Reserve And Ondo Bring AI Stocks To BNB Chain
Reserve (@reserveprotocol) has launched five tokenized AI equity funds on BNB Chain (@BNBCHAIN), backed by Ondo Finance (@OndoFinance) Global Markets tokenized stocks.
The funds cover AI infrastructure, power, photonics, cloud compute and robotics. They are also available for trading on PancakeSwap (@PancakeSwap), expanding onchain access for eligible users.
The products are available across about 145 countries, excluding the United States due to regulatory restrictions.
Perpetual futures are already taking hold in 24/7 trading.
DTFs, or Diversified Token Folios, are essentially ETF-style baskets built on-chain, giving investors exposure to a group of tokenized assets through a single tradable token rather than a traditional ETF wrapper.
Own your share of the AI industry
Today, Reserve launches not one, but five new tokenized equity DTFs, each for a unique layer of the AI revolution: infrastructure, power, photonics, cloud compute, and robotics.
Live on @BNBCHAIN and powered by @OndoFinance, eligible users can trade them onchain at https://t.co/zlQXa5cftr and @bitgetwallet, or on DEXes like @PancakeSwap X and @CoWSwap.
Read the full launch article below to learn more about $BUILDOUT, $POWER, $PHOTON, $NEOCLOUD, and $ROBOTS ↓
AI momentum continues to build on BNB Chain.
Five new tokenized equity DTFs from @reserveprotocol are now live on BNB Chain, offering users exposure across five layers of the AI economy.
Note: This post is for informational purposes only and not financial advice. DYOR.
.@reserveprotocol just kicked open the gates to the Al revolution 🚀
5 new tokenized equity DTFs
$PHOTON
$NEOCLOUD
$BUILDOUT
$ROBOTS
$POWER
each basket a slice of the AI industry 🤖
This isn't "investing in stocks" anymore
This is the future, onchain, in your wallet
Wake up, fam.🔥 $RSR @OndoFinance
And so the next stage begins.
For years now we've been searching. Searching for which type of DTF would catch on first and turn "DTF" from just something RSR holders say to something you hear every day across financial news.
We haven't found it yet. Or... maybe now we have!
Today we release five thematic AI index DTFs, each representing a slice of the AI supply chain, backed by tokenized stocks from Ondo Global Markets.
We're launching these products at a very special moment in time. The world is on track to spend an estimated $7.5 trillion on the AI infrastructure buildout by 2031, markets for AI supply chain companies are booming, and we have an interconnected world of online investors hungry to own their share of what's next. Until a few days ago, that would only have been possible through TradFi platforms, but @OndoFinance stepped up to tokenize everything across the category, so naturally @reserveprotocol stepped up to index it.
The question I keep asking myself is: are we already at the top? How are these categories going to perform?
Of course it's anyone's guess and this is not investment advice, but I keep coming back to my long-term view on AI:
I think most people are very far from understanding how impactful AI is going to be to our world over the course of our lifetimes, and if that's correct, the market is nowhere near pricing it in, broadly speaking.
Analysts project increasing token spend in the coming few years. Meanwhile, we believers project solving biology and living to be 1,000.
(Or majorly messing things up along the way. Making sure things don't go awry is a key challenge for our society in the next few decades. This product does nothing to address that bigger issue, it just helps ordinary people around the world own their share of the stack in the success case. Your portfolio doesn't matter much in worlds where everything's f*cked.)
This is not to say any given company is undervalued; it's easy to imagine the category being massively dominant over the coming decades while many individual companies go bust or end up irrelevant.
But isn't that the point of an index?
For a long time I've kept quiet about AI in favor of focusing on asset-backed currency. But today my two interests converge, so I'm starting a podcast on the full implications of AI for (a) investing and (b) the world overall. I hope it provokes you to consider how to own your share of the AI buildout and think critically about where AI will ultimately take us.
We’ll be releasing five AI thematic index DTFs. Since the tokenized stocks they wrap are not US-accessible, they will not be available in the US. We are of course still working with the SEC to release a system that will bring all of this onshore, but that’s a ways out still.
This is what I want from @reserveprotocol.
A product that either works in week one or never works at all.
