Nathaniel | Manifest (🇺🇸,🇺🇸)

bringing American economic hegemony onchain. co-founder // ceo @ManifestFinance

prev co-founder @ roostify (acq by CoreLogic)

🇺🇸 I’m betting on America

[Nathaniel | Manifest (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) @ns_dub]

saturday's Iran attack hit at 2:30am et. every major market was closed - US equities, futures, fx, europe, asia. all of it dark.

bloomberg needed a crude oil price. the only price discovery happening was onchain. they cited @HyperliquidX ... not cme. not reuters. a defi exchange that didn't exist five years ago.

hyperliquid perps for crude. XAUT trading over $300M in a day. prediction markets setting volume records.

@Matt_Hougan piece about this is worth reading. the weekend showed the rails work. the first real stress test that separated rails that exist from rails that were promised. 24/7 markets are inevitable, sooner than expected. i think he's right but underselling the mechanism.

oil has a sunday price. gold has one. US housing - the largest store of household wealth in the country - still doesn't. $35T in US home equity still goes dark every weekend.

that asymmetry doesn't last. that's the actual gap. we're filling it.

[Bitwise @Bitwise]

During Sunday’s attacks in Iran, when all traditional markets were closed, Bloomberg turned to Hyperliquid’s crude oil contract to gauge the impact for investors.

If hedge funds and banks weren’t looking at stablecoins or tokenized assets before this weekend, they’re paying attention now.

[Nathaniel | Manifest (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) @ns_dub]

The folks at @CV_Labs have been great, and we are glad to have @AguilarJanis supporting us.

[CV Labs @CV_Labs]

🇺🇸 What does the future of US real estate look like?

@ManifestFinance is making residential real estate liquid, programmable, and accessible through its flagship product, USH

As @AguilarJanis puts it: "The next phase of blockchain is being defined by real assets and real adoption, not narrative."

🏡 Discover Manifest: https://t.co/ll9c5IFpWj

[Manifest @ManifestFinance]

Janis Aguilar and CV VC backed Manifest.

@AguilarJanis runs the Switzerland-based @CV_Labs accelerator that’s backing the next phase of crypto growth — RWAs tokenisation.

[Manifest @ManifestFinance]

"Manifest is the latest in a growing line of protocols choosing Ethena's assets to back their own products. USDe's role in RWA protocols like Manifest is creating a new category of onchain assets." @gdog97_ Founder & CEO @ethena

Read more: https://t.co/OScF0FRHUa 💪

[Manifest @ManifestFinance]

If you are around in NYC, don't forget to drop by @lattice_fund Quarterly Yield Pitch.

-> Don't forget to catch up with @val_usa_crypto.

[Val | Manifest (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) @val_usa_crypto]

Proud for @ManifestFinance to be part of the growth story with Ethena

[Manifest @ManifestFinance]

Manifest is partnering with @ethena to provide initial capital deployment for USH, our real estate backed yield token.

RWA protocols acquiring long-dated private assets have the same problem: capital arrives faster than quality assets can be sourced. We solve this with USDe.

[Channi Greenwall @ChanniGreenwall]

Really proud of this partnership. @ManifestFinance is building something serious with real estate onchain, and my team is making sure the security holds from the first line of code, not the last review. This is the work I care about most.

[Nathaniel | Manifest (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) @ns_dub]

happy to team up with @gdog97_ @n2ckchong and the other studs at @ethena

[Manifest @ManifestFinance]

Manifest has partnered with @ethena to benefit from USDe’s capital efficiency while Manifest scales the real estate portfolio backing USH.

As a result, sUSH holders will receive rewards even as the backing real estate portfolio is being assembled.

[Manifest @ManifestFinance]

The average US homeowner has $300k+ in home equity. But accessing this equity requires taking on heavy debt in the form of traditional mortgage products.

Home equity goes untapped, and homeowners stay house-rich, but cash-poor.

Home Equity Investments (HEIs) fix this.

[Nathaniel | Manifest (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) @ns_dub]

great working with the guys at @KannAudits

[Manifest @ManifestFinance]

1/ Thank you to @KannAudits for its thorough audit of Manifest's smart contracts.

