Latest in Blockchain | December 16, 2025
It was a wild, earth-moving few days for onchain technologies.
Welcome to the Meridian Update. We took a brief, unexpected hiatus. Our friends at Meridian Research presented at Solana’s Breakpoint, a massive annual blockchain conference. So today is a bit of a behemoth update. We leave for a few days and everything happens. Let’s dive in.
Time to SEC what’s happening in regulatory (part n)
The Depository Trust Company (DTC) holds over $100 trillion in assets under custody. You read that correctly, $100 trillion. DTC is one of those companies of which you’re constantly a customer but have never heard of. This is going to get confusing because its parent company is the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC). But just think of DTC and DTCC as interchangeable for the remainder of this Update.
“SEC Grants DTCC No-Action Letter on Blockchain Tokenization Initiative”
In other words, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sent the DTCC a letter saying its plan for the DTC to tokenize stocks is, for lack of a better term, good to go. For at least a few years. As long as they follow that plan correctly and such. There are always terms and conditions, it’s the SEC.
“If you think about assets as software, it’s natural for the industry to begin to look at blockchain as the next generation of software to carry assets.”
And now we have an earth-shattering moment for the onchain world and stock tokenization. DTC is the behind-the-scenes company in traditional stock trading. $100 trillion in assets under custody, remember? And it now has a plan to tokenize stocks. And that plan is greenlit by the SEC.
We’ve talked about tokenized stocks many, many times here on the Meridian Update. We’ve talked about Ondo, a company that’s been an early mover in stock tokenization. But we’ve not talked about the behind-the-scenes company in traditional stock trading working to become the behind-the-scenes company in tokenized stock trading. But here we are.
Will DTC maintain its central role in a tokenized stock world? Who knows. It sounds like its products won’t go live until the second half of 2026. To us, this is much more a signal of inevitability. Will stock ownership trade primarily on blockchain networks like the Solana network five years from now? We don’t do predictions. But is it inevitable that the entire investing and financial world moves together, and does so quickly in 2026, to do an experiment, one that may prove irreversible, toward this future? Clearly, now.
A tale of two cities
Changpeng Zhao, known to Crypto Twitter as “CZ,” pleaded guilty to federal charges in the United States in 2023. At the time, some thought of him as one of crypto’s famous fraudsters.
Do Kwon, known to Crypto Twitter as the founder of Terraform Labs, was extradited to the United States at the end of 2024. He pleaded guilty to federal charges in the United States earlier this year. At the time, some thought of him as one of crypto’s famous fraudsters.
We reported on Zhao, aka CZ, receiving a presidential pardon from current US president back in October. We pointed out a funny difference in tone, and message, from the US government between that moment of pardon and the moment when Zhao pleaded guilty. When Zhao pleaded guilty, a US deputy attorney general said this:
“Today’s charges and guilty pleas – combined with a more than $4 billion financial penalty – sends an unmistakable message to crypto and defi companies: if you serve U.S. customers, you must obey U.S. law.”
The presidential pardon sent a…potentially different message? You might say it made the earlier message, umm, more mistakable?
Well, what about this from the US Department of Justice (DOJ)?
“Do Kwon, Founder of Terraform Labs, Sentenced to 15 Years for Fraud and Manipulation”
To take a slight step back, the stories of Terraform Labs and Zhao’s Binance, a centralized-exchange-for-crypto company, are different. This is an extremely rough summarization, but Terraform Labs extremely directly lost a lot of people a lot of money. Binance didn’t extremely directly lose a lot of people a lot of money. It pleaded guilty to, basically, purposefully and extremely directly not following US law.
Many years ago, Terraform Labs made and marketed something referred to as an “algorithmic stablecoin.” We have referenced this concept in the past. It is, in theory, an alternative to the dominant approach to stablecoins today, which is to do something called “one-to-one backing.” The concept of one-to-one backing, roughly speaking: maintain the stable part of the stablecoin by holding as much of the non-blockchain version of the stablecoin you put on the blockchain in a non-blockchain account. One-to-one. “Algorithmic stablecoins” propose a theory where they…don’t do that. They use algorithms, not one-to-one value of reserves, to try and achieve the “stable” in stablecoin.
Not sure if you can guess from our tone, but the Terraform Labs “algorithmic stablecoin” that aimed to be equal in value to one US dollar proved to be not stable. It collapsed in 2022. In the aftermath, Do Kwon took on the life of a fugitive. Investigations revealed that statements from Terraform Labs about how its, umm, algorithms worked weren’t, umm, exactly true. People, both normal people like us and institutions, found out they’d lost a lot of money. It was bad.
It appears that Do Kwon has met the long arm of US law. Unless someone pardons him? We don’t know. Again, the message feels a little more mistakeable now. But again, the stories of Binance and Terraform Labs are different. But isn’t that “more mistakeable,” to have things subject to interpretation? It seems we will have to wait to see how the DOJ, and the current US presidential administration, deal with the next one, and the next one, and the next one. Don’t worry, there are other people who some think of as famous “crypto fraudsters.”
Time to SEC what’s happening in regulatory (part n., part 2)
The SEC’s Crypto Task Force held a much-anticipated roundtable on financial surveillance and privacy yesterday. The chair of the SEC described it well:
“[The] roundtable participants [wrestled] with a question that, at its core, is profoundly American: whether people can participate in modern finance without surrendering their privacy.”
The chair also described, correctly, one of the most profound truths, and one of the deepest misunderstandings, about blockchain technologies so far.
