Watch the full panel discussion on Gamma Prime’s YouTube channel
Panel discussion with Tyler Carter (Co-Founder of Splice Protocol), Brandi Kolosky (GP at Sacral Capital), and Dave Hendricks (CEO and Founder of Vertalo)
The tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) is moving beyond hype and into practical applications, but the path forward is anything but simple. In a recent panel moderated by Tyler Carter, co-founder of Splice Protocol, industry leaders Brandi Kolosky (VC and digital asset innovator) and Dave Hendricks (CEO of Vertalo) explored the regulatory hurdles, opportunities in DeFi accessibility, and the evolving role of tokenized securities.
What began as a conversation about “pirates vs. the Navy” quickly unfolded into deeper insights on endogenous stablecoins, multi-chain liquidity, and the asset classes most likely to drive the next wave of adoption. From energy powering data centers to yield-bearing real estate, the panelists made one thing clear: tokenization isn’t just about technology — it’s about reshaping how value, culture, and capital markets intersect.
Tyler (Splice Protocol)
Thank you, everyone, for joining. You won’t see me on the screen, so I’ll give you a brief intro. I’m a late sub, but my name is Tyler Carter. I’m the co-founder of Splice Protocol, which is launching on Solana next week, next month.
We are basically doing decentralized ETF minting and redemptions, backed by both RWA and crypto assets inside the same product. Completely DeFi-ready. Before that, I spent a lot of time doing digital securities issuance. I was the head of digital assets at Securrency. And before that, the head of digital assets at Standard & Poor’s Indices.
So I’d love to introduce our great panel today. Maybe if we could just go down the line, give a brief intro, your background in the digital security space, and then how your firm is oriented within the space, and what you guys are working on right now.
Brandi (Sacral Capital)
My name is Brandy Koloski. I originally started in the space by helping invent the idea to bypass flare on oil fields to power crypto mining. And then it moved me over to California to a VC called Sealbox, where I met the lovely Dave here, who created Vertalo.
We were the first to layer it on and channel out digital securities with our portcos and LPs there. And so, yeah, now I’m launching my own fund, a VCPE hybrid in the data centers, Bitcoin mining, tokenizing of our assets, such as private jets, and so forth. So yeah, and that’s where I’m at now. 110 million is what we’re going for.
Dave (Vertalo)
My name is Dave Hendricks. I am the CEO and founder of Vertalo. We’re about an eight-year-old firm that focuses on transforming illiquid private assets into tradable and transferable digital tokenized securities. We’re not limited to doing securities. We can really do this with anything – really turn anything, hard asset, etc., into a tokenized version that’s transferable and tradable. So RWA all the way every day.
Probably in the questions, we could talk more about the last six or seven years, but depending on whether you want me to talk a little bit more about that, I’m happy to do that now.
Tyler
Yeah, definitely. I think a good place to start, being that this is digital securities issuance, is probably regulatory, right? Having done, I think, 13 SEC-registered funds with WisdomTree, the big issue with me is that the current SEC regulatory structure completely limits the ability to use tokenized assets and really takes away any advantage that a tokenized asset would have.
So do you see that changing under the new administration? Do you think that’s the biggest thing holding back this flywheel moment for tokenized RWA? How do we address it, and how do you see it going forward?
Dave
Well, the question you ask gives me an opportunity to talk about the application of these regulations and how they created opportunities and how they put obstacles and friction in the way.
When I started the company, the first version of Vertalo was an Ethereum-based smart contracts due diligence platform. And in September 2017, after piloting with the last company I founded, I wrote a white paper and a yellow paper, and I took it to my co-founder, who was ex-SEC Division of Trading and Markets, because I wanted to run an ICO. I thought, non-dilutive capital, just love that.
Well, he took it to our lawyers, and he came back, he said, “No ICO for you, Dave, you don’t get to do one. It’s an unregistered securities offering.” So in late 2017, we decided with Lowenstein, Sandler, and Deloitte to launch one of the first STOs, which was our own equity.
The process of going through that really illustrated some of your points. We had a 100-page PPM, we had KYC, we wrote all the smart contracts, we did all the distribution, transferred the tokens to the existing investors in the seed, and then went to sell this. What we found was the difficulty investors had was: how do I invest in a tokenized equity, a primitive, that is going to be locked up under Reg D for a year? And then even when it gets there, is there a legal place to trade it? That was very difficult for our fundraise.
Two months of trying to raise against that, I said: wait, I believe that all assets, private assets specifically, are going to be tokenized because it’s a better way to ledger shares. Just simply – it’s a ledger. So we, Vertalo, pivoted to become an API-first platform, picks and shovels, based on our own experience as an issuer, as opposed to chasing a hype narrative. We said: this is a thing, because of the regulatory and other challenges that we did have.
