Tether has submitted a binding all-cash offer to acquire 65.4% of Juventus Football Club from Exor, marking one of the most significant intersections between crypto finance and global sports. The proposal, submitted on December 12, 2025, positions Tether to potentially become the first major crypto company to take control of a top-tier football club.

A Strategic Push Into Sports Ownership

This acquisition signals Tether’s long-term ambition to expand beyond the digital asset sector and introduce stable, crypto-backed financial models to the world of professional sports. With prior minority ownership already established, CEO Paolo Ardoino is now pushing toward full control to integrate Tether’s stablecoin ecosystem more deeply into Juventus’ financial infrastructure.

Ardoino emphasized Tether’s solid financial standing, stating that the company aims to support Juventus with long-term, stable capital, boosting both the club’s performance and its global competitiveness. He outlined a vision in which Juventus can grow sustainably in an increasingly digital, rapidly evolving sports and media environment.

A Potential Turning Point for Crypto and Football

If approved, this acquisition would set a precedent — becoming the first time a crypto firm acquires majority control of an elite football club. This development could shift how sports organizations raise capital, moving from traditional ownership structures to blockchain-aligned financing models backed by stable digital currencies.

The crypto market is watching closely. Tether’s involvement could introduce new funding mechanisms, alternative revenue streams, and increased transparency in financial operations across the global sports ecosystem.

Economic and Regulatory Impact

The €1.1 billion offer highlights Tether’s financial strength, and the company has already signaled an additional €1 billion commitment earmarked for Juventus’ future development. These funds could help support transfers, infrastructure expansion, youth development, and modernization efforts across the club.

However, regulatory approvals remain a key factor. European financial and sports regulators will evaluate the long-term implications of a crypto entity taking ownership of a major football institution. Any delays or restrictions may influence both the acquisition timeline and the broader integration of crypto within traditional sectors.

A Broader Trend of Crypto Entering Traditional Markets

Tether’s bid aligns with a growing trend: the increasing presence of crypto companies in mainstream industries. This move could accelerate adoption of digital-asset-driven financial models and inspire other clubs and organizations to explore similar partnerships or ownership structures.

If completed, Tether’s acquisition of Juventus could reshape the economic landscape of professional sports — blending stablecoin economics with global football operations and potentially redefining how major clubs fund growth in the years ahead.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has released a new investor bulletin titled “Crypto Asset Custody Basics,” offering essential guidance on how crypto assets are stored, accessed, and protected. Created by the SEC’s Office of Investor Education and Assistance, the bulletin aims to help individual investors understand the fundamentals of safe cryptocurrency storage and key risks associated with custody.

What the SEC Means by Crypto Asset Custody

According to the SEC, “custody” refers to where crypto assets are stored and how they are accessed. Most investors interact with their digital assets through devices or software known as crypto wallets. These wallets don’t store the crypto itself — instead, they store the private keys that prove ownership and unlock access to the assets recorded on the blockchain.

The SEC defines crypto assets broadly, covering tokens, digital assets, coins, and virtual currencies. Each asset type may come with unique advantages and risks.

The Role of Private and Public Keys

When someone creates a crypto wallet, it generates two keys:

• Private Key: A confidential code that authorizes transactions. If it is lost, stolen, or exposed, access to the assets may be permanently lost. This key functions like a password — and the SEC stresses that protecting it is the investor’s responsibility.
• Public Key: A non-secret identifier that acts like an address for receiving crypto. Anyone can use it to send assets to the wallet, but it cannot authorize withdrawals.

Together, these keys verify ownership of crypto assets and enable secure transfers.

Hot Wallets vs. Cold Wallets

The SEC divides wallets into two main categories:

• Hot Wallets (Internet-connected):
  Easy to use and ideal for frequent transactions, but more vulnerable to hacks and online threats.
• Cold Wallets (Offline devices):
  Provide stronger protection from cyberattacks but can be lost, damaged, or stolen. Losing a cold wallet — along with its recovery phrase — can mean permanent loss of all assets stored in it.

The bulletin also highlights the importance of protecting recovery phrases (seed phrases), as anyone with this phrase can access the wallet.

Self-Custody vs. Third-Party Custody

Investors must choose between holding their own keys or relying on a third-party custodian such as an exchange or financial institution.

• Self-custody:
  The investor has full control but also full responsibility for safeguarding private keys.
• Third-party custody:
  Keys are managed by a custodian. While this may be easier for beginners, risks arise if the custodian is hacked, shuts down, or mishandles user funds.

When selecting a custodian, the SEC advises researching:

• Regulatory status
• Security practices
• Insurance policies
• Fee structures
• How client assets are stored or pooled

Some custodians may use customer assets as collateral or store multiple customers’ funds together — practices that require transparency.

SEC’s Key Security Recommendations

To minimize risk, the SEC advises crypto investors to:

• Never share private keys or seed phrases
• Keep asset holdings confidential
• Use strong passwords and multi-factor authentication
• Stay alert for phishing attacks and fraudulent wallet apps
• Carefully evaluate the balance between convenience, cost, and security

A Developing Ecosystem Requires Caution

The SEC emphasizes that the crypto ecosystem is still evolving. With many custody models emerging, investors must assess how much risk they can tolerate and how much personal responsibility they are willing to take when choosing how to store digital assets.