[Manifest @ManifestFinance]

1/ Manifest is an RWA protocol that provides composable yield from US real estate.

USH is the base asset of our ecosystem. Each USH is backed by $1 of assets.

As the backing portfolio grows in value, new USH is rewarded to staked USH (sUSH) holders.

[Nathaniel | Manifest (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) @ns_dub]

thank you @0xOwenThurm @shankshaft_ 🫡

[Guardian @GuardianAudits]

🚨 Our review of @ManifestFinance is now live!

Discover how Guardian is securing the upcoming launch in our report below:

[Nathaniel | Manifest (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) @ns_dub]

classy team, and very detailed oriented. we like them

[SHERLOCK @sherlockdefi]

https://t.co/7wvLjxieg7

[Nathaniel | Manifest (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) @ns_dub]

. @QwQiao and @davidma mapped this path in 2024: RWAs onboard crypto-natives first, then grow to serve crypto-agnostics.

stablecoins ran the full curve to $300B. US residential real estate is up next.

https://t.co/P07EK5GJK2

[Manifest @ManifestFinance]

1/ Stablecoins unlocked $300B in latent demand for dollars by removing the barriers to buying them.

The same setup exists for American residential real estate: enormous global demand, broken access channels.

Manifest is giving US real estate its stablecoin moment.

[Nathaniel | Manifest (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) @ns_dub]

TradFi's post-2008 learning brought in more than just surviving the crisis - Dodd-Frank, Basel III, resolution authority, written stress testing. the lessons got codified into structure before the next deployment. prospective loss paths.

DeFi's learning pattern runs differently. Aave eats bad debt, protocol has equity to absorb it, code gets patched, next cycle runs cleaner. retrospective absorption. genuinely works at current scale.

how does all this scale to real-world asset classes? Aave has ~$10B in stables for borrow. ABCP market alone is $400B. one commercial paper default cycle would exceed protocol equity by orders of magnitude. at that size, the learning mechanism has to become prospective: loss rules written before TVL, servicing responsibilities pre-assigned, recovery paths codified.

the failures that make DeFi better today are small. the failures that would break RWA scaling aren't. different problem. just want to keep the distinction visible.

bullish DeFi too.

[Haseeb ＞|＜ @hosseeb]

DeFi learns through failures. Whether it's from the collapse of Terra, broken auctions during Black Friday in 2020, or the stETH depeg in 2022, it has failed over and over again--but with every failure, it improves.

People talk all sorts of shit about this, but it's no different from how TradFi learned from banking crises, lending contagion (2008), or fraud (savings and loans crises in late 80s).

The important thing is that these failures are not fatal. The heart of DeFi is risk-averse and robust. AAVE might take on some bad debt, but it has the equity to pay it.

DeFi isn't going away. And seeing the vigorous debate around how to improve it is exactly the process by which it keeps getting better.

Bullish DeFi, and bullish this community.

[Nathaniel | Manifest (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) @ns_dub]

you can't manufacture yield by stacking trust assumptions without writing loss rules. boring finance starts with loss rules. homeowner defaults: who takes first loss, who's next in line. originator fails: servicing transfers here. boring. but written.

[Zach Rynes | CLG @ChainLinkGod]

Look guys, it's actually really straightforward, a bunch of people staked their ETH on the Ethereum blockchain to earn yield, except they didn't want their capital to be locked up, so they actually staked with a liquid staking protocol called Lido who provided them a liquid staking receipt token called stETH, except they decided to juice their yield further by depositing their stETH receipt tokens into a restaking protocol called Eigenlayer, except they didn't want to lock up their capital, so they actually restaked with a liquid restaking protocol called KelpDAO who provided them with a liquid restaking receipt token called rsETH, except they decided to juice their yield further by depositing their rsETH tokens into a lending protocol called Aave so that they could open a leveraged looping position that borrows ETH against the rsETH collateral and restakes the ETH into rsETH which is then deposited as collateral, except it turns out rsETH used a cross-chain bridge called LayerZero that was hacked by north koreans causing rsETH to become undercollateralized and now these looping positions are stuck and unprofitable, and everyone is pointing fingers at each other, and also DeFi is a very serious industry

