The Roadmap to $140 Trillion

The RWA industry has spent years building rails for institutional capital, but one of the most important voices at the table isn't a bank or a protocol. It's a registered investment advisor who genuinely wants to allocate and keeps running into walls. This week's episode is a masterclass in the gap between what's been built and what actually needs to exist before meaningful capital flows onchain from the wealth management channel.

Market KPIs (brought to you by RWA.xyz)

📈 RWA market cap was down 1% WoW to $31.0 billion
🏆 Biggest RWA winner: JAA added $240M (up to $664M, driven by Ethena's allocation of USDE backing into JAA)
🏆 Biggest network winner: Solana added $150M (up to $2.8B)

📈 Stablecoin market cap was down ~1% WoW to $297.0 billion
🏆 Biggest stablecoin winner: USDGO added $140M (up to $450M)
🏆 Biggest network winner: Hyper EVM added $900M (up to $5.2B, third consecutive week as biggest chain winner)

📈 Onchain risk free rates:
Short term treasuries (1m): 3.59%
Aave / DeFi: 3.61% (essentially in lockstep with SOFR this week)

Guest Spotlight: Adam Blumberg, CFP — Protocol Wealth

Adam Blumberg is a certified financial planner and co-founder of Protocol Wealth, a firm that advises crypto founders and foundations on asset allocation. He's been one of the tokenization industry's most consistent and credible champions from the traditional advisory side, having spent years trying to figure out how to get client capital into tokenized assets. He recently published a piece on the TAC Research Hub that's essentially a product roadmap for what needs to be built before RIAs can meaningfully allocate. That article is what brought him onto the show this week, and the conversation that followed is one of the most practically useful we've had.

Adam came to the space because the original promise of tokenization was genuinely exciting to someone who spends their professional life navigating the illiquidity and opacity of private markets. His father runs a multifamily real estate business. The classic problem: great operator, no scale, no access to broader capital pools, and investors locked up for years with no secondary exit. Tokenization, in theory, solves all of that. Transparent NAV, composable liquidity, permissioned transfer without endless re-papering. That vision is why Adam is still here.

The frustration, as he laid out, is that what's actually been built doesn't solve his problems. It mostly tokenizes things he can already get at Schwab, without the SIPC insurance, and with worse reporting infrastructure.

What Would Actually Get an RIA to Allocate?

Adam's piece on the Research Hub frames this as a menu for builders, and we walked through it in depth. The blockers are structural, not attitudinal. He wants to allocate. He can't. Here's why.

The onboarding problem. Every tokenized asset platform runs its own KYC and identity stack. Securitize has one. Anchorage has one. Kraken has one. Plume has one. If Adam wants to build a diversified tokenized portfolio for a client, that client has to re-KYC across eight or more separate platforms. That's not a minor inconvenience. It's a compliance and operational nightmare for a fiduciary who is required by SEC registration to track and report every position.

The reporting problem. After onboarding, you still have to pull reports from all those platforms independently and reconcile them into a turnkey asset management platform (TAMP) that gives the advisor a unified view. That unified view doesn't exist. So even if a client wants a tokenized-asset portfolio, the operational burden on the advisor is enormous, and the output still doesn't integrate cleanly with what they're required to produce.

The due diligence problem. As a fiduciary, Adam can't put clients into tokenized private credit just because it's tokenized. He still has to assess the manager, the counterparties, the underwriting quality. Right now there's no standardization around what data gets put onchain, how it's reported, or how it updates over time. You're largely trusting the manager, same as a black-box fund, except now you've also taken on smart contract risk on top of it.

The income treatment problem. This one is underappreciated. How yield is delivered matters enormously for financial planning. Does rental income rebase into the token's value? Does it pay out as USDC to the wallet? Is there a redemption trigger that creates a taxable event? Each structure has a completely different tax treatment and a completely different implication for cash flow planning. Adam pointed out that if he's planning around a client who needs income to live on, the difference between "USDC hits your wallet monthly" and "you have to redeem tokens to access yield" is not a minor distinction. It's the difference between something being usable and not.

The bottom line from Adam: it's not that the opportunity isn't exciting. It's that the infrastructure was built for individual degens who want to self-custody novel assets. It wasn't built for the advisor who sits in front of 140 to 160 trillion dollars in client assets and has a legal obligation to document, report, and justify every allocation decision.

BitGet, SpaceX Pre-IPO Shares, and the Degen Pivot

Earlier this week, BitGet announced they're offering allocations of SpaceX pre-IPO shares through the BitGet Wallet, in partnership with a platform called X Stocks. The ticker is SPCX. The offering was 13 million dollars in size and went 4x oversubscribed in 30 minutes on Solana.

My initial reaction was that this is a fascinating pattern to watch. We've spent years building a global network of tens of millions of people who are perfectly comfortable YOLOing into tokens at any hour of the day or night. That DGen appetite is real and the capital behind it is real. If that crowd is now bored, farming has dried up, and the next massive liquidity event is a string of historic IPOs (SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI), it makes a lot of sense that you'd start to see crypto-native distribution channels try to capture that shift.

