Olivia Vande Woude

1/ As the crypto bull market accelerates, builders, investors, and enjoyoors face a crucial question: what blockchain architecture will fuel the next wave of innovation? The answer is clear—purpose-built blockchains on @avax will lead the way. Here’s why. 👇 🔗 Full deep dive: @ovwoude/swiss-army-knives-vs-scalpels-why-you-should-build-a-purpose-built-l1-on-avalanche-dc9c18889cdf" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medium.com/@ovwoude/swiss…

The part of the BlackRock letter that doesn’t get discussed: removing the cap doesn’t just help stables. It also clears the path for traditional financial institutions to use tokenized MMFs as collateral in tri-party repo, securities lending, & derivatives margining.

2027 deadline creates a strange incentive structure… Issuers building stablecoin reserve architecture today are effectively betting on what the final rule will look like. Over-index on tokenized collateral & you’re exposed if the cap stays. Under-index and you’re behind if it drops.

A 20% cap isn’t arbitrary… it reflects regulator discomfort w/ secondary market liquidity for tokenized assets during stress. BlackRock’s counter is that BUIDL’s redemption mechanics route thru the same primary market as any other mmf share class. The question the OCC has to answer: is on-chain transferability a liquidity feature or a liquidity risk?

Live on @avax : Valinor + OatFi + @fence_finance collapsed the ABF funding cycle from days to intraday... Results: interest savings from eliminated cash drag + reduction in operational overhead but w/ the same underwriting, credit exposure, capital velocity. The pitch isn't "blockchain" but better returns on committed capital!

On a tokenized equity platform running 24/7, every trade outside market hours has no enforceable pricing standard behind it. The platform sets the price. The user has no independent benchmark to check it against. That’s a structural disclosure gap, not a UX issue.

NBBO is the legal benchmark that forces U.S. brokers to execute at the best available price across all 16 exchanges. It only exists 9:30am–4:00pm ET. Outside that window, there is no official NBBO. The data provider’s own methodology becomes the only quality signal.

"Does tokenization actually save money on a money market fund?" It's the most common question I get from institutional allocators. Here's how I think about it. The short answer: traditional MMF servicing runs roughly 10 - 20 bps of AUM (drawn from "Other Expenses" disclosures in insti MMF prospectuses on SEC EDGAR). Tokenized MMF servicing should land closer to 5 - 12 bps once the operating model matures. Call it ~45% savings at the midpoint. These are directional estimates, not measured numbers. But here's where the savings likely come from...Five components make up MMF servicing cost. Each 1 moves differently when the share becomes a token: 1) Transfer agency: ~3 - 8 bps may drop to ~1 - 3 bps. The smart contract becomes the share register itself, so the transfer agent's role shrinks to a compliance overlay (whitelist management, tax docs, regulatory liaison) instead of being the primary record-keeper. (BIS Bulletin No. 115, Oct 2025, describes this directly in tokenized fund pilots). 2) Fund administration: ~2 - 5 bps drops to ~2 - 4 bps. The fund admin still strikes NAV every day, but no longer has to reconcile share counts w/ the transfer agent. These represent modest savings, not transformational. 3) Custody: ~1 - 3 bps stays the same. The underlying Treasuries still sit off-chain with a qualified custodian. This is a key pt: tokenization is a liability-side change, vs. an asset-side one. 4) Reconciliation: ~2 - 4 bps drops to ~1 bp. This is where the biggest savings live, imo. In a traditional mmf, the fund admin, transfer agent, custodian, + asset manager each maintain their own ledger + reconcile with each other every day. PwC has reported ~30% of finance-team time goes to manual reconciliation generally, & fund operations vendors (Linedata, Indus Valley Partners, Grant Thornton) consistently position reconciliation as the largest efficiency target in fund admin. When everyone reads from the same on-chain ledger, most of that work disappears. McKinsey's "From ripples to waves" (Jun 2024) frames this as the core operational case for tokenization. 5) Audit, compliance, legal: ~1 - 2 bps may drop to ~1 bp. The cap table is verifiable on-chain in real time, so the audit cycle compresses. (CFA Institute, "Tokenized Money Market Funds Emerge," Oct 2025, on continuous on-chain audit trails.) What that looks like in dollars (at midpoint compression): ~$1B AUM: ~$1M/year saved ~$10B AUM: ~$7M/year saved ~$50B AUM: ~$35M/year saved ~$100B AUM: ~$70M/year saved A few notes... 1) the tokenized side is modeled, not yet measured at scale. Issuers bundle servicing into management fees + most early funds run parallel systems, so the public data isn't there yet. 2) today's tokenized funds are capturing ~20-30% of the eventual savings bc they're running both old and new infra in parallel. The full savings show up over a 5 - 10 year arc, not today. 3) custody doesn't change. The underlying Treasuries still req a qualified custodian. Anyone telling you tokenization eliminates the entire operating model is overselling it.

