ROWA Finance

Some thoughts from @consensus2026 … Despite all the buzzy headlines, sentiment was pretty weak. Clarity Act progressed, Haun Ventures and a16z Crypto announced new mega funds, Bullish acquired Equiniti for $4.2B, and Kraken acquired Reap for $600M. Yet, sentiment on the ground was mixed/bearish. All people wanted to talk about is AI. Coinbase layoffs didn't help the mood and reinforced some people's fears on what opportunities are still left in crypto (I still think there are plenty fwiw!). Other takeaways: - Lots of suits for a crypto conference. Crowd was mostly tradfi institutions, fintechs, and crypto corporates; very few startup founders. General theme was 'tokenization of everything.' - Trad institutions seem to be looking at each other to figure out their own next steps; copying each other's next moves or following similar strategies across custody, tokenization, stablecoin acceptance, trading. - Most former crypto funds are now doing crypto & AI. - VCs don't have much to share in terms of theses or new deals. Not much deployment happening. Lots of VCs raising. Though, outside of the mega VC funds announced this week, a number of other VCs have recently closed their raises and haven't announced them yet. So we will hopefully see an uptick in new startup funding over the second half of the yr. - Some policy folks think Clarity could be passed as early as end of May. - Mastercard vs Visa: Mastercard is very focused on B2B payments expansion while Visa aims to dominate agentic commerce. - Tradfi brokerages aren't just competing against each other; they see Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood as their direct competition and are closely tracking their moves. - In terms of chains, Canton stole the show. Lots of chatter about partnering and building on Canton; little mention of any other chains. Patterns I noticed: - More sophisticated onchain RWA infrastructure is emerging to improve liquidity, risk management, mandate enforcement, and execution (@Corkprotocol @redstone_defi @rowa_finance @temple_ny) - Interest in compute derivatives, as well as solving for data center imposed constraints on energy, water, etc. - Similar dynamic is forming with cross-border access to tokenized assets like we've seen with cross-border payments. The leaders will be those that carve out dominance within a specific, sufficiently large geo or corridor. For tokenized equities specifically, the leaders are currently being determined as they compete for market share to bridge US equities to Singapore, HK, and UAE.