[Nathaniel | Manifest (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) @ns_dub]

DeFi yields look bad because the collateral is circular.

crypto backing crypto speculation. no audit fixes that math - you can harden every contract and the risk-adjusted return is still capped by what's happening internally.

attractive risk-adjusted yield needs external cash flows. housing equity, receivables, private credit. assets where returns come from outside the crypto economy.

bonds at 4-5% with duration and inflation eating most of it aren't free either. just a different risk stack.

the conversation should be about what's being collateralized, not just how carefully it's being held. security issues misses the actual problem.

[Simon Dedic @sjdedic]

Very sad to see the recent Drift and KelpDAO security incidents. These were hard blows for DeFi.

In the last 2 days alone, DeFi TVL shrank by almost $15 billion.

But it makes me relate even more to what @santiagoroel has been preaching over the last few weeks:

The risk reward ratio of DeFi simply isn't attractive enough anymore.

Don't get me wrong, I am a big DeFi fan and a strong advocate for the entire financial industry moving onchain. But what you get right now from DeFi are unexciting yields for an insane risk profile. And the cherry on top is just horrible UX.

Not much can be done on the yield side in my opinion. UX is already being worked on. But personally, I think where we are lacking the most is making the risk profile more attractive.

DeFi was actually supposed to eliminate the risk of a middleman and make finance more secure by letting you take control of your own assets. But it feels like we've achieved the exact opposite.

The main reason for this, in my opinion, is that we have always massively neglected security in this industry. Most people ignore it and everything is fine, just until it's too late and the damage is done. We've seen this countless times already.

At the same time, security is probably one of the most underfunded and least exciting verticals to work in. And there is massive discouragement for teams like the @ethereumfndn itself, who choose the slow but secure path instead of quick iterations with the corresponding tradeoffs.

I noticed it myself recently when I was thinking about putting aside some of my fiat savings to put them to work. I chose TradFi bonds over DeFi yields. For those exact reasons.

If I as a crypto native already think this way, how can we expect conservative investors and retail to bring their assets onchain?

We need more support, funding and in general incentives for security again, so more top tier talent starts working on these problems and we can build a reliable foundation to truly bring the financial world onchain.

As long as this doesn't change, the majority of people will always choose banks instead.

We need to do better.

[Nathaniel | Manifest (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) @ns_dub]

The biggest unclaimed territory is off-chain assets that haven't been tokenized and off-chain users who've never opened a wallet. $35T in US home equity sitting illiquid. Forward flow agreements with real originators. Demo environments that show loss paths. Servicing fees, buy box parameters, capital stacks.

You sell infrastructure to asset managers who lack internal build capacity, and you partner with fintechs who own the last mile you'll never replicate.

Emerging market savers routed through Binance P2P because their banking system failed. Midgame for crypto-native. Early game for crypto eating finance.

[Haseeb ＞|＜ @hosseeb]

There's an obvious answer here that everyone's dancing around:

Crypto is simply harder now.

Not because it was all a scam or funny money or whatever.

Crypto is harder because it's winning, and there are way more mature companies and products at scale today. This makes incumbents harder to unseat. Coinbase, Binance, Solana, Base, Polymarket, Circle, Tether--they're all bigger and better and more entrenched than they were even just a few years ago.

This is a natural thing that happens with industries. In the early Internet, it was a lot easier to build a social network. Very hard after 2015. A couple years ago, there was room to attack the big AI labs, now it's almost impossible to get any distribution at all.

That doesn't mean there's no room for startups. But it does mean the land grab phase is over. During the land grab, almost anyone can win given the right timing. But we're in the midgame now, and most of the board is already occupied. At this stage, you'll have to attack someone powerful to take over some land, not just plant a flag in an empty field.

There are still a few greenfield areas, and there's always room for people who can genuinely innovate. But crypto is harder now, and that means the ideas need to be sharper, the teams need to be stronger, and the bar is rightfully higher than a few years ago.

[Nathaniel | Manifest (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) @ns_dub]

21 million users just got access to Aave. none of them know it. creators see a balance earning interest. the protocol stack underneath doesn't matter to them.

