Iggy Ioppe
@iggyioppe
CIO @Theo_Network.
Prev: Co-Head @PolygonVentures, Head of Long/Short @CreditSuisse, @BainCapital, @HarvardHBS.
519 Following 6.1K Followers
July CPI landed in line at 3.4%, and September hike odds fell. Markets read it as cover for the Fed to stay put.
Theo CIO @iggyioppe told @YahooFinance, @CoinDesk and @TheBlockCo why a hold isn't neutral.
Read the full articles below.
Show more
Gold has charged its owners rent for six thousand years via vaulting, insurance and custody.
Institutions have leased bullion into the market for decades and kept the income, because no rail existed to pass it to the holder. That has changed: tokenization is that rail & lease income routes to whoever holds the token.
I went deep on this with @JackNiewold on Decypher, along with the rest of the case: applications over infrastructure, and who gets access to the products private banks reserve for their largest clients.
Watch the full episode below.
Show more
Most people who talk about “democratizing finance” mean making it easier to open a brokerage account.
@iggyioppe from @Theo_Network means something much bigger:
A farmer in Thailand accessing the same products once reserved for the ultra-rich:
• S&P 500 exposure with downside protection
• Tokenized gold with native yield
• Money market funds earning the risk-free rate
That’s what democratizing finance actually looks like.
Show more
Most tokenized assets can be held but not used.
Our CIO @iggyioppe joined @JackNiewold to discuss why that's ending: the application era of crypto, gold that earns lease income instead of charging custody fees, and money market funds that work as DeFi collateral.
Full episode below ↓
Show more
It was great to see the scale of this operation live.
Mustafa moves roughly 500 kilos of gold jewelry a month from one store and their gold position never changes.
The physical gold economy, and therefore thUSD, runs on leasing.
Show more
Mustafa's inventory is an invariant. They sell 50kg & then rebuy 50kg the same day, so the gold position never moves and the revenue is pure margin.
Why does that matter?
Holding a tonne of metal still takes a tonne of capital. Someone has to finance that standing inventory, and that financing is the gold lease market.
At its most basic level, that is where thUSD's yield comes from.
Show more
1/ Mustafa Centre moves roughly half a tonne (~$65M) of gold jewelry a month from a single retail location in Singapore, as one of the largest gold retailers in the country.
We sat down with them to understand how a gold retail business like that actually runs.
Show more
"Bitcoin is down almost 50%. So it definitely hasn't worked."
Theo CIO @iggyioppe debated Bitwise's head of derivatives on @beincrypto's Markets Intelligence Council over whether bitcoin has earned the digital gold label.
Read the full article below.
Show more
1/ Our CIO @iggyioppe told IFR that a lot of AI infrastructure debt is being priced on the issuer's name rather than on the assets behind it. The Beignet 2049s have repriced from 5.60% to 7.10% as investors started asking what's underneath.
We hold the same standard onchain: reserves you can verify, not disclosures you have to take on faith.
Show more
Markets don't send a warning before they break.
Our CIO @iggyioppe joined @beincrypto's Expert Council to talk through what actually protects capital in a macro shock: real assets, market structure, and why gold keeps outlasting every hedge built to replace it.
Watch the full conversation below.
Show more
Spent an hour with @beincrypto's Expert Council (smart group) on a question allocators keep coming back to: what actually protects a portfolio in a macro shock.
This is difficult to answer well because most hedges are correlation trades in disguise, and correlation trades fail at exactly the moment you need them.
Gold has held its role for decades because it is not a claim on anyone's balance sheet. Tokenization doesn't change that property. It changes what the asset can do: settle 24/7 and move as collateral instead of sitting inert in a vault.
Show more
Markets don't send a warning before they break.
Our CIO @iggyioppe joined @beincrypto's Expert Council to talk through what actually protects capital in a macro shock: real assets, market structure, and why gold keeps outlasting every hedge built to replace it.
Watch the full conversation below.
Show more
$50M is a small number in gold and a meaningful one onchain.
Gold carry has produced income inside bullion banks for decades. But now, access is open and anyone can audit daily, and capital is choosing it.
The pattern I watch for is demand arriving before the category has a name. Tokenized treasuries had that moment two years ago. Gold carry is having it now.
The flows are coming.
Show more
1/ Gold carry deployment (accessed by staking thUSD) just crossed $50M.
We took one of the oldest yield sources in finance and rebuilt it onchain. Capital is showing how much demand there is for it.
And there's room to run: our gold carry trade has capacity into the billions, without the yield compression that caps crypto-native alternatives.
Show more
The Fed held rates steady this week, with three officials pushing for a hike.
Our CIO, @iggyioppe, spoke with @TheBlockCo on what the pause actually signals for risk assets.
Read the full article below.
Show more
Great talking with the team at @FinancialTimes about this. Here's another part that didn't make the piece: a pre-IPO perp is a market opinion on a company that has no market yet.
Access is just one part of the story -> price discovery on an asset that doesn't trade is the more interesting one.
Show more
Onchain markets are moving past representing assets to running real markets in them.
Our CIO @iggyioppe spoke with @FinancialTimes on how pre-IPO perps price a company before it lists, then converge with the stock once it trades.
Show more
Onchain markets are moving past representing assets to running real markets in them.
Our CIO @iggyioppe spoke with @FinancialTimes on how pre-IPO perps price a company before it lists, then converge with the stock once it trades.
Show more
every equity perp is really an oracle design choice.
pick a bad feed and you built a casino; pick a good one and you built price discovery. CXMT is the rare case where we get to see it resolve.
borderless markets improving at a remarkable rate
Show more
Great to work on this with you @beincrypto.
Tokenization theater is an epidemic.
Our CIO @iggyioppe was featured in @beincrypto's Expert Council on why $32.9B in tokenized RWAs sits dormant, and what it takes to make on-chain assets actually work.
Read the full article below.
Show more
Our CIO @iggyioppe was featured in @beincrypto's Expert Council on why $32.9B in tokenized RWAs sits dormant, and what it takes to make on-chain assets actually work.
Read the full article below.
Show more
The largest dollar asset in the world has always been easy to hold but harder to send & put to work for the non-onchain natives.
StablePay fixes that: dollars that move and earn straight from a phone.
Payments and yield converging in a single consumer app is how USDT goes from idle balance to productive money.
Congrats, team!
Show more
StablePay is now live.
Send USDT to anyone, anywhere 🌍
Simple, instant, no-cost everyday payments.
Built for how money should move.
Download StablePay today:
Show more
StableEarn currently yields 13.35% APY on USDT deposits. In less than 2 months, it's grown to become the largest USDT vault outside of Ethereum Mainnet.
Deposit today to earn. Link below.
Show more
