Have you bought a tokenized stock? If yes, why? Easy access, part of a trading strategy, a yield strategy, meme pairing, or something else? If not, why not? Limited assets, thin liquidity, lack of products or tools, already happy with your tradfi broker?

The metrics are the marketing. You can now use AI to do the kind of analysis a hedge fund would have taken weeks over, and in crypto the data's all onchain: revenue, fees, growth, activity, TVL. More and more people will ask their agent before they invest, so if you've built a good business with a token that captures value, they'll find it.

I’ve been thinking about what happens to DeFi when government debt yields 5-6%. If you can earn roughly 5% on short-term government bonds, earning 4-5% in DeFi while taking on significantly more risk starts to look fairly unattractive. If the baseline interest rate in the economy is 5%, then DeFi yields need to start at 5% and offer something additional to compensate for the extra risk. Otherwise, why bother? I suspect the answer is that DeFi increasingly needs to integrate traditional yield-bearing assets. By bringing government debt onchain, DeFi can establish a baseline yield that moves with interest rates in the broader economy. Additional DeFi yield can then be layered on top, with the associated risks. A 5% starting point with the potential to earn 10%+ is a much more compelling proposition. I think this is why tokenizing RWAs is so important.

When making a trade, I find it useful to ask where the marginal buyer is coming from, because the marginal buyer is what's providing the upside. In crypto right now I think there are a few places to look. If it's younger traders, memes probably do well. A lot of them feel locked out of houses and pensions, they grew up online and they get internet culture in a way older traders just don't. For them attention is the asset, and memes are a way to trade it. If it's Wall Street, they want revenue and cash flow and something they can model. As more of finance gets tokenised it needs somewhere to trade, finance positions and hedge, so perps, exchanges, AMMs and lending protocols start to look attractive to these types of investors. If it's people who care about privacy, privacy coins probably do well (duh). That's to some extent a reaction to crypto's own success, because the more of your financial life goes onchain the more anyone can see, and with AI, states can monitor everything you do. Not financial advice, just how I think about it.

ICYMI: At DAS Asia, Base's Xen Baynham-Herd told The Starting Block that most tokenized stocks won't pass an institutional risk committee. If it isn't the real share, banks have to hold capital against it.