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Morgan Stanley has applied to the OCC for a de novo national trust bank charter. The proposed entity, Morgan Stanley Digital Trust, National Association, would allow the $8 trillion asset manager to custody digital assets, facilitate crypto trading, and offer staking services under a federally regulated banking framework.

The application was received on February 18. The charter is the infrastructure play: custody is where the economics live. Coinbase, BitGo, and Anchorage currently own the institutional custody market. Morgan Stanley is signaling that Wall Street intends to that back in-house. Source.

Crypto.com received conditional approval from the OCC to charter Foris Dax National Trust Bank, d/b/a Crypto.com National Trust Bank. The entity will offer custody, multi-chain staking, and trade settlement under federal oversight. It joins Circle, Ripple, Paxos, BitGo, and Bridge in the growing list of crypto firms with OCC trust charters.

The pattern is unmistakable. In 2025, the federal government kept the crypto industry at arm’s length. Now the OCC is processing trust charter applications from 14+ firms, and conditional approvals are arriving within months. Meanwhile, the OCC finalized a rule change effective April 1 that broadens what trust banks can do, replacing “fiduciary activities” with “operations of a trust company and activities related thereto.” Source.

Bloomberg and Kaiko announced a joint initiative to develop onchain access to Bloomberg’s Data License offerings via Kaiko’s infrastructure. The initial focus: providing trusted, licensed market data to tokenized U.S. Treasuries and repo workflows.

One of the biggest objections to tokenized assets from institutional risk teams is: “Where does the pricing data come from?” Smart contracts that reference AMM prices or unregulated feeds don’t pass compliance. Bloomberg putting its name and its data onchain removes that objection for an entire class of tokenized products. The collaboration uses Kaiko’s data on-ramp service, to write off-chain data onchain while preserving IP ownership, licensing compliance, and auditability. Source

The Bank of Japan will conduct experiments using blockchain technology to settle deposits that financial institutions hold at the central bank. Governor Kazuo Ueda announced the sandbox project at the FIN/SUM 2026 conference in Tokyo, describing it as a response to a “new financial ecosystem” shaped by tokenization and programmable money.

This is not a peripheral pilot. Current account deposits at the BOJ function as reserves and are used for interbank settlements. Testing blockchain as the settlement layer for these balances is a G7 central bank examining whether distributed systems can deliver efficiency gains at the core of monetary infrastructure. The BOJ is also participating in Project Agora, the BIS-led initiative exploring tokenized central bank deposits for cross-border wholesale settlement. Source

Hong Kong Financial Secretary Paul Chan confirmed during the 2026-27 Budget Speech that the HKMA will issue its first batch of fiat-referenced stablecoin issuer licenses in March. The HKMA is reviewing 36 applications under the Stablecoins Ordinance, which took effect in August 2025. Licensed issuers must maintain HK$25 million minimum capital, full 1:1 reserve backing, and guarantee par-value redemption within one business day.

Hong Kong is moving from framework to execution. This makes it one of the first jurisdictions in the world to formally license stablecoin issuers, and it positions Hong Kong as Asia’s regulated digital asset hub ahead of Singapore. Later in 2026, the government plans additional legislation covering digital asset dealers and custodians. Source

Nasdaq MRX has filed with the SEC to offer “Outcome Related Options” on the Nasdaq-100 Index. These are cash-settled, binary-style contracts priced between 1 cent and $1, enabling yes-or-no bets on stock performance of companies like Nvidia, Apple, Google, and Tesla.

Nasdaq joins a growing list of traditional finance players entering prediction markets alongside Polymarket, Kalshi, and Cboe. CME Group is partnering with FanDuel for broader event contracts, and Bitwise filed for “PredictionShares” ETFs tied to the 2028 US election. Prediction markets have consistently surpassed $10 billion in monthly trading volume. Wall Street is no longer watching from the sidelines. Source

Paradigm, the crypto-native VC, is seeking to raise $1.5 billion for a new fund that will invest in AI, robotics, and “frontier technologies” alongside crypto, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The signal is clear: the smartest crypto capital allocators see crypto infrastructure and AI infrastructure converging. This isn’t Paradigm leaving crypto. It’s Paradigm recognizing that onchain payments, agent-to-agent transactions, and programmable money are the connective tissue between crypto and AI. Source.

Blockchain Breakthroughs: "You Can't Innovate from Afar" — J.P. Morgan's Making Sense podcast Sandy Kaul (Head of Innovation, Franklin Templeton) and Scott Lucas (Head of Markets Digital Assets, J.P. Morgan) discuss institutional tokenization adoption, the future of interoperability, and why market infrastructure is being rebuilt onchain. Listen here

→ Morgan Stanley — Senior Blockchain Architect, DeFi & Tokenization (New York)

→ Goldman Sachs — Equity Research Associate, Crypto & Digital Assets (New York)

→ Figure Technology Solutions — Director, DeFi Solutions and Partnerships Architect (New York)

→ J.P. Morgan — Digital Asset Senior Principal Software Engineer (New York)

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James Smith & David Walsh