This news got many people bulled up: Yesterday, President Trump signed an executive order to allow private equity, real estate, and other alternative assets in 401(k) plans. Crypto included.

The moon math goes like this: Roughly 70 million Americans contribute to 401(k) plans, funneling part of every paycheck, usually biweekly, into a collective $8 trillion pool. If crypto were to capture just 1% of that, we’d be looking at about $80 billion in inflows (narrator: ofc some think 1% is laughably conservative).

But here’s the catch: Fidelity already launched a Bitcoin option in 2022 and it services about 40% of the 401(k) market. Yet adoption has been slow, mainly because employers have to opt in and shoulder fiduciary risk, and most would rather not.

Still, why spoil a perfectly good back-of-the-envelope calculation?

Today, we’ll talk about:

• Assetera brings tokenized securities to Europe

• Pendle launches DEX for interest rate swaps

• SEC clears the path for liquid staking

Assetera Opens Tokenized Securities Market to Fintechs in Europe

Tokenized securities for fintechs: Last Friday, Austrian digital asset exchange Assetera launched a white-label offering that enables fintechs and crypto exchanges to offer tokenized financial products, such as bonds or stocks, to their users without needing to hold the required licenses themselves.

Why this matters: The launch follows growing momentum around tokenized equities, with firms like Kraken and Robinhood introducing offerings earlier this summer, and firms like Galaxy planning to issue a tokenized version of their stock onchain.

• However, in Europe, offering these products requires a MiFID license, a license currently held by only a few players, including Bitstamp (now owned by Robinhood) — and Assetera itself.

Compliant API: Assetera is now using its license to offer an API that enables European fintechs to build tokenized stock offerings, with compliance across onboarding, AML, and product governance.

• “Once integrated, partners can access a curated list of compliant assets, such as tokenized stocks or bonds, and offer them directly to their users,” said CEO Thomas Labenbacher in an interview with Blockstories.

Focus on distribution: “Secondary trading for tokenized securities hasn’t taken off yet, but it likely will within the next 18 months,” he added. “That’s why distribution is our focus today. We’re positioning ourselves as a key player by helping crypto platforms offer these products.”

Specialized providers: Assetera doesn’t tokenize the assets itself. Instead, it works with specialized issuers like Ondo and Backed Finance. The latter is a Swiss startup regulated by the Liechtenstein FMA and also powers the xStocks offering on Kraken.

More integrations ahead: To broaden its product scope, Assetera plans to onboard additional tokenization providers in the coming weeks: “In addition to Ondo and Backed Finance, we’re targeting 10 providers by the end of August.”

What’s next: “We’re set to sign agreements with our first two crypto partners next week and aim for five or more by the end of Q3,” Labenbacher revealed. “These partnerships will give us access to over 20 million users across Europe.”

Pendle Launches Boros, Targets $200 Trillion Interest Rate Swap Market

DeFi innovation: On Wednesday, the team behind DeFi protocol Pendle launched “Boros,” a new decentralized exchange for interest rate swaps, marking the first serious effort to bring such instruments onchain.

• Why this matters: Interest rate swaps are a cornerstone of global finance, with over $200 trillion in notional volume across the U.S., EU, and UK. They help companies hedge rate fluctuations and plan capital more efficiently — for instance, by locking in fixed borrowing costs on variable-rate loans.

The problem today: These contracts are typically traded over-the-counter (OTC), accessible only to financial institutions and approved counterparties. Boros aims to change that by introducing the first fully onchain alternative and opening the door to broader participation.

Built by DeFi pioneers: Pendle is no stranger to this market. Launched in 2021, it has become DeFi’s dominant yield trading protocol, defining the category with $7.3 billion in total value locked. Traders use it to speculate on the yield of assets like Lido’s staked ETH (stETH) and yield-bearing stablecoins such as Ethena’s sUSDe.

Careful rollout: That experience shows in Boros’ launch. To manage risk, the protocol debuts with a single product — Funding Futures — allowing traders to speculate on the funding rates of BTC and ETH perpetuals on Binance. Each market is capped at $10 million open interest and 1.2x leverage to ensure controlled growth.

• “This asset class is so new that we don’t actually know how it behaves onchain yet,” Daniel Anthony Wong, Head of Growth at Pendle, told us. “Funding rates can move from 1% to 10% very quickly, and that level of volatility is hard to model upfront. If we don’t manage the risk systems properly, it just means bad debt for us. That’s why we’re launching with tight parameters, so we can observe how the market reacts before expanding,” he added.

Why funding rates first? “We started with perpetuals funding rates because they are the largest yield market in crypto,” according to Wong. “There’s strong demand to hedge that exposure, especially from DeFi protocols like Ethena, where funding rates directly affect their core mechanism, which is the basis trade. It was the natural place to begin.”

The bigger vision: While starting with crypto-native rates, the protocol is designed to eventually support a wide range of rate swap markets, including those tied to bonds, equities, and tokenized real-world assets.

• “The only thing we need to trade an interest rate is an oracle. As long as an asset can be represented by a percentage number, we can support it on Boros. That includes not only crypto-native rates like ETH staking, but also offchain benchmarks such as T-bill yields, mortgage rates, real estate financing costs, and even corporate borrowing rates,” said Wong.

Next steps: Over the coming months, the team plans to expand support for additional assets, increase leverage and open interest caps, and onboard exchanges beyond Binance. Longer term, the team aims to introduce new rate markets, such as those for ETH staking yields

A conversation with Kean Gilbert, Head of Institutional Relations at Ethereum’s leading liquid staking protocol Lido Finance, about the SEC’s recent statement that liquid staking doesn’t constitute a securities sale.