Scott Melker discusses Okxice's plans for a Nov. 23 launch under an SEC innovation exemption; Kraken (KRAK.PVT) to launch Nasdaq-backed tokenized versions of European stocks; and Goldman Sachs (GS) and Citi (C) among the banks committing to stablecoin ventures.
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Two of the world's largest exchanges have huge announcements around tokenization of equities. And one of the biggest banks in the world has moved into crypto custody. I'm going to tell you about all of that right now on The Daily Wolf. Let's go.
What is up, everybody? Welcome to The Daily Wolf on Yahoo Finance. I am your host, Scott Melker, also known as The Wolf of All Streets. Now, I know this is going to make you sad, but there will not be a show tomorrow because I'm actually going to be in New York City for Yahoo Invest on site at Yahoo for the very first time for their amazing one-day conference that they're holding.
So you're going to have to get your full dose of The Daily Wolf today before getting another full dose, I guess, like, on Friday. I'll be back on Friday. We have two big stories about tokenization from some of our favorite crypto entities. And the first is one we've been talking about a lot. It is OKX Ice sets November 23rd launch for tokenized securities venue under SEC Innovation exemption.
We've been talking about OKX Ice here for months. They were the first ones to make an official announcement after the SEC proposed the Innovation exemption on how they were going to tokenize stocks and equities. Of course, ICE is the parent of the New York Stock Exchange. This is a joint project between OKX and ICE, and it will actually trade more like a decentralized crypto exchange, at least from a liquidity pool perspective, than it will like a traditional exchange.
So really, really going deep down the crypto rabbit hole here to present this. They've finally offered an official date, November 23rd. So they'll have more than 70 assets confirmed for a round the clock trading. Each one of those tokenized assets will be tokenized by Securitize. Uh, you had listened to my conversation from 9:00 a.m. today with Carlos Domingo, the CEO of Securitize on YouTube.
And of course, will be backed one by one by an underlying US share. So the first mover issuers here are not surprisingly mostly crypto companies, right? You have better.com, not crypto, but BitGo, Circle, Coinbase, Robinhood, Securitize, and strategy including STRC, and of course, 59 Direxion, D I R E X I O N. Direxion, I think he's a Pokemon.
Um, fire. Fire Pokemon. Uh, Direxion ETFs. Right? So, uh, this, of course, under the tokenization exemption means shareholder rights and economics include dividends, voting, and corporate actions. They are doing it the right way. STRC being tokenized is really interesting to me. They had a comment about it actually. STRC will be tokenized on OKX.
This is from Phong Le, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Strategy. Bitcoin is digital capital. Strategy's preferred stocks such as STRC transform that capital into digital credit with high yield and deep liquidity. Tokenization on the OKX ICE TSV is a natural next step toward making digital credit accessible to investors around the world 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The future of capital markets is digital, global, and always on, like my brain. Um, and my phone. Always. Catch me anytime. So, listen, this is a a very, very big announcement. OKX ICE, of course, we kept reporting on all the unfortunate people that were opting out.
We know that they will all opt in in the future. They were all Nasdaq listed companies. The Nasdaq, as we know, was telling them effectively not to do this because they have their own plans for tokenization. But this is an unstoppable train. Everything is coming on chain, will be tokenized, will be traded 24/7, 365. Now, I I mentioned this earlier. Of course, first of all, geographic and eligibility restrictions apply, of course. But this is how the trading works.
It uses Uniswap V4 automated market maker pools on X Layer, OKX's Ethereum Layer 2. So it trades like a uh trades like Uniswap, right? With liquidity pools. Really, really interesting they're doing it that way. So, uh, buckle up. Uh, all my stock friends, all my guys at hedge funds, all my buddies at the banks, sorry about your weekends and nights. Sucks to be you.
Now you're one of us. And this is not the only story that we have today about tokenization. Nasdaq back Payward launches tokenized versions of European stocks. This is, of course, Kraken. Uh it's always backed by Kraken by the Payward who owns the Nasdaq of the Paywards backed Krakens. Investors will be able to trade the tokenized stocks in the Payward-owned Kraken platform as well as other exchanges from Wednesday.
