July 2026 Summaries

Lemon, a prominent digital finance platform in Latin America, has expanded its services to include US stock investing for users in Argentina and Perú, offering access to over 10,000 US-listed companies, ETFs, indices, and thematic portfolios via its app. This initiative, powered by Alpaca's brokerage infrastructure, allows users to invest in global equities such as Apple and NVIDIA alongside their existing digital asset services. Lemon's approach integrates stock trading seamlessly into its app, aiming to simplify the investment process for its over four million users by enabling fractional trading in local currency or digital dollars. The platform's expansion into US equities marks a significant development in providing easier access to international markets for Latin American investors, addressing challenges like currency conversion and complex tax regulations. Since the launch, Lemon has seen robust engagement, with customers opening more than 80,000 investment accounts and achieving daily trading volumes of approximately $100,000 USD.

Access to the $70 trillion US equity market remains a challenge for global investors due to high fees, fragmented infrastructure, and regulatory barriers, but the rise of tokenized equities is addressing these issues. Ondo Finance, founded in 2021, aims to bridge these gaps by leveraging blockchain technology to bring US equities on-chain, utilizing liquidity from traditional exchanges like NYSE and Nasdaq rather than relying on limited on-chain pools. This approach allows for efficient trade execution with minimal slippage, facilitating the growth of the Ondo Stocks platform, which has become a significant player in the tokenized equity space by capturing 70% of the Total Value Locked (TVL) in tokenized US equities. The platform's success is marked by its expansion to over 138,000 holders and over $21 billion in trading volume, supported by a robust regulatory framework and strategic partnerships with entities like Alpaca. Ondo continues to expand globally, enhance its regulatory compliance, and innovate with offerings like Ondo Perps, aiming to provide institutional-grade financial services on-chain.

PutHouse is an automated platform designed to execute options trading strategies, specifically covered calls and cash-secured puts, by integrating with Alpaca's Trading and Market API to manage trades from start to finish without manual intervention. The platform aims to generate options income by automatically screening contracts and executing trades while allowing users to earn interest on uninvested cash through Alpaca's High Yield Cash program. Despite the potential benefits, options trading carries significant risks, including the possibility of losing the principal, and PutHouse provides AI-generated explanations to help users understand the rationale behind trade decisions, although these outputs should not be solely relied upon for investment decisions. PutHouse leverages Alpaca's infrastructure for reliable market data and automated execution, offering a streamlined user experience while emphasizing the importance of users independently monitoring their accounts and understanding the inherent risks and limitations of automated trading tools.

Alpaca has introduced index options for paper trading through its Trading API, allowing traders to simulate strategies involving Cboe-listed US index options such as SPX, SPXW, VIX, VIXW, DJX, and XSP before engaging in live trading. Index options differ from equity options as they are cash-settled and European-style, meaning they settle in cash without early assignment, and include features like same-day expiration for specific contracts. This new feature aims to help traders and builders test and refine their strategies in a risk-free environment, although they should be aware that paper trading results may differ from live trading outcomes due to factors like liquidity and order handling. Alpaca emphasizes that options trading carries significant risks and advises potential traders to thoroughly review current pricing, exchange fees, and tax considerations before proceeding. The paper trading environment offers a practical way for users to integrate index options into their broader market strategies without the immediate risk of live trading.

Vacuumlabs, a fintech product development company, has formed a strategic partnership with Alpaca, becoming its official integration partner in Europe to enhance wealth management and banking services. This collaboration allows Alpaca to provide regulated brokerage infrastructure and embeddable APIs, while Vacuumlabs focuses on front-end integration, including onboarding, personalization, and KYC processes to deliver a production-ready platform. The partnership aims to streamline the implementation workflow for fintechs and brokers across Europe by offering coordinated strategy and integration support from product design to engineering and AI. Tomas Masek, CEO of Vacuumlabs, emphasizes that this partnership addresses the challenges firms face when integrating disparate vendors, offering a unified solution from Alpaca's infrastructure to a customer-ready product. Alpaca Europe, led by CEO Karan Shanmugarajah, views this partnership as key to advancing their presence in the European market by enabling faster launches of innovative wealth and investment products.

