Rezo🛡₿RRR

RWA has $359B in assets "represented" onchain, but only $35B actually distributed, and a fraction of that usable in DeFi. The 10x gap is the whole story: we tokenized the paperwork, not the rights. Receipts don't compose.

RWA has $359B in assets "represented" onchain, but only $35B actually distributed, and a fraction of that usable in DeFi. The 10x gap is the whole story: we tokenized the paperwork, not the rights. Receipts don't compose.

Will we destroy TradFi and replace its rails with crypto? No. That’s the ideological stuff we used to push in the early anarchist days of crypto. When you grow up (and when the industry matures), you realize the world doesn’t work that way. You cannot disrupt the entire system. We used to talk about “[R]evolution,” but what’s actually happening is evolution. A real revolutionary break would only come with a total collapse of the current financial and geopolitical order. In that scenario, crypto rails could become the new system, but that hasn’t happened, and I’m not sure we should even want it to. Until then, what we’re seeing is mutual penetration, not replacement.

Will we destroy TradFi and replace its rails with crypto? No. That’s the ideological stuff we used to push in the early anarchist days of crypto. When you grow up (and when the industry matures), you realize the world doesn’t work that way. You cannot disrupt the entire system. We used to talk about “[R]evolution,” but what’s actually happening is evolution. A real revolutionary break would only come with a total collapse of the current financial and geopolitical order. In that scenario, crypto rails could become the new system, but that hasn’t happened, and I’m not sure we should even want it to. Until then, what we’re seeing is mutual penetration, not replacement.

They tokenized UK/US equities, but UK/US residents can't buy them. The rails went global... the permissions didn't.

Let me tell you about agentic trading from the perspective of an HFT desk. First, let me get rid of the biggest exaggeration in the timeline: agents are not catching up to high-frequency trading. They aren’t, and they can’t. Professional teams have been using AI for years... specialized, streaming, fast, sharpened like a blade. An agent running on a public model is not competing with that setup, and that’s not where its importance lies... what agents actually change is the texture of volatility. The mechanics are simple: - Bitcoin is priced by the last trade... what moves the market is not size, but the flow of transactions. - ETFs (big participants) buy through OTC desks and custodians, bypassing the order books, so their impact is muted. - Agents hit the market directly, and more importantly, they react to the SAME SIGNALS in parallel. The correlation here goes deeper than it looks. Agents sit on the same foundation models... they share the same DNA, and that means they share the same interpretation mistakes. This isn’t strategic correlation, like humans running similar systems, but architectural. That will change once people start fine-tuning agents on their own data and for their own objectives. Today, everyone is drinking from the same well. More volume does not mean smoother markets, and the history of algorithmic trading shows the opposite: when new volume is systematic and correlated, volatility increases. To be honest, at our scale we don’t yet see traces of agent-driven flow. But I wrote recently that, for a professional trading desk, volatility is not a threat, just a working environment. If agents add more of it, we’re ready.

Let me tell you about agentic trading from the perspective of an HFT desk. First, let me get rid of the biggest exaggeration in the timeline: agents are not catching up to high-frequency trading. They aren’t, and they can’t. Professional teams have been using AI for years... specialized, streaming, fast, sharpened like a blade. An agent running on a public model is not competing with that setup, and that’s not where its importance lies... what agents actually change is the texture of volatility. The mechanics are simple: - Bitcoin is priced by the last trade... what moves the market is not size, but the flow of transactions. - ETFs (big participants) buy through OTC desks and custodians, bypassing the order books, so their impact is muted. - Agents hit the market directly, and more importantly, they react to the SAME SIGNALS in parallel. The correlation here goes deeper than it looks. Agents sit on the same foundation models... they share the same DNA, and that means they share the same interpretation mistakes. This isn’t strategic correlation, like humans running similar systems, but architectural. That will change once people start fine-tuning agents on their own data and for their own objectives. Today, everyone is drinking from the same well. More volume does not mean smoother markets, and the history of algorithmic trading shows the opposite: when new volume is systematic and correlated, volatility increases. To be honest, at our scale we don’t yet see traces of agent-driven flow. But I wrote recently that, for a professional trading desk, volatility is not a threat, just a working environment. If agents add more of it, we’re ready.

