Robinhood to Add Redemptions and Voting Rights to Tokenized Stocks

Startale Japan, the Japanese arm of the Startale Group, and Hakuhodo Key3 announced on October 5 that they will begin soliciting subscriptions on October 6 for the "Stablecoin Adoption Bond," a digital corporate bond that pays interest and redeems in JPYSC, Japan's first trust-type yen-denominated stablecoin. The issuer is Startale Japan, the offering amount is 99.9 million yen, and the interest rate is 5% per year, with the bonds offered to individual investors. On October 7, the Financial Services Agency updated its caution page on transactions with unregistered operators, adding the operators of IZAKA-YA and Bybit and others to its warning list of crypto-asset exchange operators. On October 6, nine companies including Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation announced that they had completed the first two phases of Project Trinity, a proof-of-concept experiment to settle digital securities with stablecoins, verifying a delivery-versus-payment method that transfers securities and payment simultaneously. On October 8, the Ministry of Finance held the first meeting of its Study Group on On-Chain Government Bonds, which discusses the tokenization of government bonds, as scheduled, and published explanatory materials organizing on-chain government bond initiatives into three categories. In an October 5 speech, Michael S. Selig, chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, explained the joint interpretation of crypto assets compiled by the CFTC and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, expressing the view that Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP and others are "in principle not securities."

Robinhood Chain, the layer-2 network operated by Robinhood, is considering a mechanism that would let users pay fees to prioritize specific transactions, CoinDesk reported on the 9th, citing people familiar with the matter. The mechanism under consideration is the Priority Gas Auction, or PGA, a new system developed by Arbitrum, which provides the chain's infrastructure. Robinhood Chain is an Ethereum-compatible layer-2 that Robinhood launched on July 1, built on Arbitrum technology and designed for tokenized real-world financial assets; according to DefiLlama, its total value locked stood at about 1 billion dollars as of the 10th, ranking ninth among blockchains. The chain currently processes on-chain transactions in order of arrival, and paying a priority fee does not change the ordering, but PGA splits a 250-millisecond block into two 125-millisecond rounds and orders transactions by priority determined by priority fees; Arbitrum introduced it on Arbitrum One on September 24, replacing Timeboost. According to Arbitrum, PGA priority fees are designed to flow into the Arbitrum DAO treasury, and in the first week after launch they contributed more than 120,000 dollars to Arbitrum's revenue, while Offchain Labs co-founder Steven Goldfeder explained that Robinhood keeps about 90 percent of sequencer revenue, with the remaining roughly 10 percent flowing to the Arbitrum ecosystem.