Purpose Investments has received regulatory approval to launch Canada’s first XRP ETF. This new product will offer direct exposure to XRP and begin trading on June 18.
Additionally, the OSC will allow customers to hold this product in registered accounts, allowing them to pay substantially lower taxes on gains. This regulatory breakthrough is heartening, as Canada’s new PM is a Bitcoin critic.
The Ontario Securities Commission (OSC), Canada’s top regulator, is allowing users to hold this ETF in registered accounts. Under Canadian law, this means that customers could pay substantially lower taxes on these assets.
“The OSC’s granting of a receipt for the Purpose XRP ETF prospectus reinforces Canada’s global leadership in building a regulated digital asset ecosystem. We’re proud to continue pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the space,” claimed Vlad Tasevski, Purpose’s Chief Innovation Officer.
For the last few years, Canada has positioned itself as a crypto leader, launching the first crypto ETF in North America four years ago.
However, a prominent Bitcoin critic became Prime Minister this March, potentially disrupting the nation’s policies. In other words, it’s a very good sign that the OSC approved an XRP ETF under these circumstances.
Hopefully, this will help encourage the SEC to move forward with a similar product in the US.
BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the US, still hasn’t filed for a spot product based on XRP, but prominent analysts believe it will do so soon.
Btw, I still fully expect BlackRock to file for spot sol & xrp ETFs…
As leader in both spot btc & eth ETFs, it would make *zero* sense to cede other top crypto asset ETF categories to competitors.
Related, I also fully expect BlackRock to file for index-based crypto asset ETF.
At this time, it’s impossible to predict when it’ll win approval, but the US will be the third nation in the hemisphere to offer it at the earliest. Canada and Brazil may remind the US that it needs to catch up to stay on the market’s cutting edge.
At Paris Blockchain Week, BeInCrypto sat down with Andrey Fedorov, the Chief Marketing Officer and acting Chief Business Development Officer at STON.fi, to dive deep into the platform’s mission, roadmap, and broader views on the DeFi sector.
Andrey Fedorov shared insights into how Omniston, a liquidity aggregation protocol developed by STON.fi, aims to simplify and streamline decentralized liquidity access across the TON blockchain and beyond. It presents a unified integration point for DeFi apps, liquidity providers, and users alike.
Andrey Fedorov on Omniston
Omniston is a decentralized liquidity aggregation protocol that connects DeFi apps to TON liquidity. This protocol is built for the TON blockchain, which means that when users want to swap TON-based tokens, Omniston finds the best deals. I’d say this is a protocol and not an exchange in itself, but it does connect apps, for example, for some exchanges, wallets, games, some other apps that need to access liquidity. So, there are users in these apps who want to swap and trade tokens.
Andrey Fedorov at Paris Blockchain Week
Usually, DeFi apps need to find and integrate with various liquidity sources — a process that’s time-consuming, complex, and often expensive due to the integration work involved. That’s where Omniston comes in. Basically, instead of connecting to five or ten different liquidity sources one by one, you just integrate with Omniston once. It’s like this one plug-in point.
So when a DeFi app connects to Omniston, it automatically gets access to all these different liquidity sources that are already connected. And it works both ways — liquidity providers, market makers, and anyone who has liquidity, they also get access to the user base of those apps.
And the cool thing is, anyone can plug into Omniston. If you have access to liquidity, whether it’s on-chain (like liquidity pools or vaults) or off-chain (like private funds), you can integrate through Omniston. This makes your liquidity available to all the apps connected to Omniston.
As a result, users benefit from deeper liquidity, and liquidity providers can earn yield by serving those users. We use the term “liquidity providers” broadly — it includes market makers and any other entities that can supply liquidity.
About Omniston’s roadmap
Right now, Omniston is mainly focused on providing access — so we’re not charging anything at this stage. The idea is really to drive usage. We want people to connect and start building with it. Liquidity providers can already earn money, and the same goes for DeFi apps — they can build on top of Omniston and create their own revenue models.
As for monetization on our side, we think it’ll come, but probably not in the traditional ‘pay-to-use’ way. We just launched about a month ago, so it’s still very early. The priority right now is adoption. We want to get more apps plugged in, more liquidity providers onboarded. Once we scale that up, we’ll explore monetization options — but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll start charging across the board.
The STON.fi team is still finalizing KPIs. We’re testing everything live — this is a working product — so we’re figuring out the numbers as we go. But if I had to name one core metric right now, it’s connectivity. We want to connect as many applications as possible, and aggregate as much liquidity as we can. That’s the north star for us.
Looking at the roadmap, the next big step is cross-chain swaps. Omniston currently runs on the TON blockchain, but we’ve already built the architecture for cross-chain functionality, and we’re actively testing it. Over the next few months, we’ll be working on integration testing.
Of course, we’re taking it step by step. The next chain will likely be Tron, and then we’ll move into EVM ecosystems. But it’s not going to be all at once — we’re rolling this out gradually.
TON — The Ideal Blockchain for Omniston?
There are two reasons why we chose TON. First, it is a technically strong blockchain. Second, it’s rapidly becoming the native chain of Telegram, which has a massive user base of over one billion people.
TON helps us access these huge markets. A technically strong blockchain plus a huge market is a good fit. Additionally, the TON ecosystem offers solid developer support and growing resources, making it a compelling platform on which to build.
