DeFi Drip Podcast | Tokenized Assets & Onchain Finance

Jonathan Casterline, Product Manager for Digital Assets at Van Eck, discusses where the firm goes next in tokenization. Van Eck holds roughly $4 to $5 billion in digital assets, primarily within the ETF space. A year after launching their tokenized Treasury fund, the firm is working out how to move past experimentation and drive the institutional demand that the next generation of onchain products...

RWAs can be used as collateral onchain. That part is proven. Sebastian Pulido, Director, Institutional & DeFi Business, at Aave Labs, argues the harder problem is what comes next: market structure, liquidation speed, and getting tokenized assets into the hands of investors who will never touch a Web3 wallet. Recorded live at the RWA Summit in Cannes for Season 2 of DeFi Drip, Graham Nelson, De...

Credit markets are $200 trillion. Crypto-backed loans are $60 billion. Paul Frambot, co-founder and CEO of Morpho, argues DeFi has barely scratched the surface, and the missing piece isn't more crypto collateral, it's fixed-rate, fixed-term obligations. Recorded live at the RWA Summit in Cannes for Season 2 of DeFi Drip, Graham Nelson, DeFi Product Lead at Centrifuge, sits down with Paul to break...

The RWA market went from $1B to $25B in two years. Bhaji Illuminati, CEO of Centrifuge Labs, argues the industry is now asking a harder question: not how to tokenize assets, but how to make them actually useful. Recorded live at the RWA Summit in Cannes for Season 2 of DeFi Drip, Graham Nelson, DeFi Product Lead at Centrifuge Labs, sits down with Bhaji to break down what composability means in pra...

Most onchain treasury products in 2024 give you exposure to an intermediary, not the asset itself. Martin Quensel, founder of Anemoy and co-founder of Centrifuge, is building it differently, the token is the fund share, backed directly by T-bills, issued under BVI regulation. In this episode he explains why institutional structure is what separates real adoption from speculation, and why most offe...

EY's 2023 research showed institutional and high-net-worth investors were already planning significant allocations to tokenized assets. Prashant Kher, who led that research, argues the industry was solving the wrong problem — tokenizing assets was never the hard part. Getting them into investors' hands through the right channels was.

Safe secures more onchain assets than almost any other protocol, but Johannes Moormann's argument in this episode isn't about custody, it's about adoption. DeFi already has the conceptual infrastructure to out-compete traditional finance. What it's missing is a way out of the crypto bubble, and account abstraction is one of the tools that gets it there.

Public credit is already one of the most efficient, accessible markets in the world. Jake Lynch, investment researcher at L1 Digital, argues that putting government bonds onchain doesn't make them better — it just gives people new collateral to lever up against. Private credit is where the real opportunity is: fragmented, inaccessible to most investors, and exactly the kind of market blockchain ca...

In 2023, most DAO treasuries were sitting on volatile governance tokens with no yield strategy and no risk framework. Facu Peláez, Business Development Manager at karpatkey, was already building the infrastructure to fix that — non-custodial treasury management, 32-parameter risk monitoring, and emergency protocols for when things go wrong onchain. In this episode he makes the case that real-world...

Chuck Mounts spent 25 years covering global banks and sovereigns at Goldman Sachs, UBS, and Merrill Lynch before becoming Chief DeFi Officer at S&P Global. In this 2023 episode he maps out what he sees as the difference between DeFi's evolution phase — reducing friction, streamlining execution — and the revolution that follows: new pools of capital, democratized access, and real-world income o...

In 2022, when real-world asset allocations in DeFi were still measured in millions, Sébastien Derivaux was already making the case that a financial system without real assets is just speculation. In this episode he explains how MakerDAO was approaching that problem, and makes his bet for what would finally bring institutions onchain — a yield curve in DeFi.

In DeFi's first episode, recorded in 2022 when real-world asset lending was still fringe, Kevin Miao made the case that DeFi had already built the rails for structured credit without realizing it. The same if-then logic that routes payments through 15 counterparties in traditional securitization — servicers, calculation agents, paying agents, DTC — is exactly what smart contracts do natively, at z...