Daily Update

Latest in Blockchain | December 20, 2025

The new CFTC chair is official and they tokenized a de-tokenized version of a token (you read that right)

Aren Rendell

20 Dec 2025 — 3 min read

Article link: december-20-2025

Article title: Latest in Blockchain | December 20, 2025

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Google meta title: What was the latest crypto news on December 20, 2025?

Meta description: The new CFTC chair is official and they tokenized a de-tokenized version of a token (you read that right)

Welcome to the Meridian Update. Today, I bring you something serious and something funny. A perfect balance. Let’s dive in.

Time to CFTC what’s happening in regulatory

Blah blah blah, he got confirmed. There’s a funny thing about the news, which is that it is mostly not news. There are occasionally things that are actually new. But most articles are either confirmations, corrections, or additional details on something old.

Take the confirmation of Michael Selig as the new chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). This happened late Thursday evening. If we’re being honest, everyone was quite confident this was going to happen. The real news came back at the end of October, when the president of the United States appointed him for this position. Arguably, the news was baked months ago. Priced in, as market speak calls it. At the beginning of October, reporters shared that Michael Selig was highly likely to be the nominee, and the road to confirmation was highly likely, too.

But eventually things have actually happened, or they have actually not happened. And now Michael Selig has actually been confirmed as the chair of the CFTC, and sworn in as the chair of the CFTC, though the CFTC’s website didn’t know that as of midday today. Hopefully it’s been updated by the time you read.

The biggest impact for Crypto Twitter, and for blockchain technologies, is that a confirmed, political-appointee chair generally gets more things moving than an acting chair. And the strong expectation, what’s priced in, is that Michael Selig will make sure those things are in line with what the onchain world wants. That’s priced in. But something to keep an eye on.

People want exposure to onchain assets in off-chain ways (part n)

I’ve made a joke of the following form many times: people keep taking onchain assets and making them available off-chain, but when are they going to take the off-chain version of the onchain asset and make it available onchain? This is funny because it is entirely circular. If you want the thing onchain, you can just get it onchain. There is no need to make it available off-chain, as an exchange-traded fund (ETF), then tokenize the ETF so it is available onchain. Again, it was onchain in the first place.

Now, that’s not exactly right. Every financial product, or synthetic financial product, can have its own extremely precise details, and in turn extremely specific benefits, such that someone might want exactly the version of the financial product that they want more than the others. The reasons can seem insane, or not. The reasons can be widely desired, or not. But they are reasons. And someone wants them. Maybe even someone thinks someone wants them.

Anyway:

“BREAKING: Forward Industries (NASDAQ: $FWDI), the largest Solana treasury company, has tokenized its SEC-registered shares on @Solana via Superstate Opening Bell, enabling ex-US investors to use $FWDI shares as collateral to borrow stablecoins through Kamino.”

They really went and did it. In case you don’t recall, Forward Industries has a publicly traded ticker, FWDI, and is a publicly traded company. It now exists to, more or less, own Solana’s native taken, SOL. It doesn’t appear, or claim, to do much else. This concept is referred to as a digital asset treasury (DAT). To state it plainly, buying FWDI is a way to get exposure to the price of SOL without setting up a crypto wallet. But now, using a crypto wallet, you can use this exposure to SOL to do things on the Solana network that you could do if you just held SOL on the Solana network using a crypto wallet.

They really went and did it. The joke is no longer just a joke, it is a story. I find it to be a funny story. Welcome to the world in 2025 and probably 2026, too.