Watch the full panel discussion on Gamma Prime’s YouTube channel
Panel Discussion with Evan Szu (Co-Founder & CEO at Gamma Prime), Raja Ramachandran (Founder of Amigoo Ventures), Russell Abdullin (CEO & Founder at Liquidity.land), KI (Managing Partner at DPCapital_XYZ), Wesley Russon (COO at MCE Group), Sushant Kurren (Strategic Growth at Wormhole Foundation), and Belinda Zhou (Founding Partner at Sharding Capital)
In this panel discussion titled ‘Funding the Future of Tokenization,’ venture capitalists and industry experts explore the evolving landscape of tokenization and its impact on traditional and decentralized finance. The panelists, representing firms like Amigo Ventures, France Indicate, DP Capital, MCG, and Wormhole Foundation, offer insights into their investment strategies, focusing on secondary markets, liquidity management, and the nuances of tokenized assets. The conversation also delves into the significance of TVL (Total Value Locked), the role of stablecoins, and the importance of regulatory clarity in fostering institutional adoption of crypto and tokenized assets. The discussion highlights the need for robust, transparent frameworks to support the growth and sustainability of the tokenization ecosystem.
Raja (Amigoo Ventures)
Good morning everyone, Raja, I’m the founder of Amigoo Ventures. We are a liquid token investment firm. We focus on private market deals. We facilitate private market deals in the secondary market, in the liquid market. We are headquartered in Singapore. Happy to be here.
Russ (Liquidity.land)
Hey, I’m Russ, founder of Friends Syndicate and also Liquidity Alliance. We usually provide liquidity for early-stage DeFi protocols and also in the pre-SIT and SIT.
KI (DPCapital_XYZ)
Hi everyone, I’m KI, I’m from DP Capital and I’m based in Japan. We always do some liquidity investment. We do some pre-TGE or post-TGE driving.
Wesley (MCE Group)
Hey everyone, I’m Wesley. I have a loud voice and normally that works against me. I think this time it’s probably gonna pull it off. I work at a family office called MCG. We deploy in crypto, we do venture, liquid, with OTC deals besides our other assets, and I’m COO at MCG.
Sushant (Wormhole Foundation)
Hello everyone, my name is Sushant. I do strategy at the Wormhole Foundation. We are an interoperability protocol and do lots of things with tokenized funds, wanting to go multi-chain.
Evan (Gamma Prime)
The last panel we had was mainly traders in listed equities and highly liquid capital, so crypto open markets. These panelists are going to give us a different perspective because underneath that layer of fully liquid, highly available, exchange-listed assets is an entire other layer of secondary markets, TVL into projects. This is the first place that tokens or new stocks first land before they eventually bubble up and become widely available.
Their perspective will give us a sense of what’s really happening at the ground level, because when liquidity dries up or a bear market is coming, they’ll feel it first. I’m really interested in hearing your perspectives. Let’s start with what’s going on in secondary markets broadly.
This could be over-the-counter. For family offices, what are you seeing in that space? Are you still using it, and are you seeing changes in the liquidity environment or in terms of structure over the last several months?
Raja
The general trend we see in the secondary market is that we’re finding quite a lot of traction because the market is challenging, hence the participation in the primary market. We don’t do primary investments as some other panelists do, but we see increasing capital deployment interest in the secondary market. We don’t chase the narratives as much as primary market investors do.
For us, it’s all about data: how liquid the project is, how volatility-sustainable it is. We look at all this information to determine whether a project is viable for the long run or not. Projects with more liquid tokens are preferred. We see a lot of projects where facilitating secondary deals works better than focusing on the primary market, which requires taking more risk.
Focusing on secondary markets is giving us good results, so we’re doubling down, especially since the market is very challenging at this point.
Russ
The main trend in this cycle is that there’s not enough liquidity in the secondary market for projects. Usually, successful projects manage liquidity and coordinate OTC deals when primary investors exit. My question to the other panelists is how you manage transparency. We’ve seen unpleasant cases in OTC markets, for example Mantra, and similar projects. OTC markets are difficult to track in general. What analytical tools do you use, and how do you define great projects versus ones that just try to catch investors after launch?