These are 200 tokenized UK and EU listed stocks, which is cute because I didn't know that they had actual companies in Europe. You guys are not as good as us. Uh, I thought they only traded American companies and I thought we we were the only stock exchange in the world. I'm kidding, guys. I'm happy for you and your cute little companies. So these additions includes all 40 companies in Germany's DAX index.
They say they're going to also bring the entire Hong Kong stock market basically online. Their catalog now exceeds 1,500 total tokenized assets, assets. X-Stocks reports more than 1.1 billion in assets. So across those 1,500, only 1.1 billion can show you that this is still a very, very small market. But as we're getting OKX ICE in the United States, of course, you have X-Stocks increasing over there.
Not available to us in the US. Not available to the UK whose stocks are being tokenized. The irony of being in a amazing first world country like the United States and the UK where we're not allowed to have fun or do anything cool. Uh, I guess we have football. So that's good. Uh, and they have football too, but it's a different football. So confusing. I find, I I find Europe so confusing. But I love you guys.
Uh, and speaking of, uh, confusing Europe and and Germany and other places that are not the United States, Deutsche Bank, the jokes write themselves. I'm not going to say it. Deutsche Bank launches digital asset custody service. So Deutsche Bank said Wednesday, its digital asset custody service is live for paying clients. Unfortunately, not live for, um, people who are not paying or have no money. The service targets institutional and corporate clients in Europe.
They support Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDC, EURC, and EURAU, which I've literally never heard of. So, Deutsche Bank manages wallets and private keys here on client's behalf. So this is obviously one of the larger banks in the world, will now be officially doing crypto custody. It's a major announcement. And at the exact same time, another institutional announcement, Goldman wants coins. Goldman Sachs, City, among banks said to commit $270 million to stablecoin venture, which is known as Project Pharaoh, which I think I saw in a Bond movie once.
Plans to issue a dollar denominated stable coins expected to be incorporated in the United States. You know what we need? More dollar denominated stable coins from banks. Goldman Sachs is on like nine of these announcements. Goldman Sachs is going to have like a plethora of stable coins, a cornucopia, if you will. A wide assortment, an array of stable coins. Uh, so listen, we know that institutions are moving massively into this space.
Stablecoins is one of the ways they're doing it, custody another way, obviously, that they will be doing this heavily. But they're not the only institutions that are bringing in more crypto. The payment networks are too. Namely this one. Visa adds Monad to stablecoin settlement network options. Visa issuers and acquirers can now use Monad, I guess if they want to, for stablecoin settlement with privacy features planned for the coming months.
So that's interesting, right? We know that, uh, Visa already is, uh, allowed settlement on Ethereum, Solana, and Avalanche, adding Monad. I have no idea how much volume or transaction volume Monad actually does. Interesting to see them coming out, but this announcement did come from the Monad Foundation. But Visa as a whole reported 20 billion in annualized stablecoin settlement run rate as of September.
So, an absolutely huge number. Visa does not want to be replaced by a new better technology, so they're adopting it themselves. Very smart. But maybe the most interesting part of this announcement is that latter part. Monad plans an institutional privacy feature for the coming months, which would allow would let institutions selectively share settlement details with auditors and regulators, which is great because who wants to give auditors and regulators all your data when they ask for it? Nobody. It's like the IRS.
It's optional. Okay. So stablecoin networks, uh, I mean, credit card networks obviously adopting stablecoins and doing it on multiple blockchains. That's good news. But, uh, you know, as much as we're seeing all this expansion over here, we're still kind of in gridlock in the United States government over our own crypto plans. And it has been reported by, uh, ex-White House adviser, Patrick Witt that Trump remains interested in buying Bitcoin for US strategic reserve, but legal and custody issues stall.
progress. So what happened here, uh, Tom Emmer, who House Republican became the minority whip, which is the number two position for House Republican leadership. He is a huge advocate of the strategic Bitcoin reserve and of the crypto industry in general. And Patrick Witt just bringing up the fact that we would still love to add more Bitcoin for the strategic Bitcoin reserve, but sort of poking, uh, fun saying we would love to do it, but we have legal and custody issues, and we need a way to do it in a budget neutral manner from Congress.