As some of you know, Index DTFs have a property most crypto products hide from you. The fee runs buy-and-burn on $RSR . So the question was never whether the tech is good. The tech is fine. The only question that moves RSR is whether the product gathers capital, because capital is the input the burn feeds on.
And capital gathering in this category is brutally binary.
Look at what just happened in TradFi. A memory-chip ETF went from zero to roughly $9B in a little over a month. The index was not clever. Foreign retail genuinely could not touch Samsung and SK Hynix any other way. The product solved a real access gap. The flows followed the gap.
Now the counter-example, same season. A photonics ETF launched into the same hype wave. Six weeks, around $340M. Below the memory trajectory at the same point. Same theme, same AI supply-chain story BUT a fraction of the flows.
The reason sits in one detail. The photonics winners are already US-listed and tradeable. No access wall to break. No reason for the flood.
That comparison is the whole thesis.
A tokenized equity DTF wins for one reason. It reaches buyers locked out of the underlying everywhere else. Non-US, crypto-native, no clean path to the stock. When that lockout is real, the product explodes. Zero to billions before anyone writes the thinkpiece.
When the lockout is thin, the same product is a rounding error. $5M in week one, $5M in week ten. Dead on arrival, wearing the costume of "innovation".
This category has no slow build. The chart in week three is already written by the flows in week one.
So here is the filter I am holding.
If the first equity DTF opens on an underlying that non-US capital genuinely cannot reach, the burn catalyst is live and the re-rate is mechanical. If it opens on names already liquid and listed and reachable, it's a beautiful product solving a problem nobody has... and the fee accrual to RSR stays noise.
One more thing nobody is pricing.
This whole structure rides on the tokenizer that issues the underlying. Launch day is chained to their release day. We already watched one tokenizer this month get forced into refunds north of $1B over botched IPO allocations. The fragile point is the entity minting the shares the index holds.
So I am not watching the marketing. I am watching two data.
First: Week-one flows.
Second: Which underlying they open with.
Everything else is noise at this point.
🐸 AD MAIORA! 🌊
“Reserve Protocol is great because you can give people options to use whichever thing they want. And hopefully the best thing will win out. We have seen people move to better money over time.
I think the flexibility of Reserve Protocol is something that is very valuable. And I hope allowing that competition will allow you to create the best money possible.”
🗣️ Thomas Hogan at Monetarium 1:
“All kinds of different goods were used in different societies. […] Wheat and grains were easy to transport, storable, easily divisible: a pretty common one. Shells were another. Human teeth, not common.
We have all these weird examples of things that people used. But they tend to move to something better once something better comes along. And eventually, almost all these societies all over the world converge on gold or silver.
Some people would say the government did this. Maybe in an econ textbook they say we had barter and then the government gave us money. I don’t think that’s really how it worked. It could be that every king and chieftain around the world happened to have picked gold and silver – but that seems like a pretty big coincidence.
It’s much more likely that the market evolved to using these two metals because they were the most useful. And then the government saw people using those already and started to recognize that as money.
That’s what happened in the United States. When we founded the United States, the government wasn’t producing money, but we had Spanish dollars that were being traded. And that becomes the US dollar once we have our US government.
So from these commodities, we get bank notes where banks are willing to give you a piece of paper that you can redeem for the commodity. You don’t have to carry it around all the time – it’s much easier to just use the paper and have all the heavy metal stored in the bank.
Banks also had deposits where they would just record that they owe you some money and you can come in and take your money whenever you need.
Bank notes were for most of US history supplied by private banks. And that was pretty successful. But of course then we eventually moved to central banks. Many of them originally were also redeeming dollars for gold, but then eventually all moved to fiat. […]”
“Gold has a really established reputation. It was on the gold standard – everyone believed we would always go back to a gold standard. […]
My typical recommendation when people ask me about money is: we should have free money, we should have competition. Use whatever you want.
People want to use gold, they use gold.
People want to use stablecoins, use stablecoins. And I believe the best thing is likely to win out.
Larry White would say: if we give people choice, they’re going to go back to gold. It’s the one thing people have converged on through all of history. It’s very likely that that still acts as an anchor in people's minds. And maybe he's right, but I don't know. I don't know that answer. None of us do.
That’s why the Reserve Protocol is great…”