Investors are not betting on tokens as much anymore, and we have been thinking why. There are three kinds of assets that have accrued value in the past 18 months. 1. Assets that commit revenue to buybacks. Hyperliquid is an instance of this. 2. Assets that commit to governance through tokens requiring institutional partners to purchase the token to own a stake in the network. Morpho is an instance of this. 3. Ones that do not issue tokens but issue equity directly to private investors. Deribit, Privy, Rain fall in this camp. The market has wised up and is no longer willing to pay ridiculous multiples for low-revenue tokens without a great future. Pre AI crypto was the hot asset class. In 2026, AI takes that crown. So where does value go? Tokenisation is the trend that has been winning. Stablecoins were the first attempt at it. On-chain stocks are the second iteration. Blockchains will become the infrastructure layer where the world’s assets will be traded and settled. These assets will not be issued by foundations and labs with funny piecharts for token distributions, but more often than not by large institutions. The assets represented would be on-chain equivalents of traditional assets alongside native ones. 1. Ondo has 438 assets represented on chain. 2. Blackrock’s BUIDL has $2.3B represented on-chain. 3. Similarly, Centrifuge has scaled to $1.62B in TVL by focusing on treasury funds ($870M ) and a AAA corporate fund ($686M). None of these are what would be considered “tokens” in the conventional realm of digital assets. But in 2026, they are all digital asset representations of where the industry is headed. If you are into issuing tokens, pivot to capturing value from tokenisation. The reason for this secular trend is fairly simple. In 2022, there was the hope that radical decentralisation and DAO-native models that are run by token holders will upend traditional firms. And tokens represented a meaningful premium. In 2025, that premium turned into a discount as most asset Users see the value in tokenised representations of real world assets due to improvements in accessibility and cost. They do not value the 50th dex on the 18th L2 Tokenisation is the easiest mechanism to export the best assets from mature markets like the US and Korea to the world. It gives a mechanism for financial primitives to communicate with the marvel that globalisation itself was. The rails on which these assets move, settle and are stored will be valuable. We think, for investors and founders, this really just means four things 1. Crypto has reached a level of maturity where moats and network effects matter. The players that have emerged and dominated in the last 24 months were capital-intensive, walled IP ecosystems that spoke to finance at scale. Both Ethena and Hyperliquid had moats of capital and networks that can’t be rivaled. 2. Value accrual will increasingly be in the equity side of the equation. If you are trying to raise, seeing where tokenisation unlocks new markets or business models may be far easier an answer to find than to compete with being the 50th iteration of a Hyperliquid trading interface 3. Geo-specific markets are not as mature as the ones in the US. Tokenisation unlocks fintech primitives that were not possible earlier in emerging markets. Cracking distribution, UX and business models can lead to economies of scale in these new markets 4. Lastly - question what can be tokenised and why?. USDAI tokenised the debt markets around GPUs. There are players tokenising energy markets. A good place to start is to revisit the graveyard of dead startups in 2017 and explore what could come on-chain today due to changes in regulation and infrastructure not just beacuse it can but because there is demand. Blockchains are capital rails, but the new winners among startups will be ones that redefine what forms of capital can be pushed in these rails Where tokens allow anyone to be an asset issuer, tokenisation focuses on bringing productive assets to the masses. It creates a pathway to retain the benefits of DeFi - be it composability, 24/7 markets or global access, without the risks of buying into a random token. As consumers look towards better alternatives to hedge their own savings and diversify asset classes, tokenisation will become the common trend. For founders and investors, the fork in the road ahead asks a simple question: do you bet on a private, equity-native vehicle or do you bootstrap a network from scratch with a token? Right now, we are leaning away from tokens and towards equity.

The most important thing about a product is that it clearly serves the market’s needs in necessary ways. STRK20 does that by providing a privacy framework that is, for the first time, composable with the existing liquidity infrastructure built into its ecosystem, while also being compatible with existing assets. That makes it a genuinely strong solution to privacy, and one I expect to become table stakes moving forward. Privacy shouldn’t be an extension to how crypto has been built. It should just be there as a feature. And for that to matter, it has to work with the assets, wallets and apps that already exist, not only with things that have to be built from scratch. Starknet goes further, it is not a privacy chain. It is built on really strong architecture that can do a lot of things very well, and STRK20 is one example of what that makes possible.

1/4 We recently published our risk assessment report for the New Silver Income Fund, a residential bridge lending vehicle with a strong institutional track record, sitting inside @infiniFi's yield strategy. Structure, capital stack, risk factors, and our full assessment 👇 github.com/InfiniFi-Labs/doc…

Your X feed is either an edge or noise. If you're building in Web3, here are 20 accounts worth following ↓ > @castle_labs > @DarenMatsuoka > @GREEND0TS > @MessariCrypto > @0xJeff > @Decentralisedco > @Jackhaldorsson > @eddylazzarin > @Defi_Warhol > @andrewmoh > @Usoppu > @Mars_DeFi > @sjdedic > @green_but_red > @ZeusRWA > @TheDeFinvestor > @intern > @PinkBrains_io > @OAK_Res > @Hercules_Defi

We’re sharing our completed post-mortem on the April 18th incident, prepared with @Mandiant and @CrowdStrike. We are publishing both an executive summary and the full report at the link below. Over the past four weeks, we’ve worked with hundreds of partners to help them understand their current security posture, and harden it where appropriate. We’ll continue this work, alongside taking additional proactive steps for the benefit of not only our partners, but also the ecosystem as a whole. We want to extend our thanks to our partners for their support and patience this past month. There’s a reason that over $12 billion has moved across the network in the past four weeks, and why the world’s most valuable asset issuers have stood by our side: they believe in us, in what the LayerZero protocol has to offer, and in the value of modular, isolated, application-controlled security. The work continues. And we look forward to continue showing up for the applications that trust us with their business, as well as the broader ecosystem. layerzero.network/blog/layer…

"Institutions really care about the sovereign properties of blockchains." @gluk64 describes on @Decentralisedco how Prividiums enable Institutions to participate in networks knowing the rules are cryptographically enforced.

Ethereum's Strawmap is the protocol's most significant strategic reframing since The Merge An attempt to fix the gaps that drove users to rival chains, and to position Ethereum as infrastructure for quantum resistance, privacy, and the AI economy. My latest for @glxyresearch

5,000 Banks. One Network. Here's the full thesis 🎧

Institutional bitcoin has remained parked for a decade because moving it on-chain exposes your position, your counterparty, and your intent before the trade settles. @Decentralisedco just wrote the clearest breakdown of why that's changing and how strkBTC is the first asset to bring compliant privacy, full composability, and a shared anonymity set to Bitcoin DeFi. Read the full piece 👇