So kind of, uh, just, uh, telling Congress get their act together because Trump does in fact want the strategic Bitcoin reserve. This is only interesting because we haven't heard about it in quite a while, and now it is at least back on the menu. There's nothing being announced here as far as plans for the United States government to actually buy Bitcoin. I don't really understand why the United States government would actually buy Bitcoin, certainly not with money that's being printed, especially when the United States government can just go all around the world, prosecute criminals that have nothing to do with the United States and take their Bitcoin.
That's how our strategic Bitcoin reserve has been built so far. You just, uh, you take them. Those are ours now. Right? Uh, but still, uh, good to know that a strategic Bitcoin reserve is theoretically still in the plans. But the United States government may not be able to get Bitcoin right now, but there's a city in the United States that can. And it is Miami-Dade. You guys knew it. You knew it was going to be Miami.
Right? Will Smith's down there, rapping. You can now use Bitcoin. That was dumb. You can now use Bitcoin to pay your property taxes in Miami-Dade. Don't know why you would. Be honest. But the interesting part, the crypto is converted into US dollars before payment reaches the county so the tax collector does not hold or invest in crypto. So they'll take your crypto, but they're going to immediately convert it obviously into dollars.
So they will not be adding Bitcoin to the balance sheet. Now, back in the day, uh, when we were really in peak, you know, crypto euphoria, 2021, 2022, when Miami was going to become the crypto capital of the world, they did actually talk about letting you pay taxes and then that they would add it to the balance sheet. Not the case here, but still interesting that it can be used as a payment. Now, very notably, very notably, the IRS treats crypto as property still.
So if you use Bitcoin to pay your property taxes, it will be a sale of Bitcoin and therefore a taxable transaction. So if that Bitcoin you're using is in profit, you're going to have to pay taxes on the cost basis to what you sell it for, even though selling it is just transferring it to the local government. I would bet personally that no literally nobody does this. It's like in the last cycle, it was like, Tesla has allowed you to buy a Tesla with Bitcoin.
Your Bitcoin can self-drive your Ethereums in the robo taxis. Uh, nobody did it. They sold like seven Teslas or something because nobody wants to pay taxes on selling their Bitcoin, and everyone who has Bitcoin wants to hold it and doesn't want a depreciating asset or to pay their taxes with it. Once again, though, I guess good, uh, that you can. Now we got to, not one, but two exploits to talk about because it's Wednesday. Yeah.
Robinhood Chain Dex Arcus loses $2.23 million to accounting bug. They said an accounting flaw allowed one account to withdraw $2.23 million USDG it was not entitled to. The exchange paused withdrawals, patched the issue, reimbursed the shortfall from its treasury. So the attacker inflated a recorded balance through transfers between sub accounts and withdrew $2,234,391 USDG. Ugh. I'm shocked. I'm shocked.
Crypto, you know, has become known for having high security, no exploits, no hacks. So the fact that somebody in crypto is able to steal $2 million just blows my mind. That's sarcasm. It happens every single day. Not just once, but twice or three or four or five times. Now, of course, every single time almost now we've had the platform step in, even Binance with $6, you know, billion, step in and plug the hole. But that does not mean that your assets are generally safe right now in most of these places.
Now, that one was called Arcus. I had to check this, because there's another exploit. It's not Arcus, it's Across. I mean, what are we doing here, man? Ar Arcus is going to be next. Across Protocol restores website after hackers hijack domain. So if they're getting more creative every single day, this is the actual website for Across Protocol, whatever that is, was hijacked.
And so if you went to their actual website, the domain redirected visitors to the fake site that drained their wallets. Now, in this case, it was only $348,000. So not a big deal. Of course, Across, not to be confused with Arcus, uh, said Wednesday it regained control of the domain and restored normal operations and was going to make users whole with their own money. Wow, man.
So the right address takes you to the wrong website. You have to be so careful out there. It's almost like you just can't push any buttons or use any of these things except for the biggest names. Not where I thought we'd be at this point, but makes a lot of sense in a world where, uh, crypto is easy to hack and steal. That's all I got for you today. I will not be back tomorrow, but I will see you on Friday for the next Daily Wolf. Deuces.
