Global Risk Manager

Web3 startup Bundle launches with $5.5 million pre-Seed round. News - 30 July, 2026 * Bundle, a UAE-based Web3 rewards startup founded by Bader Kalooti alongside Mostafa Wanas, has emerged from stealth after raising $5.5 million in a pre-Seed round led by Ethereal Ventures and Further, with participation from Nascent, GSR, Scenius Capital, Anchorage Digital, and Nuwa Capital. * The startup is building a blockchain-powered rewards platform that enables brands to pool their incentive budgets into shared reward pools, allowing businesses to offer larger rewards while lowering customer acquisition costs. * During a pilot across five markets, Bundle distributed $100,000 to more than 1,100 winners, including a $50,000 grand prize, while participating brands recorded conversion rates of up to 4x compared with traditional incentive campaigns. * Bundle plans to launch initially in Singapore, Vietnam, and the Philippines with more than 50 founding brands, using blockchain technology and stablecoins to power transparent and cross-border reward distribution. Bundle today announced the launch of the world's first networked rewards platform, introducing an entirely new approach to customer acquisition, engagement and retention. For decades, brands have relied on discounts and cashback to attract customers. Yet customer acquisition and retention costs continue to rise, conversion rates continue to decline, and businesses sacrifice billions of dollars in margins every year on incentives that customers increasingly ignore. Closing the Gap Bundle is built on the insight that, in today's age, people are more motivated by the opportunity to earn something meaningful rather than small discounts. The business model responds to an existing gap within the sector, where most businesses, particularly SMEs, cannot afford to offer rewards large enough to capture customer attention. Offering an alternative to isolated rewards programmes, Bundle enables brands to combine their incentive budgets into shared reward pools. By participating in the network, every business gains access to rewards far larger than they could offer independently, giving SMEs the ability to compete with the marketing power of much larger companies. "Bundle was built to level that playing field. We believe every business, regardless of size, should be able to offer their customers the kind of rewards that genuinely excite them, rather than relying on discounting, which is a race to the bottom." Bader Al Kalooti, Co-Founder & CEO of Bundle A Seamless User Experience For users, everyday interactions such as making a purchase, referring a friend, or completing another eligible action become opportunities to earn Bundle tickets and participate in shared reward pools. For brands, it delivers a more engaging incentive model with predictable costs and stronger marketing performance. The platform also removes much of the operational complexity traditionally associated with promotional campaigns. Bundle manages the underlying rewards infrastructure and regulatory framework, allowing brands to launch campaigns across multiple markets through a single permitted platform. Bundle also represents a practical consumer application enabled by Web 3 rails to drive mainstream adoption of blockchain technology. While brands and consumers enjoy a familiar Web2 experience, rewards are distributed using modern stablecoin payment infrastructure, enabling low-cost global payouts and seamless withdrawals via licensed PSPs without any complexity. Momentum, Funding & Expansion Early results have demonstrated strong momentum. During its pilot across five markets with five companies, Bundle rewarded more than 1,100 winners, distributing US$100,000 in total rewards, including a top prize of US$50,000. Participating brands also recorded conversion uplifts of up to four times compared with traditional incentive campaigns. Through its compliance-based operating model, Bundle will look to launch initially across Singapore, Vietnam and the Philippines, where more than 50 founding brands have already joined the platform. With a view to accelerating its expansion into global markets, Bundle has newly closed a US$5.5 million pre-seed financing round led by Ethereal Ventures, founded by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, and Further Ventures, with participation from Nascent, GSR, Scenius Capital, Anchorage Digital and Nuwa Capital. "The next wave of blockchain businesses like Bundle will drive mainstream consumer applications by feeling native to users and solving real problems. It is a perfect example that uses shared rewards and blockchain rails to help brands drive loyalty and customer growth at scale." Min Teo, Managing Partner at Ethereal Ventures "Through its innovative shared rewards network, Bundle now gives brands of all sizes access to larger rewards to drive higher conversions from their marketing campaigns at a fraction of the cost, creating a more effective way to engage customers. We're excited to support the company as it expands across Asia and beyond to redefine how businesses approach incentives." Robbie Nakarmi, Partner at Further Ventures In addition to accelerating its launch across key markets, funding provided by Ethereal Ventures and Further Ventures will be used to support Bundle's product development and strategic partnership investments

