tZERO Newsletter 10.31.2025
The Federal Reserve has proposed a ‘skinny’ master account giving stablecoin issuers direct but limited access to Fed payment rails. The move could enable compliant digital asset firms to bypass commercial banks for payments, reducing settlement risk and operational friction. The announcement was made at the Fed’s inaugural Payments Innovation Conference, signaling a shift from the central bank’s traditionally cautious posture toward digital assets.
tZERO in the News
US Senator Lummis Supports Open Banking Rules, Emphasizes Importance of Digital Assets
Jinse Finance reported that U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis supports open banking rules and emphasizes the importance of digital assets. She sent a letter to the CFPB, urging that the rules remain unchanged. The rules allow consumers to own their financial data and securely share it with fintech companies, digital asset exchanges, and third-party services.
The Evolution of Art Investment: How Tokenization is Democratizing Access to Fine Art Masterpieces
The fine art market has long been the exclusive domain of wealthy collectors and institutional investors, with masterpieces by renowned artists commanding prices in the millions of dollars. However, a revolutionary transformation is underway as blockchain technology and tokenization are breaking down these traditional barriers to entry. Through the emergence of art NFTs and asset tokenization, the previously inaccessible world of fine art investment is being democratized, allowing everyday investors to own fractions of prestigious artworks and participate in the art market’s potential returns.
Banks and Big Tech Finally Agree on One Thing — Blockchain Works
A new report shows that banks, payment networks, and cloud providers — from SWIFT and to Google Cloud and Visa —are now leveraging blockchain at scale — reshaping how global finance moves, settles, and stores value. Major enterprises began using blockchain to streamline operations, cut transaction costs, and strengthen their market position.
Tokenized Real-World Assets: From Chaos to a Structured Future
Tokenizing real-world assets (RWAs) isn’t a magic fix for traditional finance — but it’s a step toward transforming it. While RWA tokenization has captured the crypto community’s imagination, it faces challenges: complex regulations, fraud risks, and fragmented frameworks. Critics point to these flaws, but what’s often missed is the necessity of building through the challenges to achieve a scalable, compliant system.
US, UK digital asset regulation: Different roads, same destination
The blockchain sector is experiencing a boom period, with the stablecoin market climbing past a $300 billion market cap for the first time in October, just as BTC was reaching new heights of $126,000 per coin. With this in mind, it seems an appropriate time to examine how two of the world’s largest economies are approaching regulation of this fast-growing sector: the United States and the United Kingdom.
Trump pardons Binance exchange founder Changpeng Zhao
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Thursday confirmed that President Donald Trump has pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder and former chief executive officer of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Zhao, also called CZ, had plead guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program and resigned as CEO in 2023. He was sentenced to four months in prison and fined $100 million.
One of the key benefits of tokenization is the potential to reduce risks through instant atomic settlement. But if the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approves the stock exchange’s tokenization proposals, that isn’t what Nasdaq intends initially.
The ongoing government shutdown reportedly hasn’t completely shut down the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). “Even during the shutdown, as we conduct our surveillance on the marketplace, we have stopped trading on eight foreign companies on Nasdaq that showed indicia of manipulative behavior — ramp and dump, we call it,” Atkins said. “So we are monitoring the market for the behavior that indicates, you know, hanky-panky going on in the marketplace,” he added.