fin

Smart ring manufacturer Oura Health Oy officially submitted a confidential S-1 registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on May 21, planning to go public on the U.S. stock market later this year, with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan serving as the lead underwriters for the IPO.Ōura was founded in 2013 in Oulu, Finland, by three co-founders Petteri Lahtela, Kari Kivelä, and Markku Koskela, all of whom came from the R&D background of Nokia and global heart rate monitoring pioneer Polar. In October 2025, the company completed an E round of financing led by Fidelity Investments, raising $875 million, with a post-money valuation reaching $11 billion. Previously, the company had raised over $1.5 billion in total financing.

The European Central Bank (ECB) rejected the proposal to relax regulations on euro stablecoins, believing that such measures are too risky and could undermine financial stability and the transmission of monetary policy.Bruegel suggested at the informal meeting of EU finance ministers held in Nicosia, Cyprus, that liquidity requirements for stablecoin issuers should be lowered and that they should be allowed to access ECB funding support when necessary to combat a market dominated by dollar stablecoins and to avoid "digital dollarization." However, officials, including central bank president Lagarde, strongly opposed this, arguing that stablecoins could destabilize bank deposits, increase banks' funding costs, weaken lending capacity, and interfere with interest rate control.Although some finance ministers had mixed feelings about the proposal, several central bank officials questioned the idea of making the ECB the "lender of last resort" for stablecoin issuers. The EU is currently implementing strict regulations on stablecoins under the MiCAR framework, while the GENIUS Act passed in the U.S. in 2025 adopts more lenient rules. Currently, euro stablecoins account for only 0.3% of the global stablecoin supply, while Europe is advancing the digital euro project to enhance payment sovereignty.

Japanese yen stablecoin issuer JPYC announced that its Series B round of financing is about to be completed, with a total financing amount expected to reach approximately 5 billion yen. New investors in this round include Life Design Fund, IHD STRATEGY FUND, a fund under Awa Bank, and Meiji Yasuda Future Co-Creation Fund, among others.JPYC stated that the new financing will mainly be used for system and application development, recruitment of business expansion talent, promotion of stablecoin payment and management business, as well as the construction of M2M (machine-to-machine) payment scenarios for AI Agents. JPYC obtained a license for Japanese money transfer operators in 2025 and began issuing the stablecoin JPYC, which is pegged to the yen at a 1:1 ratio, in the same year. The company reported that within about 7 months of issuance, the number of accounts reached 18,000, with a cumulative issuance exceeding 2.5 billion yen and a total transaction volume exceeding 35 billion yen. Currently, JPYC has been deployed on four chains: Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, and Kaia, and has integrated with the LINE ecosystem Web3 wallet Unifi, aiming to promote the adoption of stablecoins among ordinary users in Japan.

Two informed sources revealed that CATL plans to participate in the financing activities of the domestic artificial intelligence company DeepSeek. DeepSeek's first round of financing aims for approximately 50 billion yuan, which may be completed as early as next month, and after the transaction, the company's valuation may exceed 350 billion yuan. JD.com and NetEase have also been reported to be in talks to invest, but the final investors and amounts may still be adjusted.In recent years, CATL has been accelerating its layout in the AI data center infrastructure business. In addition to power batteries, it also provides backup power batteries and energy storage systems for data centers. Earlier this month, a CATL affiliate invested $942 million in GDS Holdings and invested in the power supply system manufacturer Zhongheng Electric.Reports indicate that DeepSeek has built its own data center in Inner Mongolia and is currently recruiting data center operations and maintenance personnel in Inner Mongolia. Due to the rapid growth in AI computing power demand, the demand for energy storage and stable power supply in data centers has also increased, allowing CATL to further enter the AI infrastructure track.Previous reports stated that DeepSeek's current round of financing has attracted attention from several Chinese capital sources, including the national AI investment fund and technology giants. DeepSeek has not yet achieved large-scale revenue, but its low-cost open-source model has already created competitive pressure on companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

The cross-chain infrastructure platform Squid has completed a $6 million strategic financing round, led by North Island Ventures, with participation from Ripple, Dialectic, Borderless, and others.It is reported that Squid was initially incubated within the Axelar ecosystem and later developed into an independent platform. Since its launch in 2023, Squid claims to have processed over $6 billion in cross-chain transaction volume, covering more than 100 blockchains, with a total of over 4 million transactions and more than 1 million users. After this round of financing, Squid's total funding amount has reached $13.5 million. The company plans to use the new funds to launch new consumer-facing products, further simplifying the process for users to access, manage, and use crypto assets across chains.

