josh

Another big one!

what i love about cc/agents is it doesn't just make you faster. it makes you more ambitious - you stop filtering ideas by how long they'd take to build. ideas that have sat around in hackmds for years, i can just go and build on a random weeknight

woke up at 2am, knew my agents had been busy working on something and couldn't resist jumping back in... spent an hour in the middle of the night, jumping between three agents building three different things i am cooked 😅

we spent years building rain to make onchain logic readable for humans, not just solidity devs. the whole thesis was that normal people should be able to read onchain logic before they sign it. funnily enough that’s exactly what you need for reliable human-in-the-loop - if an agent is proposing trades on your behalf, "readable intent" goes from a nice-to-have to the most important feature

sometimes it’s hard to separate hype from reality but i spent the last week building out workflows for every part of my life and work and it's so obvious there is no version of the future where humans keep pace with this already at the point where normal human-speed conversations just seem slowwwww

will be on this one later!

the question we have to keep asking with tokenized equities is what actually makes them better than just using a brokerage? the answer for us has always been composability. if a tokenized stock can plug into vaults, can sit in lending protocols, be part of programmable onchain portfolios, tradeable by agents etc - then we've created something that a brokerage literally cannot offer. that's what we've been obsessing over for the last two years. not just building a trading app but making sure our tokens are genuinely useful across defi. it's slower and harder than just shipping a frontend but i think it's the only version of tokenized equities that actually justifies existing

built an mcp server for raindex so ai agents can write and deploy trading strategies. the thing that makes this different is raindex strategies are deploy once, trade many times - your constraints and state live onchain so you can sleep at night knowing the rules can't drift. plus, the agent doesn't need to know anything about execution, it just defines the price it wants and arbitrageurs and solvers handle the rest. you end up with this clean separation where the agent governs intent and the network handles fulfillment going to keep experimenting but really feels like this could be rain's killer use case - onchain rules auditable by humans

@ZeusRWA afaics defi is the USP that tradfi can't compete with. composability, permissionless access, onchain efficiencies manifesting in better rates and eventually, better spreads

At the end of the day it just comes down to what you want as an investor. Some tokenized products just give you price exposure. That’s it. You’re tracking something. Some actually give you legal ownership. Real shares. Real rights. Some layer yield on top. Some are built mainly for liquidity and DeFi composability. They’re not competing with each other. They’re just different tools. Do you want enforceable ownership or just exposure? Do you care about yield? Do you want to use it in DeFi? Are you okay with gates and KYC? Are you okay without them? All of that changes the product. That’s why I’ll always go on about the different ways to tokenize assets. Not to complicate it, but because as an investor you actually have choices.

@SabretoothSG interesting, so price protection is main hurdle you think

offchain the incentive is that market structure is legally mandated to work for you. Reg NMS requires every trading venue to honor the National Best Bid and Offer. no exchange can execute your trade at a price worse than the best available quote anywhere else in the system. the Order Protection Rule literally makes it illegal to trade through a better price access fees are capped. data is consolidated. retail gets price improvement from wholesalers competing for their flow. onchain tokenized equities have none of this. no NBBO, no order protection rule, no legal mandate connecting fragmented liquidity across venues.

tokenized equity tvl is crazy but trading volume hasn't moved proportionally. which means people are putting stocks onchain but not really doing anything with them. wrapping a stock in an token isn’t going to change anyone's behavior, especially when we’re competing with frankly much simpler web2 products. what changes behavior is when that token can sit in a lending market, or get put in a strategy that rebalances itself, or get used as collateral in ways your brokerage account literally cannot do. having the defi infrastructure around these tokens is way more important than the tokens themselves

@SabretoothSG offchain what is the incentive for people to trade equities? there's actually tons of liquidity for tokenised equities already

@highonhopium Trading volume depends on how much liquidity, especially dex liquidity there is. There isn't much for equities cos the incentive is not there.

@ZeusRWA building @st0x_io :)

If you're into RWAs and tokenization and I don't follow you yet, drop a comment. I want my entire feed to be RWAs and tokenization only.

@ZeusRWA Where can I read more about distributed vs represented?

Some days I log on and apparently represented RWAs are the biggest scam in real world assets. “Walled gardens. Platform locked. Tradfi with a token slapped on top.” Cool. Other days I’m told distributed RWAs are the real scam. “No enforceable rights. No compliance. Just defi pretending it’s Wall Street.” And I sit there thinking… I kind of get both arguments. If you come from crypto, represented RWAs feel restrictive. Your token sits on the issuer’s platform. You can’t freely move it. You still rely on custodians and legal wrappers. So you ask, what did tokenization actually improve for me as the holder? That’s fair. If you come from traditional finance, distributed RWAs look a tad mental. Courts don’t fully recognise onchain ownership. Compliance can be messy. If something goes wrong, who enforces your rights? That’s fair too. Then you look at the numbers. Represented assets sit around $360B. Distributed assets are closer to $25B. That gap tells you who moved first. Institutions built systems that worked for them. They captured efficiency first. Lower costs. Faster settlement. Cleaner reporting. Distributed is growing, but it’s still small in comparison. Here’s the simple frame. Represented RWAs benefit issuers first. They get control, compliance clarity, operational efficiency. Distributed RWAs benefit holders first. You get mobility, composability, flexibility. Different priorities. Different starting winners. Most assets will start represented. That’s practical. Compliance doesn’t disappear because we don’t like it. But the real question is whether they stay that way forever. If tokenization stays mostly represented, we get a faster version of the old system. Better plumbing. Same power structure. If it moves toward distributed over time, holders get something genuinely different. Assets you can move. Use. Deploy. Not just view. So instead of asking which model is “right,” I prefer asking two things: Who benefits most from the design today? And is there a path for holders to benefit more later? The best projects will likely blend both. Controlled rails now. More openness over time. $360B represented says institutions need this. $25B distributed says holders want more. This isn’t black and white. It’s a question of incentives. Who benefits first and does that ever change?

@cainosullivan would love to chat about this for @st0x_io !

@ZeusRWA If stablecoins are RWAs, does that mean (central) bank notes are also RWAs? :) Is fiat currency an RWA?

@intangiblecoins late to this but 100% agree - without defi utility there's not that much point

the meaningful enhancement to equity securities offered by tokenization is access to DeFi clearing firms, exchanges being able to interact with tokenized stocks is an important “closing of the loop” they need to upgrade to handle the new format but w/o onchain it won’t matter much

this is a big and important step but what advantage do you get from trading tokenized stocks in CeFi? marginal vs traditionally formatted, imo the big unlock for tokenized stocks is 1) self custody 2) blockchain settlement / p2p transfer and (importantly) 3) access to DeFi

Let the experiment continue!

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