Canton just closed $355 million led by a16z crypto. RedStone was the first oracle to launch on Canton in December 2025. Built natively for Daml - the smart contract layer Canton runs on. The permissioned design means price data reaches only authorized parties, no public exposure - a hard requirement for regulated institutions on the network. The integration covers the full data stack: live price feeds today, with liquidation intelligence and credit risk infrastructure as the logical next layer, with institutional onchain finance growing more complex. If you're building on Canton - find us at @TokenizeThisNYC on June 23-25, where tokenized finance discussion will happen.

Shared my commentary with Decrypt: Kalshi's employer disclosure rule is a useful filter, not a solution. Self-reported. Only verified when an investigation is triggered. And MNPI rarely travels through a clean employment line - it moves through contractors, advisors, friends, family. Prediction markets are only accurate because informed participants trade on what they know. There's a meaningful difference between domain expertise and insider information. Broad checks risk removing the former while missing the latter. New territory for a regulated venue - users should expect the same standards on how their identity and conflict data is stored and shared.

For five years, institutional allocators have been looking at DeFi from the same angle. The yields are interesting. The infrastructure is impressive. But we cannot defend a position to our risk committee without an independently documented probability of loss. Spark Savings USDT just ran that experiment cleanly. Same vault, same mechanics, same protocol. The key variable that changed on March 1, 2026 was that Credora published an independently quantified probability of loss. Ten weeks later, TVL went from $300M to $1.40B. The April 17 stress test made the mechanism legible. The rsETH hack. Institutions needed to know, in real time, whether their Spark position was in scope. The Credora rating document was downloaded 69 times in a single day. Spark held and attracted capital. Comparable unrated vaults on the same protocol lost TVL. This is not about whether ratings are perfect. Every institutional credit market has spent decades arguing about that. What the Spark data shows is more specific: when capital has to choose between a vault where the risk is on record and one where it is not, it picks the one with the independent verification. Especially under stress, when those decisions have to be taken for billions of dollars. Two markets are starting to separate inside DeFi. The rated one, where institutional allocation flows when conditions get noisy. And the unrated one, where allocators have to defend why they did not already exit. Credora is what made that distinction possible onchain. An independent rating, methodology you can read, probability of loss you can cite in a risk memo. The Spark data is a great showcase. That is what institutional capital has been actually waiting for.

Bloomberg does not cover Polish companies every week. But for Żabka story is one of the most underrated business case studies in our region, and the incoming CEO just put the ambition on the table. Build the 7-Eleven of Europe. Some numbers first. -> 12,339 stores at end of 2025. PLN 27.2bn revenue ( 14.1% YoY). Net profit up 78.3% to over PLN 1bn. Almost a third of Poland's population lives within 300 meters of a Żabka (no joke, they are everywhere). The company opened 1,394 new locations in 2025 alone. -> Origin: 1998, Poznań. Mariusz Świtalski, the guy who had already built Poland's largest wholesale network (Elektromis), bet on the country's tradition of small neighborhood shopping and launched a modern version of it. Seven stores in Poznań. By 2001, 100 stores. By October 2005, 1,700. Then came the private equity baton pass: 2007: Penta Investments 2011: Mid Europa Partners 2017: CVC Capital Partners (just over €1bn) That 2017 deal is where it gets interesting. Right after closing, CVC and the management team flew to Japan to study Seven & i Holdings firsthand. They came back and re-engineered the company around it. Franchise-first model. Dense urban footprint. Hot food. Mobile app. Autonomous Nano stores. Private label. A tech stack closer to a fintech than a corner shop. October 2024: IPO on Warsaw Stock Exchange. PLN 6.45bn raised. ~$5bn market cap at debut. Biggest Polish listing since Allegro in 2020. Fourth largest European IPO of 2024. The 2025 results show the model is working: Revenue: PLN 27.2bn ( 14.1%) Net profit: PLN 1.06bn ( 78%) Adjusted EBITDA margin (Q4): 14.4% 12,339 Żabka stores in Poland 173 Froo stores in Romania ( 188% YoY in year two) Stated goal: double end-customer sales between 2023 and 2028 Romania is the proof of concept for the European ambition. Żabka entered in May 2024 by acquiring local distributor DRIM Daniel Distribuție FMCG, rebranded the network as Froo, and is already seeing customer traffic per store approaching Polish levels. Estimated market capacity in Romania: ~4,000 locations. Now the ambition. Tomasz Blicharski, currently Chief Strategy Officer, takes over as CEO on 1 January 2027. He told Bloomberg the long-term goal is to be the convenience leader in Europe. The thesis is sharp: Europe is structurally fragmented, the global players including 7-Eleven do not run unified pan-European operations, and there is no European convenience champion. There is a gap, and Żabka is the only operator with the franchise machinery, technology, density and balance sheet to fill it. The optionality is what makes this very perspective: East vs West is still open. East = faster consumer growth, lower entry barriers, smaller TAM. West = larger economies, harder competition, supplier rebuild. Nano (autonomous stores) gives a low-capex wedge into harder markets. The digital ecosystem (Maczfit prepared meals, Dietly D2C marketplace, Jush! and Delio eGrocery) extends the surface area to attack each new geography. A Polish company born in Poznań, ~€1bn buyout in 2017, now a $5bn public company openly chasing 7-Eleven for the European convenience crown. There are plenty of promising and innovative businesses out of Poland, I'll try to cover some of them this year 🇵🇱