Building financial infrastructure on Bitcoin with Ark. 24 July, 2026 Three years after Bitfinex covered Ark as an unimplemented proposal, two different implementations - Ark Labs' Arkade and Second's Bark - are now live on Bitcoin mainnet and gaining real-world traction, with interest in similar approaches now spreading well beyond the teams that built them. A lot has changed since Bitfinex last discussed Ark in 2023. What back then was an ambitious albeit unimplemented proposal for simplifying self-custodial Bitcoin payments has now become working infrastructure, with Ark Labs' Arkade (opens in a new tab) and Second's Bark (opens in a new tab) both operating on Bitcoin mainnet. The two implementations represent different approaches to the same underlying architecture. Arkade is exploring how the model can support not only bitcoin payments, but also assets, swaps and more complex financial applications. Bark is focused on improving self-custodial bitcoin payments and Lightning interoperability. The emergence in July 2026 (opens in a new tab) of Wavelength, Lightning Labs' alpha-stage toolkit built around an "Ark-like settlement layer" for agentic payments, has also brought attention to similar approaches beyond the teams directly building Ark implementations. Like RGB, which Bitfinex recently examined as another approach to expanding Bitcoin's capabilities without changing the base layer, Ark reflects a broader trend in Bitcoin development towards building specialised systems around Bitcoin while preserving its role as the underlying settlement layer. What has changed since 2023? Ark was first proposed (opens in a new tab) in 2023, promising to let users send and receive self-custodial bitcoin without needing to open Lightning channels, source inbound liquidity or operate an always-online node. It achieved this through virtual transaction outputs, or VTXOs: off-chain, pre-signed Bitcoin outputs backed by bitcoin committed in a single bitcoin transaction. Bitcoin normally records ownership through unspent transaction outputs, or UTXOs. Spending bitcoin means consuming existing outputs and creating new outputs controlled by the next owner. Ark extends this model by allowing users to transfer VTXOs off-chain while maintaining a route back to Bitcoin settlement. In the original Ark proposal, the entity coordinating transactions, VTXO renewal and entry and exit from the protocol was called an Ark Service Provider, or ASP. Arkade and Bark have since taken different approaches to this role, with one or multiple operators providing the coordination needed for the creation and execution of Virtual UTXOs. The original Ark design was closely associated with covenant functionality (opens in a new tab) that Bitcoin does not currently support, raising early questions over whether the architecture could be implemented without changes to Bitcoin's consensus rules. Since then, Arkade and Bark have demonstrated that many of Ark's core ideas can be built using existing Bitcoin primitives, including pre-signed transactions and collaborative signing. Ark has not developed into one single network. Because interoperability between different Ark Service Providers is not a requirement of the architecture, different implementations can evolve independently. Payments between users of different implementations can typically route through Lightning instead. This reflects a broader pattern in Bitcoin development. Lightning (opens in a new tab), Liquid (opens in a new tab), Spark (opens in a new tab) and BitVM (opens in a new tab) all extend Bitcoin in different ways without requiring one shared architecture. Bitcoin Optech (opens in a new tab) tracks Arkade and Second's implementation as distinct systems rather than versions of one network, while the March 2026 V-PACK (opens in a new tab) proposal aims to provide a neutral format for verifying and backing up VTXOs across different implementations. Arkade processed its first mainnet payments (opens in a new tab) at the Baltic Honeybadger conference in August 2025 before opening publicly (opens in a new tab) that October. Second brought Bark to Bitcoin mainnet (opens in a new tab)on 9 June 2026, with a public server, developer SDK and integrations spanning mobile wallets, an Umbrel application and a BTCPay Server plugin. Both implementations address similar challenges around fast off-chain payments. Second uses arkoor (opens in a new tab) transactions, allowing transfers to occur outside scheduled rounds with coordination from the Ark server. Arkade achieves the same functionality through its Virtual Mempool (opens in a new tab) architecture. Financial applications built around Bitcoin. Arkade's broader ambition is to extend the VTXO model from a payment mechanism into a more general execution environment around Bitcoin. In practice, this means transactions can be validated and coordinated off-chain before later settling to Bitcoin, rather than requiring every individual transfer to wait for its own on-chain confirmation. This separation between execution and settlement introduces a different architecture from Bitcoin's base layer. Users retain a unilateral exit path for the underlying bitcoin, while Arkade's signer infrastructure coordinates preconfirmed transactions before they are ultimately settled on Bitcoin. Arkade uses Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) (opens in a new tab) and remote attestation to allow users to verify aspects of the environment running the signing software and provide greater assurance that it is operating as intended. The clearest extension beyond Bitcoin payments is Arkade Assets (opens in a new tab), introduced in October 2025. This places Arkade within the broader ecosystem of Bitcoin asset protocols, alongside approaches such as RGB. The two systems take different paths to a similar challenge: expanding what can be built around Bitcoin without requiring the base layer to execute every application directly. RGB uses client-side validation, where participants independently verify the asset state relevant to them. Arkade instead uses a shared off-chain execution environment, with transactions coordinated before later settlement to Bitcoin. One concrete example is