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Figure's $717M Kiavi Bet, Visa-Mastercard Settlement & WealthTech Funding Drop
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Figure acquires Kiavi for $717M to put $7B in annual real estate loans onto tokenized blockchain rails — a defining moment for institutional RWA adoption. Plus: the $38B Visa-Mastercard swipe fee settlement advances, European WealthTech funding contracts 18%, and crypto rails target wire transfers.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Figure just closed a seven hundred seventeen million dollar acquisition of Kiavi, and the real estate tokenization sector is no longer in pilot mode. This is an enterprise-scale consolidation bet, and it tells us something precise about where institutional capital thinks this market is heading.
That said, the sector still has unresolved infrastructure to build around it. Securities regulation for tokenized assets, tax treatment, and cross-border frameworks are all still undefined in most jurisdictions.
Shifting to Europe, the first quarter of twenty twenty-six produced a clear funding signal for WealthTech, and it wasn't encouraging. Total investment dropped eighteen percent year-over-year to three hundred forty-three million dollars across thirty-four deals.
On the payments side, a U.S. district judge has granted preliminary approval to the thirty-eight billion dollar Visa-Mastercard swipe fee settlement. This case has been running for twenty years.
One more development worth noting. MassPay has partnered with Coinbase to target cross-border payment corridors traditionally dominated by wire transfer fees.
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