Big week for us. A rooftop startup showcase, founder dinner, and the Chicago Builds: Future of Money summit, all in one week.

Meanwhile Chicago’s two defining bets, quantum and financial infrastructure, both made moves. Plus a nuclear update and a hiring signal worth your attention.

Here’s what’s up this week in Chicago:

I was honored to be able to share exclusive news live on stage at Chicago Builds: Future of Money.

Chicago-based zerohash announced a partnership with Marqeta that lets people spend stablecoins across global card networks. The split is clean. zerohash handles custody, compliance, and liquidity in the background. Marqeta handles card issuance. The user just spends.

Two companies that shared our stage last week are now building this in production, and the third made it bankable. Burling Bank, led by CEO Michael Busch, is the chartered partner giving the stablecoin-to-card bridge real regulatory footing while zerohash and Marqeta handle the rails.

A year ago, stablecoins were mostly a settlement story running behind the scenes. Now they are reaching the point of sale. For context, stablecoin monthly transaction volume hit $7.2T in February 2026, passing the US ACH network for the first time.

Full session videos from Chicago Builds: Future of Money are coming in the next few weeks to my YouTube.

All photos from the summit here.

The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park on the South Side had its strongest stretch yet. Three announcements stood out:

PsiQuantum, IBM, Infleqtion, Pasqal, Diraq, and Quantum Machines are all committed to the campus, and Illinois has put $500M into the park on top of $200M into the Chicago Quantum Exchange.

Chicago is co-locating the whole supply chain, the cryogenics, the components, the manufacturers, in one place. That’s what turns a research lead into an industry, and it is the hard part to copy.

In early 2016, a University of Chicago grad toured a River North building Chris Deutsch’s family had owned since 1983. Arnav Dalmia and his two co-founders, Ryota Sekine and Shivani Jain were building Cubii, an under-desk elliptical.

Chris from Lofty Ventures and Loft Development Corporation offered them office space as an in-kind investment in his loft building, and Cubii became both his portfolio company and his tenant.

A year later Chris walked VCs into Cubii’s office to meet them. Nobody bit.

Then Cubii went on QVC.

In one weekend the numbers blew past every expectation. Arnav, the co-founder, came downstairs to Chris's office to ask what he thought about a small insider round to cover the new demand. Chris asked if there was room for him to double down. That was the last capital they would raise.

100,000 units sold by 2018. Number 180 on the Inc 500 in 2019. Then in September of 2020 with the world in the middle of Covid and suddenly desperate to exercise at home, Cubii exited for around $100M. Because the founders never raised much venture money, they owned almost all of it, and all still in their 20s, immediately became set for life.

Here is the part that matters for Chicago. Chris reinvested every dollar of his seven-figures in Cubii proceeds. Between April and December of 2020 he grew his portfolio from 30 companies to 60, deploying more capital in eight months than in the prior six years combined. Roughly one new check a week.

Cubii’s exit powered roughly his next 30 investments, mostly at first-check/first-round and the vast majority in Chicago.

Ryota became Lofty's first Entrepreneur in Residence and now angel invests across the ecosystem. Arnav is building his next company, Tovie, with Lofty backing him again.

One exit funded 30 more swings and turned two founders into investors. That’s the flywheel Chicago has been missing. We need more founders-turned-angels to help back the next generation of local entrepreneurs.

Chris has assembled 30 speakers to help founders, angels and angel-curious Chicagoans learn how to invest in early stage startups.

Learn from speakers like StockX’s founder, Josh Luber, Tom Sosnoff, five of Lofty’s FTAs and dozens more thought leaders at the Lofty Angels Summit, back at Bank of America's downtown building on August 10th.

Arnav will be joining the FTA panel to take this story full circle.

Register with code LOFTYLANDON for 10% off: https://loftyangels.com

Nine Illinois communities said this week they’re interested in building new nuclear facilities, the first concrete response to Pritzker's EO to bring at least two GWs online, enough to power up to 2M homes or 20 large data centers.

It follows the Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act, signed in January, which lifted a four-decade ban on building new large scale nuclear power plants.

Illinois electricity costs rose about 15% from 2024 to 2025, more than triple the national average, and AI demand is only pushing them higher.

Every quantum lab, trading floor, and training run in this city leans on that grid. The state that pairs compute ambition with reliable, affordable power has a real edge, and Illinois is trying to be that state.

On July 21, The Digital Chamber filed suit in Sangamon County asking the court to review the Digital Asset Tax Act before it takes effect January 1.

The 0.2% levy applies to the exchange, transfer, or storage of digital assets, and because it attaches to the transaction rather than to any profit, the open question is how broadly it reaches. The state still has room to clarify that through regulation, and a repeal bill is already pending.

As written, the tax hits blockchain-based assets while economically identical traditional ones stay untaxed. A dollar transfer is free. The same dollar as a stablecoin is taxed.

Here is the side most coverage misses: This is not only a crypto question, it’s a trading question.

Chicago's prop trading firms move enormous volume on margins of a few basis points per trade. Under the broadest reading, a 20 basis point tax on the full value moved could run several times the profit on a trade.

New data puts Chicago third in the US for growth in AI-related job postings, behind only NYC and SF, and AI companies now hold about 308,000 sq feet of office space downtown

For a long time the knock on Chicago was that we trained world-class engineers and then exported them to the coasts. This points the other way. The roles are showing up here, in a city that already has the finance, healthcare, and logistics companies that need AI built into the core of the business.

The number I’m actually watching isn’t the postings. It is whether they convert.

The metric market watchers are focused on is the rate at which AI job announcements turn into signed leases and filled seats, and how Chicago handles this expansion could become a template other tech-aspiring cities try to follow.

What this all means if you are building or hiring here:

Which is why I’m building OneTwoLoop: the homepage for engineers in Chicago.

See all roles: onetwoloop.com

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