Lendaswap, a non-custodial swap product launched by Lendasat (opens in a new tab) (now Satora (opens in a new tab)) in November 2025 that uses Arkade to facilitate swaps between bitcoin and stablecoins on other chains. Similarly, in May 2026, Hodl Hodl, the peer-to-peer Bitcoin exchange, integrated Arkade (opens in a new tab) into its escrow system to speed up trade settlement. The following month, Bitrefill added Arkade (opens in a new tab) as a payment option on its gift card platform, offering instant, zero-fee purchases. Commercial interest has also emerged around this direction, with Ark Labs raising $5.2 million in a March 2026 funding round (opens in a new tab) backed by Tether, alongside investors including Ego Death Capital, Epoch VC and Anchorage Digital. A broader bitcoin infrastructure stack. Ark's evolution reflects a wider shift in Bitcoin development: building specialised systems around the base layer while preserving Bitcoin's role as the final settlement layer. Ark Labs is building VTXO architecture that can support bitcoin plus a broader range of financial applications, including assets and programmable transaction flows. Second is continuing to refine Bark around self-custodial bitcoin payments and Lightning Network interoperability. Meanwhile, Wavelength suggests that Ark's settlement designs are gaining attention beyond the original Ark ecosystem. Three years ago, Ark was an ambitious proposal for making self-custodial Bitcoin payments simpler without changing Bitcoin itself. The open question was whether its architecture could move from theory into practice. Today, that question has been answered. Ark is live, multiple implementations exist, and developers are now exploring how the same VTXO-based model can support not only faster payments but a broader layer of Bitcoin-native financial infrastructure.

Joe Tuccio joins Spotex as Head of Digital Assets. Spotex, the institutional trading venue for FX, precious metals and digital assets, has appointed Joe Tuccio as Head of Digital Assets. Tuccio joins the US-based firm at a pivotal stage in its growth as Spotex builds on its established expertise in FX and precious metals to expand its institutional offering across digital assets. Tuccio was previously Head of Digital Partnerships at Seabury Capital, a long-time investor in Spotex. He brings 20 years' financial markets experience to the firm, with almost half his career focused on institutional digital assets. He has held global business development roles at Elysium Technology Group and BOSONIC, and was Managing Director, Global Head of Digital Asset Management at Nukkleus Capital, which he helped scale ahead of its sale in 2020. He was also Head of Business Development at Noble Bank, the first crypto bank in the US, where he was responsible for growing its global footprint. Prior to moving into digital assets, Tuccio gained extensive experience in institutional FX, including senior roles at ED&F Man, FIXI Americas and FC Stone (now StoneX). Over recent months, largely through leveraging Tuccio's industry network, Spotex has formed partnerships with over a dozen liquidity providers and custodians including Wincent, Wintermute, B2C2 and Keyrock Crypto. Spotex is also the first crypto ECN to be integrated with Anchorage Digital's settlement platform. In his full-time role at Spotex, Tuccio will focus on building additional trusted institutional digital asset partnerships and growing the firm's digital asset client base, as well as expanding Spotex's network of TradFi relationships. John Miesner, Chief Executive Officer, Spotex John Miesner, Chief Executive Officer, Spotex said: "Joe is ideally placed to help us to meet our growth ambitions and become a market leading institutional trading venue for FX and digital assets. Over the last 16 years, Spotex has built a strong reputation for delivering institutional-grade FX trading capabilities to brokers, hedge funds and asset managers. We now bring the same execution standards and technology that have defined our FX business to a new generation of crypto market participants. Joe's appointment strengthens our ability to expand our crypto offering and support clients at a time when digital assets are become an increasingly important part of their institutional trading strategies." Joe Tuccio, Head of Digital Assets, Spotex Joe Tuccio, Head of Digital Assets, Spotex commented: "Spotex has a clear opportunity to grow its share of the institutional digital assets market. FX clients are increasingly looking at expanding to digital assets, and we can make that process simple, seamless and cost-effective by offering one venue, one API and access to quality liquidity across FX, precious metals and digital assets. "As the US strengthens its position as a leading global crypto hub, being based in the US, with servers in NY4 is a significant advantage for Spotex, alongside our long-standing reputation in institutional FX. This is ideal timing to be driving the digital asset side of the business forwards and I am very excited about playing a major role in accelerating Spotex's growth." Found this interesting? Become a member of LiquidityFinder and get daily industry news direct to your inbox - join here. We're the largest marketplace to connect with brokers, Fintech companies & digital asset firms. Want to partner? Let's get in touch. This content may have been written by a third party. LiquidityFinder makes no representation or warranty and assumes no liability as to the accuracy or completeness of the information provided, nor any loss arising from any investment based on a recommendation, forecast or other information supplies by any third-party. This content is information only, and does not constitute financial, investment or other advice on which you can rely.