Will we destroy TradFi and replace its rails with crypto? No. That’s the ideological stuff we used to push in the early anarchist days of crypto. When you grow up (and when the industry matures), you realize the world doesn’t work that way. You cannot disrupt the entire system. We used to talk about “[R]evolution,” but what’s actually happening is evolution. A real revolutionary break would only come with a total collapse of the current financial and geopolitical order. In that scenario, crypto rails could become the new system, but that hasn’t happened, and I’m not sure we should even want it to. Until then, what we’re seeing is mutual penetration, not replacement.

Let me tell you about agentic trading from the perspective of an HFT desk. First, let me get rid of the biggest exaggeration in the timeline: agents are not catching up to high-frequency trading. They aren’t, and they can’t. Professional teams have been using AI for years... specialized, streaming, fast, sharpened like a blade. An agent running on a public model is not competing with that setup, and that’s not where its importance lies... what agents actually change is the texture of volatility. The mechanics are simple: - Bitcoin is priced by the last trade... what moves the market is not size, but the flow of transactions. - ETFs (big participants) buy through OTC desks and custodians, bypassing the order books, so their impact is muted. - Agents hit the market directly, and more importantly, they react to the SAME SIGNALS in parallel. The correlation here goes deeper than it looks. Agents sit on the same foundation models... they share the same DNA, and that means they share the same interpretation mistakes. This isn’t strategic correlation, like humans running similar systems, but architectural. That will change once people start fine-tuning agents on their own data and for their own objectives. Today, everyone is drinking from the same well. More volume does not mean smoother markets, and the history of algorithmic trading shows the opposite: when new volume is systematic and correlated, volatility increases. To be honest, at our scale we don’t yet see traces of agent-driven flow. But I wrote recently that, for a professional trading desk, volatility is not a threat, just a working environment. If agents add more of it, we’re ready.

Will we destroy TradFi and replace its rails with crypto? No. That’s the ideological stuff we used to push in the early anarchist days of crypto. When you grow up (and when the industry matures), you realize the world doesn’t work that way. You cannot disrupt the entire system. We used to talk about “[R]evolution,” but what’s actually happening is evolution. A real revolutionary break would only come with a total collapse of the current financial and geopolitical order. In that scenario, crypto rails could become the new system, but that hasn’t happened, and I’m not sure we should even want it to. Until then, what we’re seeing is mutual penetration, not replacement.

RWA has $359B in assets "represented" onchain, but only $35B actually distributed, and a fraction of that usable in DeFi. The 10x gap is the whole story: we tokenized the paperwork, not the rights. Receipts don't compose.

They tokenized UK/US equities, but UK/US residents can't buy them. The rails went global... the permissions didn't.

🔥 NEW: Kraken parent Payward is expanding xStocks to Hong Kong, UK, European and South Korean equities.

London Stock Exchange's almost "around-the-clock" move is interesting not cos of the extended trading hours but cos of what it's actually built for... algorithmic trading + AI agents. It's not about convincing retail... It's laying the rails for machines. An eight-hour trading day worked when capital was local... but markets have converged, and global capital needs 24/7 rails. We’ve been in the HFT space for a long time, and we’re now building out our larger asset management platform. The math there is simple: latency + alpha is everything, while an 8-hour window out of 24 immediately wipes out 2/3rds of the time when that alpha could be captured. The crypto leg moves overnight, the traditional one waits for the opening bell, but for an algorithm, that’s not an inconvenience but a serious gap. Crypto solved this years ago with a 24/7 market, guaranteed final settlement, and machine access from day one. The old rails are not catching up with a trend, they're catching up with the architecture.