The Future of Euler and DAS Recap

This week at the Digital Asset Summit, NYSE announced Securitize as its first digital transfer agent, Franklin Templeton tapped Ondo to bring its ETFs on-chain, and Invesco stepped in to take over SuperState's nearly billion-dollar treasury fund. Meanwhile, Euler CEO Jonathan Han joined us to talk about DeFi lending's comeback story and why the next wave of growth depends on bridging the TradFi-DeFi talent gap. Also, the Resolv USR exploit reminded everyone that vault infrastructure still has some growing up to do.

📈 RWA market cap was down 2% WoW to just under $27 billion
🏆 Biggest RWA winner: Ondo's USDY added $100M+ (now at $1.15B)
🏆 Biggest network winner: BNB Chain added $50M, cementing third place at $3.2B

📈 Stablecoin market was down ~1% WoW to $299.97 billion
🏆 Biggest stablecoin winner: Sky's USDS added $160M
🏆 Biggest network winner: Solana added $300M up to just under $15B

📈 Onchain risk free rates:

• Short term treasuries (1m): 3.7%
• Aave / DeFi: 3.03%

Guest Spotlight: Jonathan Han, CEO of Euler

Jonathan Han joined us fresh off the Digital Asset Summit to talk about one of DeFi's greatest comeback stories. Euler suffered a multi-hundred million dollar exploit a few years back that saw TVL crater. The team worked closely with regulators, the FBI, and centralized exchanges to recover the stolen funds and return them to users. Now, with TVL back over a billion dollars, Jonathan is leading the charge into Euler's next chapter.

The playbook? Leverage Euler's battle-tested DeFi infrastructure to serve institutions that are increasingly looking to deploy capital on-chain. Jonathan highlighted three key bottlenecks the team is tackling: security and institutional customization to give large allocators confidence, handling the unique mechanics of tokenized equities like weekend liquidity and market-making, and solving for private credit's redemption windows and NAV issues in a 24/7 settlement environment.

Jonathan also made a strong case for the talent gap being one of the biggest constraints in the space. Finding BD and go-to-market professionals who can speak fluently in both TradFi and DeFi is extremely difficult. Euler is hiring for exactly those profiles, so if you can talk to Fidelity and a crypto-native hedge fund in the same week, reach out.

As a former fintech founder, I'll add this: if you're building in fintech today and still tromping through the mud on ACH and homegrown web two infrastructure, talk to the Euler team and the stablecoin providers. There's an easier way now.

NYSE x Securitize: The First Digital Transfer Agent

The NYSE announced that Securitize will be its first digital transfer agent, minting blockchain-native securities in partnership with the exchange. Think of it as a blockchain-native version of the DTCC. The NYSE platform will support both traditional transfer agents and digital-native ones like Securitize. Being first matters, and congrats to the Securitize team for earning that position.

Franklin Templeton x Ondo: ETFs Go On-Chain

Franklin Templeton partnered with Ondo Global Markets to tokenize a suite of its ETFs, starting with seven. This is significant because it's the first time an asset manager of Franklin Templeton's scale (roughly $1.7 trillion AUM) is directly involved in the issuance of tokenized assets through Ondo GM, where previously the ~200 listed stocks had no direct sponsorship from the original issuer.

The bigger picture here is access. If you're an everyday investor in Argentina who found stablecoins as an inflation hedge and then moved into money market products, ETFs are the logical next step along the risk curve. Single stock exposure to Nvidia isn't how most people invest, but a diversified ETF from a manager with trillions in AUM? That's a product for the every-person investor. And once those base assets are on-chain with well-understood risk profiles, they become building blocks for the next generation of vault strategies, fund-of-funds products, and composable DeFi strategies without the fee stacking that plagues traditional fund structures.

Three of the top five ETF managers are now involved in tokenized products: BlackRock (BUIDL), Fidelity (money market fund), and now Invesco. The holdouts are Vanguard and State Street.

SuperState x Invesco: The Demo That Worked

SuperState's nearly billion-dollar USTB treasury fund will be taken over by Invesco and renamed the Invesco SuperState US Treasury Fund. SuperState co-founder Jim Hiltner described USTB as something that was built as a demo, and then the demo worked. This makes total sense. SuperState is a technology company and likely doesn't want to be running asset management at scale when a world-class manager like Invesco can step in.

This is exactly the progression the industry needed. Crypto-native teams prove the concept, then institutional heavyweights step in to scale it with their brand, distribution, and compliance infrastructure. Rob Leshner and the SuperState team deserve credit for building credibility for the entire tokenized treasury space.

Johnny's aside: there are roughly $11 billion in tokenized money market funds on-chain today. Want to add zeros to that? Carve out a narrow exemption from securities registration for money market strategies that satisfy the reserve management requirements in the GENIUS Act and let them be freely transferable 24/7 worldwide. Treasury Secretary Bessent, if you're listening, this is how you sell more treasuries.

The Resolv USR Exploit: A Wake-Up Call for Vaults

Resolv's USR stablecoin suffered a smart contract exploit that resulted in $80 million in unauthorized minting. The fallout exposed a real issue in vault infrastructure: some vault curators didn't have proper oracles attached to their borrow markets for USR, which meant liquidations didn't trigger. Fast-acting users withdrew their money, leaving bad debt behind for everyone else. A bank run.

This sparked a broader conversation at DAS about fiduciary duty for vault curators. Currently, there's no official (and arguably no unofficial) standard requiring curators to act in the best interest of their LPs. This is exactly the kind of opportunity where smart regulation, or at least self-imposed standards, could differentiate responsible operators. It's also the playbook that Maple used to carve out their institutional lending niche: lean in, be accountable, and give depositors real people and real offices behind their capital.

Vaults aren't going anywhere. But this sucks, and everyone impacted has our empathy.

Shout Outs

Tether has apparently signed a definitive agreement to get an audit on their reserves for the first time. Announce the audit and the results. We'll be impressed then.

TAC member ParaFi raised a $125 million fund to invest in Seed and Series A startups. Congrats to Ben, Josh, and the whole team. That reportedly brings their AUM to a couple billion.

Solana launched a developer platform for tokenization, making it easy for anyone to create stablecoins or tokenized assets. To all vibe coders out there: you now have something your Claude Code can chat with to launch your stablecoin. The platform is AI-ready, because of course it is.

Watch or listen to the full episode on Spotify.