Whop was sitting on idle creator balances the same way Western Union sits on transit float. yield converts that liability into a retention tool. every platform with idle user money is now one product decision away from doing the same thing. the float mechanic is what makes this inevitable.

DeFi will go mainstream when the users don't have to care about DeFi ... best infrastructure is invisible.

[Stani @StaniKulechov]

Whop just pulled off one of the biggest DeFi-to-fintech integrations ever.

Whop is a marketplace where creators make money selling digital products, and it has been gaining serious traction. On Whop, creators can sell online courses, tools, digital downloads and community access. Think of it as Shopify for digital products. Patreon with more tools. Discord with built-in payments.

Their users have made over $1B in sales past year and I have no doubt Whop is going to be the biggest fintech in their category soon and here why:

Whop solves an end-to-end problem: how a creator can build products, sell access to them and manage customers, all within a single dashboard. It is the fastest and simplest way to monetize your work as a creator or seller.

Online platforms typically rely on traditional internet payment rails for their infrastructure to process payments, collect revenue and manage recurring billing like subscriptions.

The reason Whop works so well is that it solves the exact problem its founders lived through. @cultured and @czoob3 were reselling sneakers through Facebook. They ran paid Discord groups where people subscribed to sneaker alerts, deal notifications and reselling tips.

While they were already generating revenue, selling digital memberships was a mess. It required juggling too many tools: Discord, PayPal, Zelle, bots and manual tracking. So they built a platform that solved everything for sellers like themselves: accept payments, deliver digital products, manage subscriptions, control community access and handle customer management. @jsharkey joined this mission as the technical co-founder and became CTO.

What made Whop different was that creators could sell products, charge subscriptions, deliver files or access and manage customers all inside one system. This was a real problem that many online community sellers had, including the founders themselves.

Whop understood that new online selling behaviour requires new tools. And new behaviour requires new infrastructure. For a startup like Whop, building entire infrastructure from the ground up takes significant time. At the same time, existing infrastructure does not serve the same global audience that Whop has, nor does it offer the cost structure that helps Whop keep its products viable and competitive.

Digital communities and digital goods are inherently global. Existing payment methods rely on infrastructure that is regionally bound. While accepting payments is available globally today, the fees and the number of middlemen remain high.

Going onchain solves many of these problems across payments, credit and fund management. Stablecoins bypass the need to settle transactions through credit card networks or banks, significantly lowering the cost margins. This is why fintechs are excited about stablecoins.

And guess who benefits the most? The users.

Stablecoins are a gateway to something far more valuable for fintechs like Whop. They unlock new ways for users to transact, earn and access a whole range of financial opportunities through DeFi. DeFi provides transparent and verifiable financial infrastructure that is accessible globally with stablecoins. There are no black boxes, no long and complex agreements, and no reliance on manual human processes.

With Whop Treasury, when a user opts in, their balance converts to USDT0 stablecoins. From there, funds route through a @veda_labs vault on the @Plasma network, a blockchain purpose-built for stablecoin transactions at scale, and are allocated into @aave lending markets where they earn yield.

Autocompounding happens automatically, meaning generated yield is continuously redeployed without the user paying gas fees or managing any positions.

Deposits via card and crypto are powered by @moonpay and @tether provides the stablecoin infrastructure underpinning the entire system.

This is the onchain rails stack to transact and earn. By moving to onchain rails, Whop Treasury connects its 21 million users directly to financial infrastructure that anyone can verify and rely on, all in an automated fashion guaranteed by smart contracts.

The result is fewer middlemen, more transparency and access to programmable financial opportunities that are readily available, global from day one and built on resilient infrastructure.

We will see more fintechs going directly onchain. But we will remember Whop as the first to break the ice, showing the fintech industry the direction where the future of finance is heading.

Whop Treasury was also a masterclass in building an Earn stack that works for institutions: USDT0 for stablecoins, Plasma for low-cost stablecoin transfers, Veda for capital allocation and Aave for yield.

Whop is about to eat commerce, and DeFi is going to be the backbone of all of it.