Alpaca has announced that its broker partners can now access German equities through the Frankfurt Stock Exchange's electronic trading platform, Deutsche Börse Xetra, via Alpaca's Broker API. This development allows partners to expand their offerings to include one of Europe's largest equity markets, providing access to major German companies such as BMW and Adidas. This move is part of Alpaca's broader global equities initiative, which plans to extend access to additional international exchanges like the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and London Stock Exchange. The integration offers diversified investment opportunities, multi-currency trading, and increased user engagement by enabling trading during European market hours. Alpaca emphasizes that investing in global securities involves risks like currency fluctuations and varying regulatory standards. The initiative aligns with Alpaca's mission to democratize financial services by enhancing globally connected investing experiences through a unified API-first brokerage infrastructure.

Alpaca has launched two MCP Servers for broker partners in public beta, designed to facilitate integration with their Broker API by using natural language interactions. These servers aim to improve efficiency for engineering, operations, and support teams by allowing them to explore and understand integrations and workflows through a single interface. The Sandbox MCP Server supports both read and write operations for testing various workflows before deployment, while the Production MCP Server offers read-only operations for secure access to live data. These MCP Servers enhance integration speed by allowing users to quickly find necessary endpoints and retrieve guidance grounded in Alpaca's documentation, while OAuth-based authorization ensures secure connections. Additionally, Alpaca has introduced a Broker API Skills repository to assist AI assistants in performing common workflows, further streamlining the integration process. The initiative is part of Alpaca's broader effort to develop agent-first brokerage infrastructure, with ongoing enhancements shaped by partner feedback.

Through a partnership with Broadridge Financial Solutions, Alpaca is enhancing its services by integrating institutional-grade shareholder governance capabilities into tokenized equities, allowing shareholders to access Broadridge's ProxyVote.com platform for proxy voting, investor communications, regulatory disclosures, and voting entitlement reconciliation. This integration enables investors holding tokenized equities through supported brokerage relationships to participate in corporate governance decisions such as board elections and mergers. Alpaca, a leading provider of custody for tokenized US equities and ETFs, connects tokenized markets with traditional capital market standards, ensuring accuracy, auditability, compliance, and transparency. However, it is important to note that tokenized assets generally provide economic exposure rather than direct equity ownership, and they do not confer voting rights unless explicitly stated. All investments involve risk, and there are no guarantees of future performance, emphasizing the need for investors to consider their objectives and risks carefully.

Alpaca has announced a $135 million funding round led by Peak XV, bringing its total financing to $435 million, including debt financing from Payward and BMO, as it seeks to expand its regulated infrastructure for both traditional and onchain financial markets. The company has seen significant growth, including acquisitions in India and Europe, the launch of global equities access, and a doubling of revenue over three consecutive years. Alpaca's infrastructure supports a range of financial entities globally as it adapts to major industry shifts driven by tokenization and AI, positioning itself as a key player in bridging traditional and digital markets. The funding will be used to enhance Alpaca's brokerage infrastructure, enabling its clients to scale investment products across various market types, while the backing from investors like Peak XV underscores confidence in Alpaca's potential to be the foundational infrastructure for next-generation financial services.

LamaTrader, now available on the Alpaca Connect Marketplace, provides an integrated trading workspace that connects seamlessly with users' existing Alpaca brokerage accounts via Alpaca Connect (OAuth). It offers a customizable environment called the Integrated Trader Environment (ITE), which consolidates research, charting, portfolio management, AI-powered analysis, and trading functionalities into a single interface. Users can leverage Lama AI to create custom trading skills, widgets, and dashboards tailored to their needs, whether they are new traders or those employing algorithmic strategies. This platform allows for trading in various asset classes such as US stocks, ETFs, options, and cryptocurrencies, all through a unified interface. Additionally, LamaTrader emphasizes user control by requiring review and approval of all AI-generated suggestions and orders, thus ensuring that traders remain informed and in command of their activities. Although LamaTrader is a third-party application independent of Alpaca, it utilizes Alpaca's robust APIs for market data and order execution, facilitating a comprehensive trading experience without needing multiple tools.

Alpaca has expanded its investment services across the European Economic Area (EEA) by completing the process of EEA passporting, allowing it to offer regulated and localized investment services in 29 countries through its Spain-based hub. This expansion enables Alpaca to build on its regulatory foundation established in Europe under the MiFID II framework and provides fintechs, financial institutions, and enterprise partners access to its API-driven investment infrastructure without needing separate authorizations for each market. The development strengthens Alpaca's position as a regional infrastructure partner, facilitating the creation, launch, and scaling of investment products across Europe. This milestone follows Alpaca's previous European expansion and acquisition activities, aligning with its mission to simplify access to regulated investment infrastructure across markets.