Crypto News: ICE-OKX Tokenization Joint Venture, Trump Quantum Orders, Strategy STRC Recovery

Hi! In today’s edition:

🏛️ ICE and OKX launch a joint venture to build tokenized equity infrastructure, with Andrew Cuomo as co-chair and NYSE-listed stocks as the target
🔐 Trump signs two executive orders: one to build a large-scale quantum computer, one to mandate post-quantum cryptography migration across federal agencies by 2030
🟠 Strategy raises its USD reserve to $1.4 billion through common stock sales as STRC stabilizes after hitting 17% below par

NYSE Owner ICE and OKX Team Up to Tokenize Wall Street

Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, has formed a joint venture with OKX to build tokenized securities infrastructure for crypto markets. The deal, subject to regulatory approval, would give OKX's 120 million retail traders global access to tokenized equities.

Former New York Governor and Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who has worked with OKX since 2023, will co-chair the venture alongside ICE. An OKX spokesperson told Fortune the initial focus will be on tokenizing NYSE-listed equities.

The announcement follows ICE's March announcement of a strategic investment in OKX at a $25 billion valuation. The two firms last month launched crypto-native perpetual futures for crude oil. For ICE, the venture is a deepening bet that TradFi infrastructure and crypto technology and distribution can converge on a single product layer.

Trump Signs Twin Orders to Build a Quantum Computer and Guard Against One

President Donald Trump signed two executive orders Monday with direct implications for the security of blockchains, including Bitcoin. The first, Executive Order 14411, aims to have the Department of Energy to host at least one large-scale quantum computer. It also orders the Pentagon to deploy next-generation quantum sensors by September 2028.

The second, Executive Order 14409, takes the defensive posture. It sets deadlines for federal agencies to migrate to post-quantum cryptography, 2030 for key establishment and for digital signatures, 2031. The order warns adversaries may already be harvesting encrypted U.S. data to decrypt later using quantum computers, a cyber attack strategy known as "harvest now, decrypt later."

The orders arrive as the crypto industry has been scrambling to assess its own quantum exposure. A March paper co-authored by Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake, Stanford cryptographer Dan Boneh and Google researchers estimated that breaking Bitcoin's elliptic curve cryptography could require fewer than 500,000 physical qubits, a 20-fold drop from earlier estimates. Google has set 2029 as its internal deadline for post-quantum migration. Ethereum has matched it.

Strategy Rebuilds Cash Reserves to $1.4B as STRC Bounces Off the Lows

Strategy added $300 million to its USD reserve on Monday, lifting it to $1.4 billion, using proceeds from a common stock offering that raised $335 million. The cash build, the firm's third consecutive weekly reserve increase, is a direct response to mounting pressure on STRC, its perpetual preferred stock, which fell as low as $82.53 last week before stabilizing around $91 on Monday.

Strategy also bought 520 BTC for $35 million, its smallest purchase since it sold 32 BTC three weeks ago. Holdings now stand at 847,363 BTC. STRC currently carries an 11.5% annual dividend, generating over $100 million in monthly costs for the firm, making cash reserves one of the primary signal investors watch to gauge the model's sustainability.

Competitor Strive outpaced Strategy's Bitcoin buy last week, adding 759 BTC to reach 19,864 BTC.

🏛️ The U.S. Senate passed a housing bill in an 85-5 vote that includes a four-year ban on a Federal Reserve CBDC, prohibiting the Fed from issuing or creating any central bank digital currency through the end of 2030. Following the bill’s passage in the Senate, it now heads to the House.
⚖️ Securitize has filed a suit in a Delaware federal court seeking a declaratory judgment that it does not infringe patents owned by rival tokenization firm tZERO, which had sent a cease-and-desist letter accusing Securitize of violating patents covering blockchain-based securities infrastructure. tZERO says it holds 105 patents globally and is investigating potential infringement by at least six other firms.
🔬 Five former Ethereum Foundation researchers launched Ethlabs, an independent R&D nonprofit backed by SharpLink, BitMine, Consensys CEO Joe Lubin, and others, to accelerate Ethereum research outside the Foundation. The launch comes amid a wave of senior departures from the Foundation, and the new organization plans to focus on faster settlement, expanded mainnet capacity, and robust cross-chain infrastructure.
🟡 The Bank of England eased its proposed stablecoin rules, scrapping planned individual holding caps in favor of a £40 billion ($52.8 billion) per-coin issuance limit and raising the share of reserves issuers can hold in UK government debt from 60% to 70%. The BoE plans to finalize rules by the end of 2026, with regulated stablecoins expected to operate in the UK from 2027.
📈 BitMine added $92 million in ETH last week, bringing its holdings to 5,672,956 ETH and crossing 4.7% of the circulating supply, edging closer to its stated goal of 5%. Chairman Tom Lee said the firm projects roughly $268 million in annualized staking revenue once it finishes staking its full treasury through its Made in America Validator Network.
⚖️ Leading crypto lobbying groups including the Blockchain Association, the Digital Chamber, and the Crypto Council for Innovation sent a letter to Congress urging the House Ways and Means Committee to advance Rep. Mike Carey's Tax Clarity for Mining and Staking Act without changes. The bill would let miners and staking recipients defer income recognition until they sell, rather than treating newly received assets as immediate taxable income.
🤖 MoonPay acquired Entendre, an AI-powered finance operations platform built for on-chain businesses, to bring automated reconciliation, bookkeeping, treasury, and close workflows into its infrastructure stack. Entendre's customers, including Polygon Labs and Babylon Labs, process an average of 25,000 transactions per month across more than 30 financial accounts, automating 93% of journal entries.
🏦 Baillie Gifford, the 118-year-old Edinburgh-based investment firm, launched a tokenized fixed-income fund on Ethereum and Solana in partnership with BNY, offering eligible UK, Swiss, and Cayman Islands investors an actively managed, short-duration corporate bond portfolio with a roughly 7% yield. Both firms were added to the FCA's list of registered crypto companies alongside the launch.
⚖️ RockawayX's investment vehicle RBCH filed a derivative lawsuit in New York state court against the board of Solana treasury company Solmate Infrastructure (formerly Brera Holdings), alleging self-dealing, fiduciary breaches, and shareholder oppression that have caused tens of millions in harm. The suit centers on a registered direct offering in which two board members acquired 21.4% of the company's post-issuance shares at roughly 34% of net asset value, with no fairness opinion and no other shareholders invited to participate.

💼 Franklin Templeton completed its acquisition of 250 Digital and formally launched Franklin Crypto, a dedicated institutional digital asset division to be led by Christopher Perkins and Seth Ginns from 250 Digital alongside Franklin Templeton's Tony Pecore. The $1.78 trillion asset manager will invest its own capital in the liquid crypto strategies the team previously ran under CoinFund.
🌐 MoneyGram joined Solana as a validator, helping process and secure the network's proof-of-stake transactions as it deepens its stablecoin payments infrastructure. The move follows MoneyGram's launch of its MGUSD stablecoin on Stellar earlier this month, part of a broader strategy CEO Anthony Soohoo described as building on open, interoperable stablecoin rails.

💸 Fomo, a social-first onchain trading app with 600,000 users and $4 billion in trading volume, raised $75 million in a Series B led by Index Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures and Benchmark, at a $550 million valuation. The company plans to use the funds to add equities, perpetuals, and prediction markets to its platform.
💰 TurboFlow, an onchain prediction markets and perpetual futures platform targeting Asia-Pacific users, raised $6 million in a seed round led by Pantera Capital, with Susquehanna Crypto and Digital Currency Group also participating. The Hong Kong-based platform says it has processed more than $19 billion in trading volume during its beta.