Thema

[Aamir Ghai @AamirGhai]

"What the AP structure can suppress is the integrity of the price discovery mechanism itself."

Absolutely correct frame. And the stress data from traditional markets shows exactly how badly it breaks when it matters most.

During covid, investment grade bond ETFs traded at discounts of more than 5% to NAV. Not because the underlying bonds were mispriced, but because the AP arbitrage mechanism froze. The designated buyers stepped back. Price discovery didn't just lag; it inverted. And it's not just bond ETFs, SPY itself hit 90bps above nav just last year, its widest dislocation since 2008.

The core issue runs deeper than the institutions themselves. It's the market structure those institutions were built to operate within. Exclusive creation rights, designated arb buyers, opaque collateral chains, this architecture was never designed for assets whose entire value proposition is transparency and open access. Transplanting it onchain doesn't fix it. It just moves the grey window onto a faster rail.

We've spent the last year building a different architecture. The core idea: what if the market structure itself was designed so it didn't require an AP club to function? What if dislocation rules were written explicitly at issuance, onchain, visible to everyone, and executable by anyone?

No regulatory carve out. No grey window. No designated arb buyer.

We've formalized this in our research paper @themafinancial and have a live deployment showcasing the advantages of the mechanism. Happy to share both if you're curious @dgt10011

[Brian R @BrianRetford]

Strong evidence @themafinancial we can replace APs with agents and DeFI too. No more S&P500 depegging. More yield for everyone.

[U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission @SECGov]

I also am excited about the use of on-chain software systems by issuers and intermediaries to eliminate economic frictions, increase capital efficiency, enable new types of financial products, and enhance liquidity.