Watch payment finance: the next credit category emerging post-GENIUS. When a merchant accepts a stablecoin payment, the funds settle in seconds. But their bank account, payroll, and suppliers still run on fiat rails that take 1-3 days to settle. Someone has to front the dollars during that gap. That bridge financing is the opportunity: short duration, secured against already confirmed Visa/Swift/ACH settlement, + structurally net new. As stablecoin payment volume scales, so does the gap that needs financing.

Partner spotlight: @intainft. 2k community banks power Main Street America: small business loans, commercial real estate, local credit. But when it comes to accessing institutional capital markets, they've been effectively locked out. Securitization has been a game for the biggest players, with the manual reconciliation, opaque reporting, and due diligence friction to prove it. @intainft and FIS cracked that open. The Digital Liquidity Gateway, built on Intain's Avalanche L1, plugs directly into FIS core banking systems, automates the workflows that used to require armies of back-office staff, + settles loan data programmatically with real-time transparency for every party in the chain. What was once an exclusive institutional capability is now accessible to 2,000+ banks that had no path in before. Hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions are expected to flow through by year-end. Every dollar that moves through more efficiently is capital a community bank can redeploy into its next loan: more credit, better rates, stronger local economies. This is what it looks like when blockchain stops being a concept + starts being infrastructure.

3 models of tokenized equities exist, & they're not equivalent: -Direct issuer tokenization: token IS the security -Regulated custodian: token = beneficial ownership, segregated custody, NBBO pricing -Legal wrapper: SPV holds shares, token = claim on SPV The architecture determines what you actually own + who bears counterparty risk if a layer fails.

1/ Tokenization is poised to transform capital markets Grayscale Research believes $ETH $SOL $CC $BNB $AVAX $LINK are well positioned to benefit from more than $300T+ in assets moving onchain 🧵↓

The tech to transport digital identity across institutions has existed for years... the gating factor isn't engineering; it's that regulators across FinCEN, MiCA, MAS, CNV haven't agreed on mutual recognition. Tech changes as regulatory regimes do.

Embedded finance on @avax 👇 Apps don’t want to be “crypto companies”but they do want better products. The infra should be invisible. Avalanche = fast, low-cost settlement. The edge = the stack: -Banking (stablecoins) -Yield (@opentrade_io) -Equities (@DinariGlobal) -Lending (Tare) -Cards (Rain) Thesis is that distribution wins… 1 front-end, full product shelf, powered by rails you didn’t build.

@RickMcCracken Thank you vm @RickMcCracken, always appreciate your engagement!

The absolute best alpha in crypto tokenization I ever read on X comes from Olivia. If you want to learn about the practical efficiencies, limitations, and actual implementation of tokenized RWAs on blockchains just scroll her X posts for about 5 minutes.

What tokenization does NOT make cheaper: -Yield. A tokenized T-bill earns the same coupon as a non-tokenized one. Tokenization doesn't manufacture basis points out of thin air. -Asset custody. The fund still needs a qualified custodian for the underlying Treasuries. Bank-grade custody is a feature, not a bug. -Regulatory and compliance overhead. Registration, audit, and oversight don't vanish because the share class lives on a blockchain. Smart contracts automate execution, not obligations. What tokenization actually changes: the share-level recordkeeping layer, transfer agency, reconciliation across fund manager/TA/custodian/admin, the settlement cycle, + the mobility of the position once owned. That's where the ~13 bps of operating savings in Calastone's research come from: not yield or underlying custody, but collapsing the operational stack between investor + fund. And for institutional holders, the bigger unlock isn't even on the expense ratio but capital efficiency: a tokenized MMF position can simultaneously earn yield, sit in regulated custody, + serve as collateral. Tokenization is a more efficient operational and collateral layer wrapped around the same underlying asset.

