Seny Orlov

Bringing capital markets onchain @RealFi_co
// ex @Lisk @Keyrock @inside_R3 @MorganStanley
views are my own

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

Crypto is racing to tokenise everything in sight. The harder part is what actually makes the assets worth holding: being able to trade in size, getting it in front of those who'd buy it, market makers, exchanges, lending venues, and curators that make it all possible.

Minting the tokens is the easy bit, but the liquidity, distribution and partnerships around it are the hard work. Everything gets tokenised and almost none of it gets a market, because a mint is a headline and a market is months of slow and unglamorous work no one announces.

Started my career in equity capital markets, raising $50bn+ taking companies public and to market. Now doing the same onchain. Building the markets, not just the tokens.

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

@DefiVaults Great piece. Once borrow rates pin at 3.5-5.5% everywhere, the loan book follows distribution. The Coinbase/Morpho and Robinhood style integrations are the whole game now

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

@SherifDefi distribution shows up as collateral acceptance before volume

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

@pendle_fi @Morpho cool to see utilisation becoming a tradeable curve with lenders who used to just receive the rate now being able to hedge or express a view on it

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

JPMorgan posts tokenised QQQ as margin at CME in the same week Binance Wallet starts accepting tokenised stocks as collateral for perps. Different venues but the same conclusion i.e. that the first real use for tokenised equities is collateral rather than trading volume. Margin desks got there first

[Cointelegraph @Cointelegraph]

🔥 NEW: JPMorgan tokenizes the Invesco QQQ Trust, converting the ETF into a real world asset token.

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

@bpaynews LATAM is pull demand... users already want dollars and the neobank is just the shelf. Distribution deals price very differently when demand is organic vs. manufactured, which is why issuers pay up for LATAM rails

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

@stacy_muur the asset went sideways while the balance sheet on top of it 10x'd... ~$290B of stablecoins and ~$100B of RWA now settle on it

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

@birdeye_data @Paxos gold being used as trading collateral rather than vault storage... different asset than it was two years ago

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

@PaulFrambot @Morpho @galaxyhq Institutional curators change what vault TVL is made of. Galaxy arrives with its own client book, so deposits follow a risk mandate rather than an APY screenshot. That's the sticky kind

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

@CoinDesk Mint/burn plus approval workflows is exactly the operational layer banks didn't want to build themselves. Whoever runs that layer sits closest to the float

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

@Eli5defi @thelearningpill It's a rotation... sUSDe -50% while USDY +64%... funding-rate yield shrinks in risk-off while T-bill yield doesn't

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

@castle_labs @Theo_Network @sygnumofficial The fund isn't the product but what you can do with it is. A tokenised T-bill you can't borrow against or post as margin is just a wrapper on a fund. The more interesting numbers to watch are always how much gets used as collateral rather than just how much got issued

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

@yield_xyz @robinhood @Morpho @sparkdotfi when yield becomes an API line item, the competitive surface shifts... apps own the user, curators own the risk decisions (collateral, caps, rates), the protocol becomes plumbing... not sure who carries the blowup risk in that stack though as it's no longer obvious

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

@wycf_show @CapApp @Benjamin918_ first loss sizing is the whole game for RWA-backed stables... the equity tranche relative to advance rate decides whether holders are senior or just early

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

@tokenterminal @ethereum @novogratz Interesting to see JPM who spent years building private rails (Onyx/Kinexys) issue on public Ethereum... distribution beats infrastructure control

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

@AboutRWAs automated dividend payouts are the underrated bit... corporate actions are the ugliest cost line in custody, and stablecoin settlement is what makes them programmable

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

@TheBlockCo Open USD's pass-through-yield model attacks the thing that makes Circle's revenue work which retaining most of the treasury yield rather than passing it to distributors. The equity market is now pricing stablecoin issuance the way it prices asset managers in a fee war

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

@krakenfx @veda_labs @SentoraHQ @Morpho Bitcoin quietly becoming a financing asset not just a holding one, the same evolution gold went through when it moved from the vault to the repo market

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

@StaniKulechov NGNL removes the tax friction that made every lending-protocol deposit a taxable disposal and is the kind of plumbing fix that moves institutional UK money before any headline regulation does, nice to see UK doing something positive for this industry for once

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

@TheBlockCo yield restrictions at issuer level don't kill yield just relocate it into staking wrappers and curated vaults... the deposit-flight risk banks fear just moves one hop away from the regulated entity

[Seny Orlov @OrlovSeny]

@0xogDefi Some DeFi vault curators set the risk parameters and are also the largest borrowers against them. In trad cap markets terms that's bookrunner, issuer and anchor order all in one.... works fine until it doesn't