I would also add that the TON ecosystem is growing very fast, with strong support from the TON Foundation. Plus, with so many projects on the chain, they craft good documentation that shows the use cases and so on. For developers building on TON, this means they benefit not just from the strong support but also from the collective experience and momentum of the broader community — which is incredibly valuable.
The Impact of Crypto and Blockchain Regulation
First of all, I don’t think regulation is a limitation per se. It’s something we monitor closely, and we take all regulatory developments into account as we grow.
I would say that Europe has made some progress over here because of MiCA. Regulation in the United States is fragmented, but we still need to watch them closely. Our goal is to remain fully compliant — and we view that as necessary and inevitable.
Promising Crypto Trends
Everybody is speaking about AI agents. The concept is definitely compelling and has strong future potential, but the challenge is that there aren’t many clear, practical use cases yet. What we need to do now is find these good use cases, and currently, I would say that there are not so many. That’s the problem. But again, we need to watch this space closely.
From what I understand, AI agents are already being used to evaluate whether there is a balance in the market. It is interesting to use them for this specific test case, but this is only one. It is the most obvious one.
There’s definitely room to explore more impactful ways to combine AI with crypto. It’s an area worth studying closely, and while we’re still in the early stages, I don’t see any fundamental limitations holding us back.
While the token has not yet been launched, expectations are already swelling that the final unlock could bring in $1 billion to $2 billion, if not more.
“We have reached our deposit cap of $500 million. We are thrilled that 1,100+ wallets participated, with a median deposit amount of ~$35,000. Trillions,” Plasma announced.
Amid the headlines and hype, however, a deeper story is emerging. Concerns extend from whale domination and insider access to a growing sense that token launches are increasingly becoming gated events for the crypto elite.
The numbers show that only a handful of wallets accounted for outsized allocations. More specifically, the top three contributors alone deployed over $100 million collectively.
Perhaps more shocking, one user reportedly paid 39 ETH (approximately $104,871 at current rates of $2,689) in gas fees, which secured them a $10 million USDC allocation.
“This guy spent 100k in gas (230,000 Gwei) to get his deposit in for Plasma,” wrote MonaMoon, the founder of the Duck Frens NFT project.
User pays 39 ETH for a $10 million USDC allocation on Plasma ICO. Source: ManaMoon on X
This illustrates the intensity of FOMO and the lengths participants were willing to go to for early access. Notwithstanding, the frenzy has come at a reputational cost. With whales taking the lion’s share, many are calling this launch anything but fair.
“…it’s an obvious skip for the community…Only 100 wallets with $50 million each… these wallets alone will create an oversubscription of 100x… unfortunately, it’s not a fair launch, even though the price is very attractive,” warned an X user before the raise closed.
Despite offering just 10% of the total XPL token supply in the public sale at a $500 million FDV (fully diluted valuation), retail users were effectively pushed to the sidelines. They will likely only get in later, at 10x to 16x the price.
Critics Slam Plasma’s Tech and Tokenomics- ICO Was a Lockout, Not a Launch
This sharp disparity has some dubbing it a “whale sale,” rather than a launch accessible to the broader community. Further, there may be more than just bad optics at play. Crypto trader Hanzo raised serious red flags, suggesting possible coordinated insider behavior.
Hanzo calls out over 100 wallets, each receiving 48 million USDC, before the token even launched, highlighting that some of these wallets approved token interactions before the token contract went public.
“That means insiders had early access to mint and trade. This wasn’t a surprise launch — it was a private party. Retail wasn’t invited,” he claimed.
The mechanics of the raise also raise questions. Hosted on Sonar/Echo, dubbed by some as “the CoinList of this cycle,” a time-weighted share of vault deposits determined plasma’s deposit period.
Participants had to lock stablecoins on Ethereum, with a minimum 40-day lockup. However, with the deposit cap abruptly raised to $500 million and filled almost instantly, many users were left wondering whether this was ever meant to be an open opportunity.
Even the technology underpinning Plasma has not escaped scrutiny. A user broke down the chain’s architecture and found it lacking.
“Plasma is another L1 chain… It uses a ‘classic’ pBFT consensus layer, with Proof-of-Stake… and Bitcoin as ‘settlement’ by simply publishing state differences… It looks a lot like many alt-L1 EVM forks… It surfs on the Bitcoin “side-chain” marketing campaign and is pushed by influencors.. but I am not convinced at all,” the user noted.
In his view, Plasma’s use of influencers and Bitcoin branding is more marketing veneer than technical substance.
What makes this worse is how well it’s working.
Influencers are hyping it. Retail is showing up.
The liquidity is flowing — right where it needs to.
Still, not everyone agrees. Zaheer from SplitCapital praised the distribution, noting a broad holder distribution with over 1,100 wallets and only one wallet holding $50 million.
“All things considered insanely good distribution of holders for Plasma at $500m total size of deposit. Seeing a ton of folks with smaller amounts on here and only one entity with $50m in a wallet. Well done,” he stated in a post.
According to Zaheer, this contrasts with the typical whale-dominated ICOs and suggests a more inclusive allocation strategy.
Plasma’s ICO serves as a mirror to today’s market mechanics, where speed, size, and for some, connections, often matter more than innovation or accessibility.
Whether Plasma becomes a foundational chain or another cautionary tale will depend on the unlock numbers and how its ecosystem fairs beyond the ICO hype.
(@DeFi_Hanzo) 