Folks Finance is redefining how cross-chain DeFi should work — not as an asset-moving challenge, but as an account-state challenge. Instead of treating each chain as an isolated environment, the protocol uses a unified global account model that dramatically improves capital efficiency across multiple networks. This approach allows DeFi to function the way traditional finance already does: with one account, one risk profile, and one source of truth.

By placing all core logic on Algorand as a computation hub, Folks Finance separates backend complexity from frontend interaction, creating a more predictable, scalable, and structurally sound architecture for the future of cross-chain finance.

When Multi-Chain Expansion Turned Into Fragmentation

Crypto expected that multi-chain DeFi would lead to higher efficiency. Instead, it produced fragmentation. Liquidity spread across networks, but capital efficiency stagnated. Risk became harder to assess. Users were stuck bridging assets back and forth, paying more fees while gaining little actual benefit.

Most protocols masked these issues with incentives — rewards, yield programs, and rapid deployments — rather than addressing the underlying architectural flaws. Few stepped back to ask a fundamental question: What is the base unit of DeFi in a multi-chain world?

Folks Finance asked that question and reached a breakthrough conclusion:
The true base unit is not the chain, nor the liquidity pool — it’s the account.

This perspective explains why Folks Finance looks so different from typical lending protocols and why it cannot be evaluated with the same metrics.

The Real Bottleneck of Cross-Chain DeFi: Account Fragmentation

Most “multi-chain” DeFi protocols simply copy themselves across networks. Each deployment functions as a separate market with its own assets, risks, and liquidity. From the outside, it looks like an expansion. Inside, it’s fragmentation.

Users end up managing multiple partial accounts across chains. Collateral on one network cannot directly support borrowing on another. Bridges only relocate assets — they don’t unify accounts.

This leads to structural inefficiencies:

• Idle capital on one chain while another suffers liquidity shortages
• Diverging interest rates
• Poor risk balancing
• Increasing reliance on incentives to attract temporary liquidity

Folks Finance believes that until accounts are unified, DeFi cannot be efficient — no matter how good the bridges become.

A Hub Model for a Global Account System

Folks Finance’s breakthrough is not a new bridge but a new account architecture.

All account state, risk calculations, liquidations, and interest logic live in a central hub. Other chains function only as asset entry and exit points. Instead of separate accounts on each chain, users maintain a single global account.

The protocol evaluates:

• Collateral
• Borrowing power
• Health factors
• Liquidation thresholds

…across the entire portfolio, regardless of which chains hold the assets.

Because the account is unified:

• Assets don’t need to move to support borrowing
• Cross-chain lending becomes seamless
• The system tracks risk, not chains

Most importantly, state synchronization is no longer required, eliminating one of DeFi’s hardest engineering problems.

Why Algorand Was Chosen as the System Brain

Algorand often gets misunderstood as a political choice. It isn’t. It’s an engineering decision.

The hub layer handles highly sensitive operations that require:

• Low latency
• Stable execution
• Predictable fees
• Fast finality

Running these processes in an expensive, congested environment would degrade system stability. Algorand provides the reliability needed at the core. User interaction remains on popular chains, while all computation occurs where execution is most predictable.

In this architecture:
Algorand is the backend brain — not the storefront.

A Multi-Rail Security Model for Cross-Chain Communication

Folks Finance treats cross-chain communication as multiple problems, not one.
Messages, assets, and stablecoins each involve different risks, so the system isolates them:

• High-value state messages use high-assurance communication
• Asset custody is separated from message verification
• Stablecoins rely on official issuer infrastructure, not wrapped tokens

This reduces systemic coupling and limits failure impact.
This is especially important for lending markets, where wrapped assets introduce depegging and liquidity fragmentation risks.

The result: a cleaner, safer borrowing and collateral experience.

From xALGO to xChain V2: A Long-Term Structural Bet

Folks Finance’s evolution has been consistent. Early products made network states portable. Governance participation became liquid. Rewards became transferable.

xChain continued that vision by applying portability to accounts.
xChain V2 deepens it further, using vault-based structures to make collateral both productive and borrowable at the same time.

This shifts the protocol from simple lending toward cross-chain asset management infrastructure — a harder problem, but one with long-term defensibility.

Why Unified Accounts May Define the Next Era of DeFi

Folks Finance challenges a foundational assumption of DeFi: that accounts must be tied to chains.

By unifying account state instead of moving assets, the protocol unlocks efficiencies that incentives alone can never achieve. The model comes with new risks and dependencies, but it also creates a pathway toward a less fragmented, more measurable, and more scalable DeFi landscape.

As DeFi continues to expand across chains, the question will evolve from:
“How fast can assets move?”
to
“How cleanly can risk be measured?”

In that future, unified global account systems may matter far more than bridges.