NEW YORK — The city of New York is launching a digital assets advisory council to bring fintech jobs into the Big Apple, Mayor Eric Adams announced Tuesday.

New York City is «open for business, he said at the start of a summit hosted at the mayor’s official residence, Gracie Mansion. The council will be composed of individuals from the industry, with a chair to be announced in the coming weeks.

«We want to use technology of tomorrow to better serve New Yorkers today,» Adams said in his opening remarks. «We have experts right here, and they are going to help us navigate solutions that serve our city. We are lucky to have this type of human capital right here in the city of New York.»

The summit, which included a public press conference followed by closed-door roundtables, had participants from both family offices and unicorn startups, said Richard Hecker of Traction and Scale, a logistics firm involved in the event.

Business interests aside, the city will explore putting birth and death records onto a blockchain to help New Yorkers’ next of kin easily access these types of documents, Adams said.

Andrew Durgee, the co-CEO of Republic, which backs other startups financially, noted that his firm remained in New York despite concerns about regulators and other issues, even as other firms left the country.

«Now the first time in 15 years, we’re in this scenario, we have no idea what it’s going to look like,» Durgee said. «You have now all these people, these smart, brilliant people now coming back to the U.S., and they’re looking for a place to land.»

A tokenized version of a major private credit fund managed by Apollo will arrive on Solana’s SOL decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, bringing traditional financial instruments closer to the fast-growing network.

The launch, orchestrated by lending platform Kamino Finance with support from tokenization specialist Securitize and DeFi risk advisor Steakhouse Financial, aims to make the Apollo’s Diversified Credit Securitize Fund (ACRED) token the first of its kind to be available for on-chain borrowing and leverage on Solana. The token’s debut is pending on completing an audit, Kamino said.

The ACRED token, launched in January, offers exposure to Apollo’s private credit strategies and is issued under Securitize’s regulated token framework. ACRED will also be the first token on Solana using Securitize’s sToken standard, with more assets expected to follow later, Securitize said.

The product underscores a growing appetite in crypto for real-world asset (RWA) tokenization. RWAs—traditional instruments such as funds, bonds or real estate—are being brought onto blockchain rails to reduce friction in investing, improve access and transparency, and allow for programmable use in DeFi protocols. In practice, this means investors can use RWAs as collateral to borrow against, yield farming, or plug into automated investment strategies.

«The value of tokenization really comes into play when these assets are integrated into DeFi, and new products and strategies are developed around them,» says Reid Simon, head of DeFi and credit solutions at Securitize.

Despite Solana’s fast-growing DeFi market, RWAs are yet to take off on the chain. According to RWA.xyz, Solana hosts $330 million worth of RWAs, small compared to the network’s nearly $9 billion DeFi market size. It’s also trailing rival layer-1 network Ethereum’s $7 billion real-world asset market. But with large players in tokenization stepping in, backers of the launch see this as a tipping point.

«Solana has experienced explosive consumer growth in recent years, but below the surface we are seeing enormous interest from institutions and asset issuers,» said Marius Ciubotariu, co-founder at Kamino, «Finally, the industry is in a position to not only bring these assets on-chain, but to provide genuine use-cases.»

Through Kamino’s Multiply product, users will be able to leverage ACRED for yield strategies—automatically looping the asset to increase exposure while managing collateral and borrow levels through Solana-native smart contracts. That’s a similar offering to what Gauntlet introduced on Polygon in late April.

«Building on off-chain credit assets in a composable way is the sort of long-term investment we believe can help catalyze further growth of DeFi in Solana,» said adcv, co-founder of Steakhouse Financial.

Crypto infrastructure company Validation Cloud announced Tuesday the debut of Hedera-based AI engine Mavrik-1 that lets users and developers get DeFi market insights by asking queries in plain English.

Despite DeFi’s promise in revolutionizing finance, its complexity has long acted as barrier against widespread adoption. For DeFi users, the learning curve is steep, requiring knowledge of complex terminologies such as liquidity mining, impermanent loss and staking. Many Defi platforms require users to interact with command-line interfaces and complex web applications.

With Mavrik-1, users can ask questions like «Which trading pairs have the largest spreads and which stablecoin has the highest on-chain
transaction volume?.» Imagine chatting with your personal AI advisor.

The ability to seek information via natural language queries represents democratization of data analysis and marks a shift in how investors interact with the blockchain protocols.

«This is a pivotal moment for the Hedera ecosystem,” Viv Diwakar, Chief Information Officer at Hedera Foundation, said in a press release shared with CoinDesk. “Validation Cloud’s Data x AI platform brings an entirely new way to engage with blockchain data. It’s a novel experience that unlocks usability and insight for builders, enterprises, and users in our ecosystem.”

Validation Cloud is the AI platform powering Web3 finance, delivering products across Data x AI, Staking, and Node API.

Mavrik-1 is deeply integrated with the Hedera-based DeFi applications, such as hUSDC, Karate Combat, and leading DeFi applications, the press release said. It is specially trained for blockchain environments, ensuring contextually relevant responses to queries.

«We built Mavrik because you shouldn’t need a PhD in Web3 to access and understand what’s happening on-chain,» said Andrew McFarlane, CTO of Validation Cloud. «By surfacing real-time intelligence in natural language, we’re making Web3 accessible to everyone.»

The launch on Hedera is the first step, which will be followed by integrations with other blockchains and a full public rollout, dubbed Mavrik 2, later this year.

Hedera debuted in 2021 and is a leaderless proof-of-stake network with aBFT hashgraph consensus. Hedera Foundation fuels the development of the Hedera ecosystem through grants and expert support for decentralized applications across DeFi, NFTs, and more.