KI
For the OTC investor in Japan, OTC investing is very popular. Japan is fast and financially advanced in Asia. Some investors prefer community trading; they invest in tokens from older, top projects in marketing. It’s different from trading mini coins in Korea. We focus on tokens from big projects, like Cardano, Filecoin, and more recently Tone (T-O-N) and Donet. In Japan, they believe in big-value projects with good marketing support, so they like to deal with those.
Wesley
In the current cycle, there is a need for liquidity. From an institutional perspective, we first focus on primary markets. But there is still interest in secondary markets. The liquidity crunch is helping institutional players get better deals.
Transparency is not perfect, so additional parties can negotiate better terms regarding OTC or TVL deals. There’s also benefit for projects: if they engage more in secondary markets, they can negotiate additional terms. For example, beyond receiving tokens for capital, they can ask for introductions or additional support. I advise parties to negotiate for better terms. The current cycle is interesting, especially for parties with liquidity and knowledge—they can get better deals.
Sushant
One way to look at it is that a lot of money that would usually go to VC or market-making is now being tokenized on-chain. For example, Securitize, which Wormhole works closely with, tokenized a money market fund on-chain, creating infinitely scalable APR around 5%, backed by government debt. On-chain, that isn’t meaningful to some because people expect higher yields.
Securitize converted the fund into a token and used it as collateral to mint a stablecoin with Athena called USD TV. Historically, yield hasn’t been scalable; it was either Ponzi token incentives or cash payouts to achieve TVL. Now, with money market funds on-chain, access to scalable yield becomes more meaningful.
Family offices have realized that instead of farming tokens by providing TVL, they can tokenize cash on-chain, guarantee yield, and use it as collateral with stablecoin issuers. This creates better utility for their funds. Ironically, even though more money is coming into crypto, competition is higher—not because protocols can’t access it, but because the funds themselves are getting involved. Securitize is a big example, and more funds will do the same over time.
Evan
Excellent, thank you guys. When I think of the next layer down beneath secondary markets, I think TVL, because that tends to be isolated into specific chains and specific projects. TVL is the lifeblood of projects. If you’re a project with plenty of liquidity, maybe that’s not so much an issue. But for the crypto ecosystem as a whole, if TVL dries up in these pockets, that’s going to affect innovation and the viability of these projects. What are you guys seeing in that next layer down in the world of bringing TVL to these smaller projects?
Raja
Projects or TVL more broadly, I’ll take a slightly contrarian view. While we all understand the criticality of TVL, sometimes it’s overplayed. There are many liquidity providers, but a lot of TVL just sits dormant, so it doesn’t tell much about how the project is performing. From a valuation standpoint, we look at trading volume, market makers, and other data points to understand project performance, not purely from a TVL perspective.
Even for RWA projects, there are more dynamic metrics that prove the project is really performing well. It’s about the use cases, user engagement, and usage of your platform. That tells a compelling story about overall performance, beyond just TVL as the main KPI.
Russ
For most DeFi protocols, TVL is vital. You basically can’t operate or support users without a decent amount of TVL, for example stablecoins. TVL is also a tricky metric because most private valuations are adjusted to the amount of TVL protocols have. Protocols usually over-incentivize liquidity at the early stage, which creates additional opportunities for private liquidity providers.
Currently, liquidity or TVL bootstrapping deals raise 10–15 million from private actors like Ember, Edge, Re7, MEV, and similar. These conditions are 1.5–2 times better than public conditions for retail investors later on. This creates opportunities for private liquidity actors to provide liquidity. It’s similar to a VC game, but without the downside of dropping the native token asset, and you can also farm assets on another hand.
A few platforms democratize private deals and incentivize them. For example, Royco was involved in Bearer Chain Race and became popular. Other platforms like Liquidity Land and Turtle Clubs are trying to democratize and incentivize liquidity. There is room for disruption and opportunity in the private sector versus more open opportunities to retail or smaller investors.
