Markets Media

In August this year there was an unusual merger announcement when TruGolf Holdings, a Nasdaq-listed golf simulation company, said in a statement that it was acquiring Polymath Research, a privately-held Canadian technology company focused on blockchain and tokenization. Polymath will become one of the first Layer-1 blockchain companies in the public markets, making institutional-grade tokenization accessible to the financial industry at scale, according to the statement.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s Investor Advisory Committee will host a public meeting at the SEC Headquarters in Washington D.C. on Sept. 10 at 10 a.m. ET to discuss artificial intelligence technologies in the public markets and the SEC’s Regulation National Market System rules.

Appital, the institutional liquidity platform built exclusively for the buy-side, announces Citadel Securities will act as a liquidity provider, integrating its superior pricing and execution capabilities directly into the Appital platform. This will enable continuous access to significant institutional liquidity across more than 1,500 European equities. For buy-side traders, this fundamentally expands what can be achieved electronically.

Citi announced that it has successfully processed live transactions on Swift’s blockchain-based ledger, marking a significant milestone in its strategy to deliver always-on, cross-currency, and interoperable payment solutions for its institutional clients. As the first U.S. bank to conduct live native ledger transactions, Citi has collaborated with First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) and Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC) on this global initiative.

Equity perps are (prob) joint CFTC–SEC “security futures." A CFTC @coinbase DCM (futures exchange) notice registers with the SEC and then lists. CB not first DCM down this path (@CMEGroup already relaunched dated SSFs), but @coinbase may be first on the US perp version.

Nodal Exchange, a leading U.S. power derivatives exchange offering the world’s largest suite of locational power futures contracts, and Compute Desk, a premier provider of compute data and benchmark indexes for the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) compute ecosystem, announced plans to launch a new suite of GPU compute futures contracts on Nodal Exchange, bringing standardized risk management tools to the rapidly expanding compute market.

Vanguard is closing the gap with BlackRock for assets under management in U.S.-domiciled exchange-traded funds, according to Morningstar. The data provider said in a report that the gap between the two ETF issuers was nearly $200bn in assets in 2024 but this is the first year that it has shrunk to less than $100bn. “Although these are still enormous sums of money, Vanguard briefly overtook BlackRock earlier this year before slipping back into second place by the end of June,” added Morningstar.

State Street Investment Management announced the launch of the State Street® SPDR® UC Investments 90/10 Endowment Strategy Index ETF (“UCBG”), a new asset allocation ETF developed in collaboration with UC Investments (“UC”), the investment arm of the University of California and the index provider for the fund.

U.S. Treasury ADV up 15% from last August Metals ADV grew 48% CME Group, the world’s leading derivatives marketplace, reported its second-highest August average daily volume (ADV) on record at 29.7 million contracts, an increase of 6% from August 2025. Market statistics are available in greater detail at https://cmegroupinc.gcs-web.com/monthly-volume.

Broadridge’s Distributed Ledger Repo solution expands cross-border atomic settlement and collateral mobility across G7 securities for global financing and collateral markets Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc., a global Fintech leader, announced the global expansion of its Distributed Ledger Repo (DLR) solution, bringing G7 securities into its network and providing market participants an institutional scale solution to execute international cross-border repo transactions, intraday repo...