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What a morning thus far.

Custodia Bank said that it launched the first-ever “bank-issued stablecoin on a permissionless blockchain” in partnership with Vantage Bank. 

The two issued and redeemed Avit, Custodia’s stablecoin — which uses the ERC-20 standard  — on the Ethereum mainnet in a series of test transactions.

Remember when Custodia was being shunned just last year by regulators? How quickly times have changed. 

Meanwhile:

• Bitcoin’s down ever so slightly this morning, still maintaining $87,000 though. ETH, however, is down 1.3% to just over $2,000.

• Mt. Gox made another $1 billion transfer last night, according to Arkham Intelligence data.

• DeFi’s TVL topped $100B per Blockworks Research, a 7% increase since we mentioned it Monday.

🗞️ Extra, extra!

Here’s a Tuesday morning exclusive for you: Chronicle raised $12 million in seed funding. 

The round was led by Strobe (which used to be known as Blocktower Venture Capital) with participation from Brevan Howard, 6th Man Ventures and more.

Chronicle is the first oracle on Ethereum, and it’s headed up by a group — including founder Niklas Kunkel — who were part of the founding team at MakerDAO (now Sky). 

If you don’t know what an oracle is, Kunkel explains it as putting your phone on airplane mode. Your apps then mostly become useless.

“The utility of apps that we've come to expect … comes from the ability to send and receive data outside of just this sandbox of a phone, and Oracle's allow blockchains to do the same things.”

Chronicle is also a data infrastructure provider for tokenized assets, so it has built-in exposure both to DeFi and RWAs. It has its own RWA oracle called verified asset. If you’re curious about who’s using Chronicle, I’m told the list includes the likes of M^0, Centrifuge, Superstate and Securitize.

It may seem odd that the project is catering to two very different audiences. But Kunkel wishes to carry on what he saw at Sky and merge the two client bases — as I called them — given the overlap he sees.

As Kunkel noted: “If you're a DeFi protocol, your revenue is so boom, bust with every bull and bear cycle, and it's hard to sustainably run a company continuously like that, right?” 

But the trend he sees is more projects using products similar to traditional finance fixed income that would help smooth out the revenue. 

Kunkel feels that Chronicle’s in a “prime position” to help institutions as they get into the RWA space. Clearly, with the increase in interest for such products as well as the changing tide from the administration, this was the “ideal” time to scale the product. 

While Kunkel couldn’t give specifics, he said that there’s a “general trend” among the top 50 financial institutions looking to gain exposure to RWAs (and given Fidelity’s move this weekend, are we even surprised?). It’s a big focus for the team over the next 12 to 18 months. 

“We’re just going to see a huge wave of products coming online in Q2, Q3, Q4 … even going into next year. I think Chronicle is uniquely positioned to take advantage of that. We're the exclusive oracle for anyone who wants to have any kind of [Sky] or buy-side action on their token item. And fortunately for us, [Sky formerly Maker] is the biggest buy-side owner of tokenized assets.”

The raise will go toward product build and research development. Kunkel had nothing but praise for the team over at Sky and noted that one of the best moves the team made back when it was Maker was to fund research. Kunkel says allowing folks to research areas of interest related — but not tied to — what the project is doing can “pay dividends for years afterward.”

While oracles in the past have been rather difficult to scale, Chronicle’s looking to build “essential infrastructure” to safely bring on TradFi. Now we’ll just have to see who walks in the door.

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• Kraken is reportedly exploring a $1B debt package as it gears up for a potential IPO, according to Bloomberg. 

• Binance said it offboarded a market maker for Movement’s MOVE token that netted $38 million from breaking the exchange’s rules. 

• Trump Media announced a deal with Crypto.com to launch ETFs and other products.

🤔 A curious situation

Yesterday, former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao praised “USD1” and posted, “Welcome to BNB Chain!”

A couple of hours later, World Liberty Financial noted that USD1 is not “currently tradable” and seemingly took ownership of the new stablecoin. 

And, after a lot of speculation and even more texts sent out from yours truly, we finally have some answers this morning. USD1 will be minted on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain blockchains, though the team isn’t ruling out future protocols, per a press release. 

“WLFI’s USD1 will be 100% backed by short-term US government treasuries, US dollar deposits, and other cash equivalents,” the release said.

BitGo will custody the USD1 reserves. In a statement, CEO Mike Belshe praised the stablecoin as an advancement in “institutional-ready digital assets.”

“USD1 provides what algorithmic and anonymous crypto projects cannot — access to the power of DeFi underpinned by the credibility and safeguards of the most respected names in traditional finance,” said Zach Witkoff, WLFI co-founder.

It’s still unclear from the press release what role Wintermute was playing, though it looked like it was potentially in the mix per Etherscan. No word back from their team yet, either.

WLFI just closed $550 million in token sales last week and, in an accompanying press release, said: “Over the last six months, WLFI has established key relationships with leading blockchain protocols and institutions including Ondo Finance, Ethena, Chainlink, Sui and Aave. These relationships have positioned WLFI to more rapidly build and deploy its upcoming platform which is being purpose-built to democratize finance for millions.”

But the project hasn’t been without its criticism, with our very own Jack Kubinec reporting last month that it was courting other teams for token swaps. 

Now we’ll just have to see what’s next for WLFI. And the biggest question is: What players are involved?

It’s a builders market. It will always be a builders market. 

Permissionless IV is for the ones deep in the code — building infra, launching new systems, and reshaping how this space runs.

🎤 Speaker apps are open — got something that matters? Say it on stage.

💻 Hackathon is live — $100K+ in bounties. Builders get in free.

June 22–26 | Brooklyn

On our minds: Bye-bye memecoin trading?