Decentralized Finance: Where Capital Works Harder

Speakers

Real Assets, New Rails: Tokenization Across the Risk Spectrum

• Jonas Krstic, Head of Business Relations at STOKR
• Darren Camas, Cofounder & CEO at IPOR Labs
• Ben Elvidge, Head of Alternative Assets at metals.io
• Jonas Konstandin, Chief of Staff at Midas
• Aleksandar Bukovski, Lead Research Analyst at The Big Whale

The entry point is exotic, the destination is institutional

STOKR's path into the market runs counter to the usual institutional playbook. It started with one of the most exotic assets in crypto: hash rate-backed bitcoin mining notes (BMN1, then BMN2), which delivered 20%+ annual cash-on-cash returns. The rails built and stress-tested for those high-volume payout flows are now being repurposed for lower-risk products:

• A pre-phase partnership with a major US asset manager for a tokenized money market fund is underway (name undisclosed)
• Structuring BMN2 as an asset-backed security with ISIN, Luxembourg securitization vehicle, and MiFID compliance opened it to institutional allocators who could not engage with the raw exotic instrument
• The tokenized digital securities market grew from $6-7B to $30B in one year, too early for consolidation and still a land grab across asset classes and investor profiles

Midas frames the ceiling: the dollar, after 10 years of tokenization, sits at roughly 1% on-chain penetration ($300B out of $30-35T outstanding). Equities could reach 1% in five years. The market has enough space for multiple platforms with distinct positioning.

Uranium and rare metals: tokenizing the previously inaccessible

The uranium spot market processes roughly $300M per month. Financial investors represent only 40% of it, against 60-80% in gold or oil, because the access barrier is structural: $8.5M minimum to buy 100,000 pounds, with storage limited to one of three approved global facilities.

metals.io' answer is XU308, a tokenized uranium product built on Tezos X:

• 97% price correlation to the physical uranium market
• Beneficial ownership of the underlying physical asset, not just a price wrapper
• Bankruptcy-remote structure: in any scenario where the issuer is compromised, holders recover value through liquidation of the physical
• Whitelist controls ensure only eligible investors hold the asset, satisfying legal requirements around controlled materials
• A US ETF filing with the SEC is underway to add a traditional securities wrapper and deepen order book liquidity

The chain choice matters: Tezos X is an EVM-compatible rollup providing access to roughly $72B of DeFi TVL while retaining formal verification at the protocol level, mathematically proving that ownership rules are enforced at all times rather than attested by periodic audits.

European regulation is a competitive moat, not a bottleneck

MiFID gave European platforms a structural head start. Digital securities issuance on blockchain has been legally viable in Europe for years while the US was still developing its framework. The results are visible in where US players chose to build:

• Robinhood, Kraken (Backed) and others launched tokenized equity products via Liechtenstein, not the US
• STOKR, regulated by the CSSF in Luxembourg, is accessible to investors across 130 jurisdictions
• MiCA enforcement begins at end of June 2026, providing clarity on stablecoins and crypto asset licensing

The stablecoin market at $316B is the demand engine underlying all of this. Tether recently overtook Ethereum in daily volume. For digital securities specifically, MiCA does not apply directly: STOKR issues MiFID instruments, not MiCA-regulated crypto assets.

The remaining friction is at the MiCA licensing layer for new entrants. Requirements around information security and compliance were historically sized for banks. That is changing as the market absorbs them, and the playing field is becoming clearer for platforms that have invested in the groundwork.

DeFi yield needs TradFi assets to survive rate cycles

Three DeFi yield cycles have played out in succession: leveraged long crypto (2020), ETH staking loops, and the basis trade (Ethena-style carry). Each was correlated to crypto sentiment. When capital rotates into traditional risk assets (IPO season, AI equities), that yield compresses and liquidity leaves.

The structural fix is yield diversification through RWA on-chain:

• Private credit, money market funds, and equity exposure create yield sources uncorrelated to crypto volatility
• Midas built "Midas Static Liquidity," a smart contract architecture providing instant atomic redemptions even when the underlying fund has a monthly cycle; the fee structure generated 20%+ annualized returns during high-flow periods
• IPOR Labs' Fusion is modular on-chain asset management infrastructure: an evergreen vault that shifts strategy over time without redeploying smart contracts

The partnership model shows how the regulatory layer integrates: Tesseract, a MiCA-regulated CASP, uses Fusion as its infrastructure stack. 21Shares ($11B AUM in ETPs) and BitGo ($60B AUM) are bringing yield to their users via Tesseract strategies built on Fusion. The DeFi infrastructure runs underneath; the regulated entity faces the client.

The security threat is operational before it is technical

AI-accelerated hacks are increasing, but the dominant threat vector is not sophisticated on-chain exploits. It is operational security: compromised private keys, social engineering, poor practices. North Korea and Lazarus Group remain the most active threat actors, funding weapons programs through on-chain theft at scale:

• IPOR Labs: dedicated internal security experts, external security consultants, on-chain monitoring from deployment through ongoing operation, with a national cybersecurity specialist embedded in the team
• metals.io: formal verification via the Tezos protocol stack mathematically proves ownership rules are enforced continuously; bankruptcy-remote structure limits holder exposure in any breach scenario
• Midas: the period of open global access is hardening protocols across the industry, with North Korea functioning, perversely, as a stress-test for the entire ecosystem

Darren Camas noted that the biggest incidents attributed to AI are largely misclassified. Most are the result of poor key management and social engineering, not novel attack code. Immutability remains both a feature and a hard constraint: transactions cannot be reversed, which concentrates risk at the moment of compromise.

Conclusion

Berlin produced a realistic picture of where RWA tokenization stands. The dollar is at 1% on-chain penetration after a decade. Uranium is tokenized but moving $1M a day. DeFi yield diversification depends on TradFi rails still being built. The honest answer to when on-chain finance becomes structurally cheaper than traditional finance is: orders of magnitude of growth from here. What is not in question is the direction. Regulatory frameworks are clarifying, infrastructure is being stress-tested at scale, and the institutional capital is moving in. The gap is in pace, not destination.