“Public blockchains are more transparent than any legacy financial system ever built. Every movement of value is recorded on a ledger that anyone can inspect. Chain analytics firms are already exceptional at assisting law enforcement with linking on-chain activity to off-chain identities. In other words, pushed in the wrong direction, crypto could become the most powerful financial surveillance architecture ever invented.”
In the 2010s, a perception developed that blockchain technologies were good for crime. Over the past decade, the long arm of US law has made it clear that this isn’t exactly right. At some point, the Department of Justice (DOJ), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and various other law enforcement agencies learned to be quite good at using blockchain technology for law enforcement purposes. There was something funny about it all. People committed crimes using systems that “are more transparent than any legacy financial system ever built.”
Amazingly, this perception has been incredibly sticky. Many people think of crypto, and blockchain technologies, as a venue for crime. Personally, we would not commit crimes. But if we were to commit a crime, we would steer absolutely clear of using something like the Solana network. We, as people who have developed a strong sense of what is true and what is not true about blockchain technologies, would understand that our activities on the Solana network are pseudonymous, not anonymous.
Roughly speaking, you take actions on the Solana network from wallet addresses on the Solana network. Think of these like usernames on Twitter, for example. Your username can be anything. Want to be @meridian_update? Sure. But if people connect you to @meridian_update, they now know that you are the one behind that username…and will be able to associate everything from that username with you! But the Solana network goes a step further. You can trace all the transactions. It’s not easy. You have to really try. But you can. The FBI can. The DOJ can. Anyone can. This is part of what makes the Solana network such a good ledger. We’ll discuss that another day.
Anyway, the SEC’s Crypto Task Force had a roundtable about all of this. Nothing happened per se. But you can now feel confident that two things are true based on that meeting:
- The current SEC leadership understands blockchain technologies extremely well. Everything described above, they know. Perfectly. It’s impressive, honestly.
- The current SEC leadership has now publicly, forcefully, and in a coordinated fashion made clear it wants to work with the onchain world to bake privacy into the law and this onchain financial systems. From the chair:
“Indeed, if the instinct of the government is to treat every wallet like a broker, every piece of software as an exchange, every transaction as a reportable event, and every protocol as a convenient surveillance node, then the government will transform this ecosystem into a financial panopticon.
At the same time, this technology allows for privacy-preserving tools that the analog world could not provide, such as zero-knowledge proofs, selective disclosure, and wallet designs that allow users to prove compliance without handing over their entire financial history or personal details to intermediaries or to the government. One can imagine systems where a regulated platform can demonstrate that its users have been screened, without the ability to retain a permanent, person-by-person map of every payment, trade, or donation…As we begin this roundtable, I am eager to hear more from our panelists about how we as a Commission can protect Americans’ privacy, as well as how crypto’s privacy tools can lessen, rather than increase, the need for mass financial surveillance.”
Visa likes the Solana network
Visa and the Solana network started announcing partnerships, at least theoretical ones, a couple years ago. At the time, we thought, “Sure, but these are just theoretical.” And we weren’t the only skeptics. There are corporate announcements about partnerships, explorations, and product research all the time. Very few of them amount to anything real.
Well:
“As of November 30, Visa’s monthly stablecoin settlement volume passed a $3.5 billion annualized run rate – a significant milestone since Visa became one of the first major networks to settle transactions in a stablecoin in 2023.”
$3.5 billion is a drop in the bucket for Visa. It did $16 trillion in total payments and cash volume in 2024. But $3.5 billion is way more settlement volume than we’ve ever done! It’s real. It’s publicly announced. That is, it’s not theoretical.
Anyway, that was a really weird takeaway buried in the actual news that Crypto Twitter cared about. This tweet from Visa captures the actual news:
“Coming: stablecoin settlement 7 days. Money moves when commerce does—weekends included. U.S. institutions can settle with Visa in @circle USDC over @Solana. @Lead_Bank and @CrossRiverBank are the first US banks to join Visa’s pilot, more through 2026…”
What does this actually mean? Our takeaway is that Visa, a transaction processing behemoth, is pushing one of the core value propositions of the Solana network versus traditional financial/banking systems: it is a completely modern system that operates 24x7. The Crypto Twitter narrative was that this is another big institution validating the Solana network, specifically, relative to other existing blockchain network options. Something to keep an eye on.
More news on the tokenized stocks
We talked last week about Ondo. It is no longer under SEC investigation. We described Ondo as an early leader in issuing tokenized stocks. That is, one thing Ondo does is to make stocks ownable and tradeable onchain. Now, Ondo is bringing those tokenized stocks to the Solana network:
“The largest platform for tokenized stocks and ETFs is coming to @Solana in early 2026.
Wall Street liquidity meets internet capital markets.”
In the wise words of the Meridian Update:
“Will DTC maintain its central role in a tokenized stock world? Who knows. It sounds like its products won’t go live until the second half of 2026. To us, this is much more a signal of inevitability. Will stock ownership trade primarily on blockchain networks like the Solana network five years from now? We don’t do predictions. But is it inevitable that the entire investing and financial world moves together, and does so quickly in 2026, to do an experiment, one that may prove irreversible, toward this future? Clearly, now.”
2026 is coming faster than we could’ve ever imagined. And it is really feeling like 2026 will feel like the year tokenized stocks come faster than we could’ve ever imagined.
That’s a wrap
It was a wild, earth-moving few days for onchain technologies. We’ll see you tomorrow morning.
Think we missed something today? Send us a note: email@meridianupdate.com.