I even started asking myself whether Goldman or JPMorgan would eventually look at this and think: there's an aggregated pool of onchain retail capital that we want access to for IPO distribution. Maybe.

But the important caveat: X Stocks are position tokens. They represent price exposure, not necessarily direct ownership of the underlying shares. It's unclear whether the offering is fully one-to-one backed with actual SpaceX stock. So we're in wrapper territory, and I got notably less excited once I understood that. Adam made a sharp observation here: the crypto crowd that gets angry about ETFs being synthetic wrappers is now apparently totally fine buying a token that represents price movement without necessarily representing the asset. It's the same structure, just going the other direction.

My concern with the wrapper narrative is that it tends to be fine right up until a market shock, and then it isn't. I hope the plumbing works. I believe we'll eventually get to natively tokenized stock issued directly by issuers through their transfer agents. That's real. That's years away. In the meantime, I'm going to watch this closely because the distribution channel story is genuinely interesting even if the underlying instrument is imperfect.

Aave's New Risk Framework: Speedrunning TradFi Lessons

Charlie flagged a significant governance development at Aave. The Llama Risk proposal has been widely socialized and represents a material upgrade to how Aave thinks about risk management. The backstory: the previous framework essentially only evaluated market risk at the time an asset was first listed, relying on simulation firms like Gauntlet and Chaos Labs to model liquidation scenarios. Operational risk, counterparty risk, and infrastructure risk were assessed at listing and then largely left alone. The Kelp DAO incident exposed how badly that framework could fail when a non-market risk materialized in a protocol that was being used as collateral.

The new framework adds continuous monitoring across multiple risk dimensions, not just price exposure. Which is, of course, exactly how traditional finance does it.

Charlie's framing was exactly right: we are speedrunning TradFi risk management lessons. The difference is that in crypto, the cascade happens in machine time. No banking hours. No circuit breakers. No weekend that slows down an attacker because everyone's playing golf. Adam extended this point in a way I thought was pretty sobering. Once you start looping RWAs as collateral in DeFi lending platforms, the correlation between off-chain events and onchain liquidations becomes real. He walked through a hypothetical: what if tokenized hurricane insurance pools are used as collateral in Aave, and then you get four consecutive hurricanes? The underlying asset looked "safe." The yield looked great. The correlation to systemic DeFi risk looked zero. Until it wasn't.

That's 2008 rehypothecation logic applied to DeFi, and it's the exact failure mode that needs to be solved before scaled institutional capital can safely sit in decentralized lending markets. Aave at its peak had something like 60 billion in deposits. That puts it in the top 50 banks in the United States by deposit base. That's not a cute number anymore. The risk management has to match the scale. I'm encouraged that the community is taking this seriously post-Kelp DAO, and I hope other large protocols are watching and doing the same internal work.

The Five-Year Vision: Hyper-Personalized Portfolios

We didn't want the episode to be entirely about what's broken, so I pushed Adam on what actually works when the infrastructure gets built. His answer was genuinely exciting. The combination of onchain composability and AI unlocks something that traditional wealth management can't currently deliver: truly hyper-personalized portfolios that account not just for return and risk tolerance, but for the full fabric of a client's financial life.

His example: if you live in Houston and your income, your stock options, and your 401k are all tied to oil and gas, your investment portfolio should be hedging that concentration even if you don't think of yourself as having oil and gas exposure. An AI-driven system with access to onchain data about your actual positions, your income sources, and real-time market correlations could rebalance around that automatically. Not just to optimize return. To optimize your whole financial life for stability.

When everything is tokenized and everything is liquid, the distinction between "public" and "private" starts to dissolve. You just have assets. And you have an advisor, or an AI system with an advisor in the loop, that can optimize across all of them continuously. That's the vision. Getting there requires solving exactly the plumbing problems Adam described earlier in the conversation. Build the menu. Make Adam happy. The capital will follow.

Shoutouts

Digital Asset (developers of Canton Network): A16Z Crypto led a $355 million raise. Huge congrats to Yuval, Eric, and the rest of the team. Canton has been quietly building serious enterprise-grade infrastructure and this raise reflects the conviction that institutional blockchain rails are a durable business.

Securitize: The SEC declared their registration statement effective for their SPAC, sponsored by Cantor Fitzgerald. Shareholder vote is scheduled for June 29th, with the merger closing shortly after. The ticker, for anyone who hasn't seen it, is SEXY. Best ticker in the history of capital markets.

Circle: Launched cirBTC (pronunciation TBD), their wrapped and custodied Bitcoin product designed for deployment across other chains. Another step in Circle's expansion beyond USDC into broader onchain asset infrastructure.

Watch or listen to the full episode on Spotify.