KI
I can show the AI GPUs for TVL. The AI GPUs mine the project and open the machine for the 4080. If they don’t choose Edge 100 or Edge 200 machines, they can get cheaper costs with the 4080, and many end tokens are not sold if marketing is not good. If they choose Edge 100 or Edge 200, it’s very expensive—one machine may cost 20–100k USD. So mining with these machines may provide more tokens, and if marketing is not good, mining still holds. Staking and long-term holding is good for TVL because they hold the largest tokens. This is good for TVL value.
Wesley
Coming back to your question about TVL and LP deals, you can see it from two perspectives. From a project perspective, TVL is the lifeblood for a DeFi protocol. At the same time, TVL needs to be sticky. Develop your product so people still want to provide TVL. Point systems can help, but that’s only part of it.
Projects also need momentum, integrations, and connections with other protocols and infrastructure to get the flywheel going. From an LP perspective, many people only focus on yield, which is important. But it’s also crucial to look at fees generated from TVL. TVL efficiency matters. From a liquidity provider perspective, consider fees as well as audits—at least one, ideally more. Besides team and other well-known factors, these are important metrics from a different perspective in the industry.
Sushant
I think in the last cycle and previous cycles, TVL was kind of the only metric that really mattered. But now, as competition is getting so high, everyone really only cares about fees and how you actually build a meaningful business that generates revenue. The biggest protocols that make the most money, probably no one here has ever heard of—they don’t have any TVL. They’re trading bots on Telegram. Anonymous teams, no one knows who they are. They literally have a Telegram bot that allows people to buy spot and perp trades, and they’re making year-to-date like 40 million in straight fees. Some have generated over 700 million dollars and have been live for less than 12 months.
These don’t have any TVL—they’re literally just bots. It’s about improving the UX so users are happy paying 1–1.5% on every transaction. Not an anecdote, but Aave has almost 2 billion dollars in TVL that is literally goodwill TVL—people who got in extremely early or maybe were in the ETH ICO—they’ve parked TVL earning 0.3% APR on USDC on mainnet, doing nothing, just as a token of goodwill.
TVL doesn’t necessarily mean anything meaningful anymore, unless, like Wesley said, you’re able to generate fees or make it actually useful. That’s how I would think of TVL. It’s meaningful as a headline metric. If you have zero TVL and you’re not a trading bot, and you’re a DeFi protocol, something’s wrong. But there are plenty of chains on DeFi Llama with hundreds of millions in TVL and daily fees or DEX volume that’s zero.
Belinda (Sharding Capital)
Hi everyone, this is Belinda. Before I get into the TVL metric, a brief introduction. I’m founding partner of Sharding Capital. We are an early-stage fund based out of Dubai. We focus on supporting founders from day one and try to write the earliest check possible. Our strongest value is mostly in marketing and go-to strategy in key regions where we have strong distribution, including the Middle East and Asia.
To get into the question, I guess the question is what does TVL mean. On-chain mean, right? For protocols.
Evan
Yeah, it’s what trends are you seeing in TVL, given the recent market? There’s been a reduction of liquidity, some price backfilling—what are you seeing at the TVL layer that may give insights about what’s going on?
Belinda
Tokenized projects specifically. RWA businesses have very small margins, so they rely on big volumes. For this project, it’s important to have big volumes, big TVLs, or sales with big brands, signaling potentially constant future income. Their tokens and RWA are not necessarily correlated, because RWA is more long-term and VCs are more aligned with tokens.
When marketing RWA businesses, it’s not really about TVL—it’s more about clarity on what the protocol does and long-term alignment with token holders. Show that it’s a long-term business with proper revenue and sustainable use, which makes it more interesting for token holders or retail. If TVL can be shown, it’s nice to have, but more important is explaining the project well and getting that message across consistently.
Evan
Consistent theme I’m hearing: not all TVLs are created equal. People can obsess over that number without understanding how active it is or what kind of value it’s generating. In trading, people obsess about whether returns are 15 or 20 percent, but they also have to understand the risk profile. There’s a lot more than just the raw overall figure.
Belinda
These days, projects do a lot of TVL bootstrapping, using token incentives to encourage liquidity providers or funds to put in a big amount of capital. That’s a dangerous signal because they give away tokens and potentially unlock them early, which could hinder long-term success. Always look at fundamentals. Where is the TVL coming from? Real demand or artificial demand due to short-term token incentives?
