24/7 Stocks, Stablecoins, and Tokenized Gold

Welcome to our Crypto news in 10, a daily podcast bringing you the latest news about crypto in under 10 minutes.

Here’s what’s moving crypto on Thursday, January 29, 2026... We’ve got Robinhood doubling down on tokenized stocks with a push toward true 24/7 on-chain trading. Bybit is stepping into neobank territory with personal IBAN accounts launching as soon as February. The UAE has greenlit a U.S. dollar stablecoin for compliant digital asset settlement. Hong Kong debuted a gold ETF that also issues tokenized units on Ethereum. And in Washington, six senators are pressing the Deputy Attorney General over alleged crypto conflicts of interest tied to the DOJ’s enforcement shift. Let’s get into it.

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Story one... Robinhood wants tokenized stocks to trade 24/7 — fully on-chain. CEO Vlad Tenev says the company will expand its European stock token offering with around-the-clock trading and access to decentralized finance, including self-custody and on-chain use cases like lending.

Right now, Robinhood’s stock tokens live on Arbitrum One and already provide exposure to more than 200 U.S. equities and ETFs in the EU, dividends included. The company has also signaled it ultimately plans to route this through a purpose-built Robinhood Layer 2 network.

The vision is simple — move traditional equities from market hours to uninterrupted, on-chain rails... and let users actually put tokenized shares to work in DeFi. That’s a cultural shift — from buy and hold, to compose and deploy. According to reporting from The Block this morning, 24/7 trading and self-custody are next on the roadmap.

Story two... Bybit is edging into banking. CEO Ben Zhou says the exchange plans to roll out IBAN-based MyBank accounts in February, supporting 18 fiat currencies through partner banks — with Pave Bank, a Georgia licensed lender, named as one partner.

Users would hold U.S. dollars, British pounds, and more under their own name, send and receive cross-border transfers, and move funds seamlessly between fiat and crypto — bringing Bybit closer to a neobank model rather than just a trading venue. Zhou also teased a new institutional custody product for real world asset tokenization, said Bybit is vetting a U.S. expansion with a licensed partner, and confirmed a possible public listing as a longer-term goal. Approvals are still pending... but the company says it’s working with authorities to turn those features on in February.

Story three... The UAE just got its first central bank registered, U.S. dollar backed stablecoin for settlement. Universal Digital International launched USDU — that’s U S D U — after being recognized as the first Foreign Payment Token Issuer under the UAE Central Bank’s Payment Token Services Regulation.

USDU is built for compliant digital asset and derivatives settlement inside the UAE framework — where settlement must occur in fiat or via a registered foreign payment token. The issuer says reserves are held one to one at Emirates NBD, Mbank, and Mashreq, with Aquanow — regulated by Dubai’s VARA — helping integrate USDU into the broader ecosystem. As Universal’s Juha Viitala put it, this sets a new benchmark for regulated digital value... and aims to give institutions the clarity they’ve been waiting for. For tokenization platforms and exchanges in the Gulf, this could streamline on and off ramps, and reduce settlement friction.

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Story four... Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Gold ETF debuted today — and it includes a tokenized share class issued on Ethereum. The listed fund, trading under ticker zero three one seven zero on the HKEX, tracks the LBMA Gold Price AM and stores bullion in Hong Kong vaults, with HSBC as custodian.

What’s novel is the second, non-listed tokenized class — units issued initially on Ethereum, with HSBC acting as tokenization agent. Investors won’t be able to trade those tokenized units on secondary markets — instead, subscriptions and redemptions run through qualified distributors. Early trading saw the listed ETF jump about nine percent in Asia morning hours as gold stretches record highs... while the tokenized class shows how traditional ETFs can start layering programmable, blockchain-native rails without changing what the fund actually holds. It’s a bridge between centralized finance market structure — CeFi — and on-chain fund plumbing.

Story five... Six U.S. senators are pressing Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche over alleged conflicts tied to last year’s crypto enforcement pullback. In a letter sent Wednesday night, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Mazie Hirono, Dick Durbin, Sheldon Whitehouse, Chris Coons, and Richard Blumenthal demanded details after reports that Blanche held between 158,000 and 470,000 dollars worth of crypto — primarily bitcoin and ether — while issuing his April 2025 memo titled Ending Regulation by Prosecution.

That memo scaled back the DOJ’s approach and disbanded the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, directing prosecutors to focus on individual bad actors rather than treating platforms as liable for user activity. The senators argue Blanche should have recused himself under federal conflict of interest law. The DOJ, for its part, says the issue was appropriately flagged, addressed, and cleared in advance — calling the claims baseless. Watch this one... any ethics finding could reverberate through policy debates on crypto enforcement in 2026.

Quick recap... Robinhood is pushing tokenized stocks toward a true 24/7, on-chain future. Bybit is moving into neobank territory with IBAN accounts. The UAE unveiled USDU, a central bank sanctioned dollar stablecoin for compliant settlement. Hong Kong listed a gold ETF that also issues tokenized units on Ethereum. And in D.C., senators turned up the heat on the DOJ’s crypto stance.

We’ll keep tracking how these threads — tokenization, compliant settlement, and evolving policy — interlock over the next few weeks.

Thanks for listening and see you tommorow!