutiny intensifies, CEOs will need to project credibility by explaining how risk is managed, how exposure is structured, and how returns are generated across a range of market conditions. The market will not reward Bitcoin’s loudest cheerleaders; it will reward the firms that deploy their holdings most productively.