Circle Buys 1,000 IBM Patents, Tether Gold Goes Halal, Perps Hit Wall Street 🏦

Circle, the issuer of USDC (USDC), announced Monday it will acquire IBM's blockchain patent portfolio, comprising more than 680 patent families and nearly 1,000 issued patents worldwide. No financial details for the transaction were disclosed. CRCL stock price was up more than 2% in premarket activity on Monday following the announcement, according to Yahoo Finance data. Circle said the acquisition positions it as the leader in blockchain patent holdings in the United States, with research firm GreyB noting IBM had slowed its patent filings from peak years 2018-2019, when more than 500 blockchain-related patents were filed. "IBM has been a pioneer in technological innovation, and this acquisition expands Circle's ability to advance the infrastructure that powers global, internet-native finance," said Sarah Wilson, general counsel and corporate secretary at Circle.

Tether's gold-backed token XAUt has received Shariah certification from Amanah Advisors, a move that could expand access to the token among Islamic financial institutions and investors seeking Shariah-compliant exposure to physical gold. The certification found XAUt's structure complies with key Islamic finance principles, including full backing by physical gold, the absence of interest and leverage, and transparent reserves. Each XAUt token represents one troy ounce of physical gold stored in Swiss vaults, according to Tether. Tether's latest reserves report showed the token was backed by more than 707,000 troy ounces of physical gold worth over $3.3 billion as of March 31, while RWA.xyz data shows the token's onchain asset value has climbed from about $700 million in July 2025 to roughly $2.5 billion. Tether said it expects the certification to support adoption across markets where Islamic finance is widely used, including the Gulf Cooperation Council, South Asia and parts of Africa.

Regulated perpetual futures are officially landing in the United States, but Wall Street banks are proceeding cautiously. Kalshi's perpetual futures topped $1 billion in trading volume within a week of launch in June, making them the company's biggest product debut since prediction markets. The exchange has since sought regulatory approval to offer perpetual futures tied to gold and silver. On May 29, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission cleared Kalshi to offer the contracts, and Coinbase (COIN) also received approval to list regulated perpetual futures in the U.S. Bank of America has estimated annual perpetual futures volume at about $90 trillion. People familiar with industry discussions said the first movers are more likely to be proprietary trading firms, market makers and newer clearing firms, while large banks face stricter capital rules, client obligations and reputational risk that require years of data, clear regulatory treatment and stable infrastructure before committing large sums.

Separately, a consortium of technology companies including Nvidia, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Cloudflare, Hugging Face, Salesforce and Palantir has launched the Open Secure AI Alliance, an industry initiative to develop open-source tools and standards for AI safety and cybersecurity. More than 40 companies and organizations are participating as founding members, with others including Dell Technologies, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, SAP, Siemens, Red Hat and NetApp. "Attackers have frontier AI. Defenders need a frontier AI ecosystem—the best open and closed models, force-multiplied by a global community," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote on X. Nvidia also released the Nvidia Labs Object-Oriented Agent, or NOOA, framework as open source on GitHub, designed to make AI agents easier to test, audit and govern.