For RWA business, the key is to have huge bearing assets in the pool instead of token-incentivized liquidity. If incentivized, the program should be structured in a way that doesn’t hurt the community.
Evan
In the last few minutes, I want to zoom out and talk about the big picture. There’s a lot happening politically and economically, with tariffs and regulatory environments. The UAE has become crypto-friendly. What are some forward-looking trends you’re paying attention to in your specific businesses based on the global macro environment?
Sushant
I’ve been to a few places this year. In January, I was in Japan and spoke to regulators and banks. Historically, Japan has had a very tight regulatory environment, but now they’re loosening doors. People want to build DeFi. Banks want to come on-chain.
Interestingly, the only chain they cared about was Solana, and the only stablecoin was USDC, because they’re U.S.-aligned. Same in Argentina—builders exist, but they care about Solana to be U.S.-aligned. In Hong Kong, many builders exist, still nascent for DeFi, but they care more about Sui because it’s an Eastern team.
As more institutions come on-chain, it will become far more political and geopolitical than it is now, where anyone can do anything. TradFi will align to different chains and assets for these reasons.
Wesley
I agree with that. We are partially based in the Netherlands and EU, which has MiCAR, the first real crypto regulation. Banks are showing interest in deploying stablecoins. Major banks like ING are investigating setting up their own stablecoins. The infrastructure will be there, which helps institutions enter the space and find standards.
I have a legal background, and institutionals want to deploy, but they need guidelines and a framework. The EU provides a decent framework, though not perfect. DeFi involvement is still a gray area, but institutionals need that framework to deploy assets and interact more in the space.And to see what they can do in the long term.
Raja
If I may add — we kind of see a general trend when it comes to RWA projects that the compliance cost is as much as 10%. With increasing regulatory clarity across a few markets—we see Dubai is very progressive in that sense, like Singapore. We are headquartered in Singapore, so we see quite a lot of initiatives by the regulatory body there, plus initiatives from different markets across the globe.
We are quite excited from that standpoint because the industry itself is estimated to be a few trillion dollars already, and some stats say we are expecting 16 to 20 trillion dollars by 2030. This means that bigger institutions are deeply involving themselves in the tokenization aspect, which also puts more focus from regulatory bodies to give more clarity for businesses to pursue.
We expect inter-regulatory body coordination to increase in the next few years, and the compliance cost of projects—which eats much of their operating costs—will dramatically cut down. This will increase investor confidence and attract more players, plus lead to more technical innovation. That’s where we look forward to projects from the RWA space innovating more, purely from a technical standpoint—building interesting utilities beyond just the first layer of tokenization. We are excited from the regulatory standpoint and based on the current trend.
Russ
I think stablecoins might be the biggest trend of this year. Even in DeFi, we might see a spike of new stablecoin issuers—probably hundreds of protocols globally. The US is also preparing a stablecoin bill, which drives adoption of stablecoins for cross-border payments.
Tether became one of the largest TVL holders in history. In general, the US is moving the stablecoin agenda forward. If the US dollar becomes the primary asset for stablecoins, it helps secure its status as a reserve currency in the world order, especially vis-a-vis China. The stablecoin agenda may also expose some of the traffic that sticks in stablecoins and hopefully move it to DeFi.
Belinda
I want to add two things. To really facilitate institutional adoption, we should avoid vendor capture—for example, people only going to Solana. That’s not very healthy for overall adoption for enterprises.
On the regulation side, we should prioritize alignment with regulators beyond just financial regulators like banks. Government-level alignment is key. For example, in Dubai, alignment with the Dubai Land Department could lead to tokenization of real estate. To facilitate adoption, we should target these levels and avoid vendor capture, ensuring a robust infrastructure for anyone to enter and do tokenization business.
Evan
Thank you all, panelists. What we’ve seen is as we bring more institutional participation, more integration with capital beyond traditional retail, it means we’re going to see more of the rest of the world come in. Considering fragmentation, political forces, and other dynamics, whether that’s good or bad isn’t our statement—it’s about recognizing that it’s coming and being prepared for it.
Thank you to all our panelists—let’s give them a hand.
