Happy August. I hope many of my readers are receiving this week’s newsletter from somewhere paved with warm white sand and dotted with lazily swinging palm trees.  As we savour these warmer months of the year, I thought it would be the perfect time to take stock of the 2024 tokenization market by looking at all the money that went into funding this years’ tokenization startups. Where are investors putting their money? The 3 key questions we are looking to answer: Who are the

Lately I have been inundated with client requests for various industry-level reports on the tokenization space. One piece of data that stood out to me as I was going through my research process was composition of the No.1 tokenization vertical: tokenized USD cash. There has been plenty of ink spent on the topic. You can read about its usage breakdown here . But they all tend to treat the category as if every product in the category is similar and homogenous in their makeup. 

A few weeks ago I started the series “How will tokenized MMF scale to trillions AUM?” We looked at three traditional finance use cases that are likely to adopt tokenization for immediate benefits and that benefits scaled into very large numbers. Having looked at US corporate cash management and derivatives collateral management in part 1  and part 2 , we are wrapping up the series with intraday repo as our last stop. Unlike the other two use cases, intraday repo is a new mark

I recently wrote a post about the 3 proven product market fit areas  when it comes to digital asset adoption. One of them is tokenization. Another one is trading. And the last but not least is payment. While the trading business is essentially a commission business dependent on the overall crypto market activity, tokenization and payment are independent from the overall crypto market and have much bigger potential to become foundational building blocks in our financial market

How big are the US corporate cash management & global derivatives collateral opportunities for tokenized MMF?

How will tokenized MMFs change the financial system one market at a time.

Want to understand JPMorgan's Onyx? Here are its main products and GTM strategies.

As the tokenized yield-bearing cash solution space’s No.1 player Ondo Finance’s AUM surged past $464 million this week, the thought of a path towards broader adoption in this nascent but highly important space came to the forefront of my mind. The space that the tokenized yield-bearing cash solution is currently addressing mostly has to do with stablecoin capital that is already onchain. There are already $160 billion of these but the size of the market outside of crypto is m

What synthetic dollar? It is a tokenized hedge fund strategy running basis trade

The biggest tokenization narrative of 2023-24 so far can be summarized in the following 3 stories about stablecoins and yieldcoins (TBills backed cash equivalents): Stablecoin is the biggest tokenization success story Yieldcoin is going to eat into stablecoin’s market due to its superior capital efficiency Yieldcoins from leading tokenization players such as BlackRock, Ondo and Franklin Templeton have been taking market share from stablecoin The conversations on tokenization

This what 110x looks like for an tokenized asset that has achieved wide adoption...

Has the tokenized TBill market reached an inflection point given its +43% AUM growth in past 2 months?

BlackRock’s USD Institutional Liqudity Digital Fund  or BUIDL has been the talk of the financial press recently. As the first fund management product specifically launched on the blockchain by BlackRock to address the needs of the tokenized world that banking, finance and asset management are moving into, it is a watershed moment for the tokenization space and a massive validation for the utility of blockchains. The realized inflows totalled more than $250mill which blew past

A few weeks back I wrote a post  highlighting the 3 major difficulties facing many tokenization projects today. In that post I talked about why targeting incremental improvements in operational processes or capital usage would make much more sense as a go-to-market approach.  I have been chewing on the idea of capital efficiency improvement in crypto for the past two weeks and had a light bulb moment recently: scaling capital efficiency adoption through yield bearing stableco

Within the tokenization space, there exists a school of thought that any market can be recreated onchain but with better liquidity and lower cost of capital because of blockchain’s fast settlement and borderless distribution. Real estate, auto financing, art, carbon credit etc. You name it. The list of potential onchain replications is endless with possibilities. As a result, I see startups sprung up with pitches that promise new financial paradigms. However, why is there har

2023 Oct total crypto market cap: $1 trillion, BTC $26k,  2024 Feb total crypto market cap: $2 trillion, BTC $52k, 11 BTC ETFs Lately I have been pondering what is a convenient way to get exposure to the whole digital asset market, without having to buy specific assets. Then Coinbase, the only publicly traded and regulatory compliant US digital asset exchange, reported Q4 earnings that beat across the board on 15th Feb. Given its roughly $40 billion market cap and its central

While most people think of Bitcoin and its price when hearing the words digital assets or crypto, at Crypto Adoption Curve, I have always preferred to pay attention to underlying adoption trends and their implications for value creation and capture in commercial applications. For example, I covered the recent technological advances underpinning the distributed ledger system and the competing paths they have created that would decide where trillions of digital assets go. You c

Celestia, EigenDA, and Altlayer.  Have you heard of these names before? If you have not, you are probably missing out on one of the hottest innovation trends in crypto right now.  These are some of the key teams designing and building solutions in what is known as data availability space in a modular approach towards blockchain scaling. They are building step-change functions for blockchains that will have far reaching consequences for their applications in finance, social me

How well do you know of the tokenization industry? While the newsreel of tokenization seems to be in perpetual motion, I have been hard pressed to find a complete overview of the industry players, transactions and value accrual points. Last week Binance published a mapping on the industry that arguably not only left out a lot of important participants but also failed to provide a sense of their relative scale. See below. So I am going to attempt to shine a light on the topic.

Would you prefer receiving 7% fixed for a year or 0.5% variable that could spike up to 50% for a few days but you wouldn't know when that would happen? There has been a lot of discussion about crypto FAANG projects recently, but they all seem to have missed a crucial differentiator. The differing quality of those revenue streams. In our last newsletter, we looked at MakerDAO’s, the biggest crypto project, scaling plan and explored possible revenue, expense and earnings number