Onchain Finance: New Rails, Same Winners?

On June 22 2026, The Big Whale organised a Corporate After Bell in New York City to explore who controls the new rails of onchain finance, how established institutions are navigating the shift, and where the infrastructure gaps remain.

Speakers

Move First or Get Moved

• Amy Oldenburg, Head of Digital Assets at Morgan Stanley

New Rails, New Power: Who Controls Onchain Finance?

• Amy Oldenburg, Head of Digital Assets at Morgan Stanley
• ​Max Heinzle, Founder & CEO at 21x
• ​Dennis Bree, Head of Institutional Growth at Morpho
• Adam Levine, CEO at Fireblocks Financial Services

Morgan Stanley is building a startup inside a bank, not a parallel digital assets division

Morgan Stanley's digital assets strategy is intentionally structured against the traditional playbook of building a silo. The central team is small — a hub-and-spoke model — working across every business line: equities, wealth management, asset management issuing ETPs, plus cybersecurity, infrastructure and tech risk from day one. The reasoning is direct: hybrid traditional-and-digital operations are the reality for at least the next decade, and teams that don't own the digital version of their business will eventually lose it to someone who does.

The biggest risk Amy Oldenburg identified is not a competitor or a regulatory shift. It is inflexibility:

• The platform needs to support products that don't exist yet, built on standards not yet agreed
• The analogy she used: teams that picked a single LLM before the multi-model world became obvious are already stuck
• Morgan Stanley built a full crypto tech stack in 2020-21, went to launch — and two-thirds of the shortlisted infrastructure providers had gone out of business. The entire plan had to be rebuilt from scratch.

Whoever controls the rails today, Tether proves no one predicted the winner

The panel rejected the premise that any single party controls onchain finance. In TradFi, control lives on the balance sheet and in custody. Onchain, it decomposes: collateral owners, liquidators, oracle managers, and curators each hold a piece of what the protocol can do, with parameters agreed up front so the system can run at scale.

The more useful frame is distribution versus infrastructure:

• Banks own distribution: brand and reputation in credit are not easily replaced, and institutions will not face a smart contract directly
• Open infrastructure sits underneath: Morpho's argument is that Coinbase customers should be able to borrow from Binance customers, Fidelity clients lend to Morgan Stanley clients — a shared liquidity pool no single institution can build alone
• Société Générale launched lending and borrowing via SG-Forge on Morpho in January 2025, deploying euro and dollar stablecoins — a regulated institution running on a permissionless protocol
• Adam Levine's point: Tether was not in most people's projections five years ago; it now processes more daily volume than Ethereum. The institutions that will control onchain finance are the early movers and those that have already had their "moment of enlightenment" — not necessarily those with the largest balance sheets today

The real bet is not tokenizing existing assets, it is collateralizing what has never been securitized

Amy Oldenburg's diagnosis: the industry is still in the Netflix-mailing-DVDs phase, replicating what already exists rather than seeing what becomes possible. The mobile analogy she used is precise — the cost of the phone call went to zero, but phone bills are far higher than twenty years ago, because of value-added layers no one could envision at the time.

The numbers illustrate the gap:

• Citi projects $8T in tokenized assets by 2030 — "just the stuff we already trade"
• The total credit market is roughly $200T
• Current RWA-backed loans onchain: approximately $75B
• The unlock for onchain credit is off-chain collateral: receivables, credit scores, mortgages — assets institutions hold but cannot currently bring into a DeFi lending market

Two live examples of the new business models already in operation: prediction markets for oil risk over weekends (before traditional markets open after a geopolitical event), and corporates linking ERP systems directly to exchange infrastructure for automated treasury management — both use cases that did not exist as products three years ago.

21x opened its New York office last week, and the US is moving faster

21x presented its European market infrastructure to the SEC crypto task force and the commission in August 2025. The US office opened the week before the panel, with a team of roughly twelve already in place and headcount shifting significantly toward US operations:

• The core product: trading, clearing and settlement in a single atomic on-chain transaction — T+1 second, not T+0 — eliminating the clearing leg and counterparty risk entirely
• In Europe: live on Polygon and Stellar, hundreds of millions in daily trading volume
• DTCC move: a no-action letter from the SEC authorizes tokenizing the first 1,000 US securities, then everything — a single connection that makes all US securities available in tokenized form on an onchain market
• Canton / Digital Asset: a new "layer zero" permissionless protocol backed by DTCC, Google and Citadel, not yet launched, but signaling DTCC's path toward a multi-chain strategy combining public and private chains
• The target Max Heinzle named: pool liquidity intercontinentally between the US and Europe

The EU DLT Pilot Regime improvements are still 18 months from becoming law. Until then, the US is the primary operating environment for new entrants.

The infrastructure layer is too thin, and VC funding has moved to AI

The most concrete constraint Amy Oldenburg named is vendor depth. In traditional finance, an RFP yields a shortlist of eight to ten qualified providers. In digital assets, the shortlist is three to five, and often only one or two are buildable. Every provider does one thing well; Morgan Stanley still has to build heavy control-panel infrastructure on its own side to stitch them together.

The structural risks:

• Companies going out of business during a multi-year client build is not a hypothetical — it already happened to Morgan Stanley in 2020-21
• AI has absorbed the majority of available VC capital; less funding is reaching digital asset infrastructure builders
• Security: hacks are accelerating and skewing toward weekends. Oracle risk, chain risk and smart contract risk require cybersecurity and tech risk teams in the room at product design, not at the 11th hour before launch
• Wallet infrastructure is the underrated unlock: it is where policy lives, where KYC happens, and where the distinction between retail, institutional and corporate use cases is enforced. MPC depth and a qualified custody facility are significantly harder to build than a technical team reading about it suggests

The closing observation from Morpho: demand for new collateral types is limited by familiarity, not by technology. A secondary market and frequent pricing are required for any new asset class to work in onchain lending at scale — and neither exists yet for most of what is being discussed.

Conclusion

New York produced the most commercially specific agenda of any TBW event to date. The infrastructure deficit is real: too few qualified vendors, capital redirected toward AI, and a field where companies disappear mid-build. Tether's trajectory — from invisible to dominant in five years — is the frame through which to read every prediction about who will control the rails. The $8T tokenization number that gets cited most is the floor, not the ceiling; the $200T credit market that has never been securitized is where the structural opportunity actually sits. The gap between that and the current $75B in RWA-backed loans is a decade of work. New York confirmed that the institutions willing to do it are, for the first time, sitting in the same room as the infrastructure builders.