Upward Fusion (formerly Tiger Brokers) announced that on May 22, 2026, some of the company's subsidiaries received a notice from the Beijing Regulatory Bureau of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), indicating that the CSRC Beijing Regulatory Bureau has launched an investigation into their suspected illegal activities related to securities, funds, and futures business. It was found that these subsidiaries engaged in unlicensed cross-border securities business and illegal activities related to funds and futures in mainland China.According to the investigation results, the CSRC Beijing Regulatory Bureau imposed a total administrative penalty of approximately 308.1 million yuan and confiscated illegal gains totaling approximately 103.1 million yuan. The company's director, CEO, and actual controller, Mr. Wu Tianhua, also received a warning and was fined 1.25 million yuan. As of the end of 2025, retail customer assets in mainland China accounted for approximately 10% of the company's total customer assets in the consolidated financial statements.

According to Jinshi, the final value of the one-year inflation rate expectation in the United States for May is 4.8%, up from the previous value of 4.5%.

Futu Holdings (FUTU.O) announced today that the company has received a notice of investigation and a pre-notice of administrative penalty from the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) and its Shenzhen branch.The CSRC pointed out that certain Futu entities in mainland China and Hong Kong have engaged in securities business, public fund sales, and futures business in mainland China without obtaining the necessary licenses or approvals, violating the Securities Law, the Securities Investment Fund Law, and the Futures and Derivatives Law of the People's Republic of China. The CSRC intends to order the relevant companies to rectify or cease such activities, confiscate illegal gains, and impose fines, with a proposed total fine of approximately 1.85 billion yuan (about 271 million USD).In addition, the CSRC plans to impose a personal fine of 1.25 million yuan (about 183,575 USD) on the company's founder and CEO, Mr. Li Hua. Futu Holdings stated that the proposed fines are still subject to further procedures and the CSRC's final decision.

The new generation Perp DEX PopDEX has announced the completion of a $30 million financing round, led by Foresight Ventures. PopDEX is a trader-centric decentralized perpetual contract trading platform that focuses on capital efficiency, trading experience, and value distribution mechanisms, aiming to build an on-chain derivatives trading platform driven by contributions from real trading.

The U.S. government, through the Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), has initiated a multi-agency coordinated financial action aimed at systematically targeting Iran's domestic digital asset infrastructure, with the goal of dismantling Tehran's parallel shadow banking system. According to officially disclosed information, this operation has successfully identified and incapacitated a large interconnected digital wallet network directly controlled by the Iranian regime, and has immediately frozen nearly $500 million in sovereign-related crypto assets.The U.S. intends to disrupt Iran's ability to bypass long-standing Western trade embargoes by blocking these alternative capital channels, cutting off its resources to regional proxy networks, and systematically weakening the regime's ability to transfer or repatriate wealth outside the oversight of traditional global clearing institutions. The focus of this enforcement action is to systematically identify state-sponsored large cryptocurrency trading portals, which have quietly evolved into core nodes for evading sanctions.Federal intelligence reports indicate that these regional platforms have processed billions of dollars in high-frequency digital asset transactions, heavily relying on mainstream stablecoins and high-throughput alternative blockchain networks to obscure their illegal settlement flows. Under the newly implemented executive directive, the Treasury is actively blacklisting specific crypto addresses, tracking mining pool variables, and imposing sanctions on foreign technology providers that facilitate these state-supported networks.Additionally, the U.S. is leveraging its dominant position in international banking to compel foreign financial intermediaries to fully comply with its aggressive crypto asset control protocols. The Treasury has issued stern warnings to international technology centers that any platform providing clearing services or liquidity assistance to designated Iranian digital entities will face immediate risks of exclusion from the U.S. financial system.This comprehensive containment model shifts regulatory responsibility to global exchanges, forcing them to deploy advanced real-time blockchain analysis tools to programmatically identify and block any inbound transactions originating from Iranian internet protocol or historical wallet clusters. By installing these stringent crypto safeguards at the level of global gateways, the U.S. government is transforming permissionless distributed ledgers into highly controlled economic zones, ensuring that alternative payment infrastructures cannot be used to undermine broader Western geopolitical security objectives in the next decade.

According to the latest report from BlockBeats, as the demand for trading traditional financial assets increases among crypto users, Gate is accelerating the evolution of its crypto trading platform into a multi-asset comprehensive financial platform through the "Unified Account" system. Users can trade and allocate five major types of assets within the Gate App, including CFD contracts, perpetual contracts, spot tokens, Pre-IPOs, and crypto assets, further reducing the barriers to cross-platform capital allocation and trading.The report points out that Gate has currently built a unified margin system around TradFi and on-chain assets. Users can conduct cross-product trading through a single USDT account, enhancing capital efficiency. As of May 2026, Gate has launched over 440 CFD targets, covering asset classes such as foreign exchange, metals, global stock indices, popular stocks, and commodities, while maintaining a high frequency of new listings. Additionally, Gate has partnered with platforms like Ondo and xStocks to launch over 75 tokenized stock targets, supporting 24-hour trading of on-chain metal assets such as gold and silver, continuously expanding its layout in the tokenized stock and RWA market.Furthermore, Gate recently launched the SpaceX Pre-IPO project SPCX, with applications for purchasing shares exceeding $353 million within 24 hours, reflecting the rapidly growing market demand for on-chain Pre-IPO asset allocation. In the future, Gate will continue to promote the layout of the next-generation comprehensive financial platform around the unified account, on-chain infrastructure, and global liquidity network.