Here's the design partner stack for embedded finance on @avax. Embedded finance is what happens when banking, payments, lending, and savings get built into the apps people already use... it makes for better UX, new revenue, deeper customer relationships. The companies building toward this don't want to become blockchain companies. They want to ship better products, faster; the infra should be invisible. Avalanche is the settlement layer with sub-second finality, lowest average fees among leading chains, & an institutional track record. A high-performing chain is table stakes; what sets the stack apart is the curated bench around it: -Embedded banking: stablecoin accounts and money movement, with instant settlement, 24/7 availability, programmable money flows replacing legacy bank rails. -Embedded yield with @opentrade_io: institutional RWA-backed returns on idle balances. -Embedded equities with @DinariGlobal : tokenized US stocks and ETFs that bring American capital markets to non-US users for the first time. -Embedded lending with Tare: on-chain credit infrastructure delivering transparent collateral and intra-day capital efficiency legacy rails can't match. -Cards with Rain: stablecoin-native Visa issuance that turns on-chain dollars into real-world spend at 150M+ merchants across 150+ countries, live in weeks. The thesis: distribution is the moat, product breadth is the wedge. The winners of the next decade won't have the biggest balance sheets. They'll have the deepest product shelf: 1 front-end, settling on rails they didn't have to build. They keep the customer, grow the brand, own the economics. Avalanche powers the back end and on the BD side our day job: matching institutions, fintechs, & neobanks with the right design partners, + advising them through the build.

A few things tokenization doesn't make cheaper: 1) Yield: a tokenized T-bill earns the same coupon as a non-tokenized one 2) Asset custody: the fund still needs a custodian for the underlying Treasuries 3) Compliance: registration, audit, oversight don't vanish What changes is the share-level recordkeeping layer.

Tokenized funds have looked fast for years but haven't been fast. The blocker was not speed so much as LEGAL finality: the moment ownership actually transfers in a way courts // regulators recognize. The FCA's new Direct-to-Fund model finally collapses that gap. 3 things it enables: 1) Subscribe to a fund & post those units as collateral seconds later 2) Atomic settlement: stablecoins & units change hands in the same moment 3) 24/7 fund markets w/o weekend reconciliation breaking the system

most "tokenized funds" today are wrappers: a token on-chain mirroring a traditional transfer agent record off-chain... w/ 2 systems, double the cost. PS26/7 changes that: the FCA confirmed the on-chain register can be the primary books // records, with no off-chain mirror required. that's a catalyst for native issuance: 1 record vs. two, & you actually get to retire parts of the legacy stack vs. stack tokenization costs on top of it!

Institutions no longer have to choose between earning yield + deploying capital. @okx, @BlackRock , and @StanChart launched a joint framework that lets institutional clients post BUIDL as off-exchange collateral for trading on OKX. It's the 1st time a GSIB has custodied tokenized fund collateral in this kind of arrangement, & that regulatory threshold (not the tech) is what promulgates the next wave of insti participation, in my view. the structural innovation is collateral mirroring: BUIDL sits segregated + bankruptcy-remote at Standard Chartered while showing up as usable margin inside OKX's risk system. this basically imports the post-FTX tri-party prime brokerage model directly into digital asset markets. the biz outcome is capital efficiency that tradfi recognizes.: the same BUIDL position simultaneously: 1) earns Treasury yield, 2) sits in bank-grade custody, AND 3) serves as trading collateral. That collapses a tradeoff institutions previously had to make between earning + deploying. ~30% of tokenized Treasuries on-chain (~$2.2B) are already being used as collateral rather than sitting idle, which indicates utility imo and a long runway for tokenization as a new collateral primitive.