Citigroup Launches Market-First Digital Depositary Receipts Program

Bitcoin rallied to a two-week high on Friday, climbing back above the psychologically important $80,000 level, with the broader crypto market joining the advance. According to Bitget Wallet research analyst Lacie Zhang, US spot ETF inflows and short covering helped push it through the psychologically important $80,000 level. The surge came despite a Fed rate hike earlier in the week and the failure of the Clarity Act, legislation that would have created a federal framework for the broader digital asset industry; after the measure failed to advance in the Senate, the Securities and Exchange Commission stepped in on Thursday with a conditional exemption allowing the trading of certain tokenized stocks on blockchains for the next five years. While bitcoin led the move, ether, binance and solana have outperformed over the past month, gaining 35%, 25% and 41% respectively, and rotation into alternative tokens and tokenized versions of Nvidia, Tesla and the S&P 500 helped lift the total crypto market capitalization to $2.66 trillion, according to CoinMarketCap. Fundstrat's Sean Farrell said crypto has absorbed a fairly aggressive hawkish repricing without much damage, while Compass Point's Ed Engel last week upgraded Coinbase to Neutral from Sell, citing that BTC is recovering from a cyclical bottom.

Sansiri succeeded in offering a total of 1 billion baht in digital bonds through the wallet on the Paotang application, selling out completely in just 67 seconds amid challenging fundraising conditions in the real estate sector. Wichan Wiriyaphusit, Chief Financial Officer of Sansiri Public Company Limited, said the partnership with Krungthai Bank helped cut the minimum investment from 100,000 baht to just 1,000 baht. This digital bond series has a five-year term and drew more than 2,000 buyers. Retail buyers with purchases under 100,000 baht accounted for 39% of all transactions, or 831 out of 2,145 transactions. Those buying under 300,000 baht made up 40%, and purchases were spread across the provinces, including Chonburi, Chiang Mai, Ratchaburi, Nakhon Ratchasima, Nakhon Pathom and Phuket. On the overall market, Wichan said real estate has already bottomed out. Housing priced below 3 million baht faces loan rejection rates as high as 40% to 50%, and at some companies as high as 60%, but Sansiri's rate is only 12% to 15%. Medium and small companies with credit ratings below investment grade must offer interest as high as 7% to 8% and still cannot sell out. As for factors to watch, Wichan said the US central bank's 0.25% rate hike has pushed Thailand's yield curve higher, and he estimated that private bond issuance may need to raise yields slightly by about 0.25% to 0.4%, even though the Bank of Thailand has not yet adjusted its policy rate. Sansiri will not offer bonds for the remainder of this year and will begin again in early 2027, while the digital bond is planned for another offering in the second half of next year.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission introduced a provisional, conditional exemption allowing certain tokenized U.S.-listed equities to trade on-chain under specified conditions, while S&P Global agreed to acquire OpenZeppelin, a firm specializing in smart contract security infrastructure. The SEC measure, set out in a "Statement on Innovation Exemptions" signed by Commissioner Mark T. Ueda, guarantees holders of equity tokens the same rights as holders of conventional shares and requires third parties to notify the issuer of the underlying stock in writing before dealing in tokenized shares. According to S&P Global, OpenZeppelin's technology has supported the transfer of more than $37 trillion in value cumulatively, including major stablecoins and tokenized funds. Following these announcements, the market capitalization of DeFi-related tokens rose about $7 billion on Friday, climbing 8.8% to $79.8 billion, while the total market capitalization of the broader crypto market rose 4% to $2.7 trillion. Hyperliquid's HYPE jumped 10.8% to an all-time high of about $90.46, giving it a market capitalization of $20.12 billion; Uniswap's UNI rose 29.1% over 24 hours to about $9.00, for a market capitalization of $5.59 billion; and Aave's AAVE gained 9.5% to about $135.28. Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan said the SEC is trying to put in place as much of a crypto regulatory framework as it can under its existing authority, and described tokenization as a massive tide.