Web3 fintech startup Jia announced the completion of a $3 million seed round financing, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Stellar Development Foundation, A100x Ventures, TCG, and Hashed Emergent. So far, Jia has raised a total of $7.3 million.Jia currently operates multiple decentralized lending pools and introduces liquidity through networks such as Base, Stellar, Arbitrum, and Polygon, while using stablecoins for cross-border settlements to reduce the cost and time of cross-border remittances. The new funding will be used to expand features such as business bank accounts and cash flow management.

According to Bits.media, Ivan Chebeskov, the Deputy Minister of Finance of Russia, stated that the final version of the government's cryptocurrency market regulation bill will retain the ban on transfers from Russian custodial wallets to non-custodial foreign wallets. More lenient conditions will only apply to participants in foreign trade activities, namely importers. Chebeskov mentioned that after the law comes into effect, the effectiveness of the new regulatory system will be analyzed, and in the future, the use of non-custodial wallets may be allowed in an experimental mode. The final version of the bill will be ready next week, and the Deputy Minister hopes it can be passed before the end of the State Duma's spring session.Previously, the Duma's Financial Market Committee opposed the central bank's stance on banning transfers to non-custodial wallets and proposed providing judicial protection for all cryptocurrency asset holders. The bill was passed in the first reading on April 21, stipulating that starting July 1, Russians and companies can only purchase digital assets through licensed intermediaries, and access to foreign cryptocurrency platforms must go through a list approved by the central bank, prohibiting access to exchanges that impose sanctions on Russia.

Tom Lee, the chairman of BitMine, Ethereum's largest treasury, stated that Ethereum has a strong group of leaders and developers who can ensure it continues to be the future settlement layer for finance and AI.Currently, much of the bearish sentiment is just despair and mutual blame at the bottom of the crypto winter. Blockchain is the only viable way for agentic AI to conduct business interactions while significantly improving the profitability of the financial system. I will continue to be optimistic about ETH.

According to The Block, the RWA yield protocol TownSquare announced the completion of its Pre-A round financing, bringing its total financing to approximately $16.25 million. The funds will be used to advance yield products based on institutional strategies and cross-chain brokerage services.The protocol focuses on bringing yield from institution-backed on-chain assets to ordinary users. Currently, the scale of institution-backed assets on-chain is approximately $36 billion, with yields exceeding the traditional 3%-5% level of U.S. Treasury bonds. TownSquare will build yield vaults around stablecoin USD1, tokenized gold, USDC, cbBTC, and other RWA, and will work with partners like World Liberty Financial to advance a USD1 pipeline plan with a scale of about $100 million.

a16z crypto general partner Guy Wuollet pointed out that the financial industry is undergoing a "digital migration" similar to the era of cloud computing, with blockchain becoming the core infrastructure driving this transformation. Wall Street's adoption of blockchain is not driven by the idea of "decentralization," but rather by the practical needs for counterparty risk management, settlement efficiency, and fair ordering mechanisms.The so-called "digital assets" essentially represent the process of migrating the underlying architecture of the financial system onto the blockchain, similar to the transition of enterprise IT systems from on-premises deployment to cloud services. When financial assets operate on programmable shared infrastructure, it brings the core advantage of "composability," allowing assets to be freely combined and expanded like software, significantly reducing development costs and enhancing the overall innovation efficiency of the financial system. This trend will drive traditional finance from a "closed reconciliation system" to an "on-chain coordination network," and blockchain technology will gradually become a standard component of the financial infrastructure layer in this process.

According to The Block, Bitcoin hardware wallet manufacturer Foundation has completed a new round of financing of $6.4 million, led by Fulgur Ventures with participation from Arche Capital and others, aimed at expanding from Bitcoin self-custody wallets to scenarios such as identity, multi-factor authentication, and AI agent authorization. This round of financing brings the company's total funding to $16.5 million, with valuation and round structure undisclosed.Foundation also announced that its flagship device, Passport Prime, is now available for sale to all users, integrating a Bitcoin hardware wallet, FIDO security key, 2FA storage, confidential information vault, and 50 GB of encrypted storage, emphasizing "human authorization" through dedicated hardware. In addition, the company is expanding the scope of the KeyOS developer platform and plans to launch the KeyOS app store by the end of the second quarter, with initial partners including Cake Wallet.