Tyler
Yeah, I think once you start actually tokenizing these things and going through the securities process, the veil sort of moves away. “Tokenize everything” as a mantra is really not satisfactory – it goes much deeper than that. Brandy, your thoughts on it?
Brandi
I’m excited for David Sacks heading the All-In Podcast – that’s one of my go-to religious Fridays. As far as regulatory goes, we just have to keep on top of it and make sure we’re not just being pirates, but also being the Navy.
Tyler
Pirates that become the Navy, maybe – that’s the best way to put it.
Dave
Well, you know, a lot of people like being pirates. It’s more fun. I think RWA is exciting for a lot of folks, but they see this regulated environment as being a lot less fun than the fun they’ve been having. So after being a pirate for a while, you’re like, “Hey, I’m doing all these things.” The notion that you then have to comply with rules sounds like less fun and less money. But I’d like to make the argument that that’s actually untrue and that it’s a false dichotomy.
Brandi
When I was first navigating launching my own fund, I wanted to play in the tokenized space with my fund, because that’s what I had come from working with him prior. And my attorneys were like, “No, just keep it simple.” I said, “Well, can I do Bitcoin mining at least?” And they said, “Yeah, stick there only.”
So, in my first fund, I had to be the Navy and not a pirate. But I’m ready to go into fund two already and explore alternatives and so forth.
Tyler
All right. Well, congrats on fund two. That’s fantastic. I think this actually leads into maybe a good topic or a good thread to pull. At least behind the scenes – and maybe this is alpha for people in the room – even the big tokenization firms that started off with digital securities are all spinning up their own divisions to basically issue permissionless derivatives that are backed by those tokenized securities that can actually access DeFi.
And this is really important because this answers the question: why would you buy a tokenized asset that’s more expensive, frankly, not as cheap or as liquid as, say, a traditional ETF or mutual fund with the same exposure?
So I just want to get your stance. Do you think DeFi accessibility is really what solves this and kicks off this flywheel? I mean, we’ve seen numerous false starts on the institutional side of RWA. Certainly, we’ve gotten some wins with Biddle and others. But how do you see that going forward? Do you think DeFi has a big role to play with digital securities?
Dave
What we’ve done is very simply nailed what the next leg up is. And it’s actually where the Navy and the pirates start overlapping.
We’ve done 100 issuances on behalf of clients for both digital asset securities and tokenized securities. One of the biggest things that we did was in 2022: we took the 24,000 XY Labs – this is the XYZ token, which was kind of subject to an action with Coinbase on insider trading. We took their Reg A, their Reg D security holders, tokenized them on our system, brought over 24,000, and then we moved them to T0, which is an ATS.
This is by far the biggest one of these transformations from a regular security onto a disputably tokenized ATS.
What we found was really interesting. The primitive is the equity. Their equity is freely tradable on an order-matching system. Now, if you don’t understand order matching systems, these are called alternative trading systems that are in a Reg ATS, which my co-founder wrote when he was at the SEC. We know it’s really wild. It’s not a lot different to the liquidity pools you guys deal with. There’s no market makers necessarily.
So when XY Labs allowed the free trading of their actual equity, the tokenized equity, immediately, there was only sell pressure, and there wasn’t a market maker to come in and buy it. That basically stopped in its tracks almost all other trading of these tokenized equities, these private shares, these primitives, on alternative trading systems and OTC markets, which is a big sheet thing.
What you talk about there is actually what’s now known in the Senate GENIUS Act, which Hagerty introduced in the Senate a couple of weeks ago as one of the two kinds of stablecoins that’s going to be permitted.
It also has an interesting carve-out. What you described has a name, and it’s an awesome name: it’s called an endogenous stablecoin.
The endogenous stablecoin is actually a defined derivative, which is decoupled from the underlying primitive. It’s a coin that captures the income stream, the yield from the yield-bearing primitive. Because it’s decoupled, it can be used as collateral. It can trade freely. Whoever holds the wallet is getting the proceeds, is getting the dividends.
If the underlying company is going great, the yields are increasing, they’re stable yields. It stays stable or it increases in value because it’s variable. Decoupling – having a base hard asset that throws off yield and then creating an endogenous stablecoin, which sits on top but is freely tradable, and you can Wormhole that stuff
I want to thank Gamma Prime for throwing this thing. In this market, Web3 hedge funds that can navigate this volatile environment – volatility is how people make money. This is a great hedge fund environment. You should talk to these guys. These instruments – both the primitives and the derivatives – are going to be successfully bought and sold. They’re digital twins, and there’s so much great opportunity. Even in a regulated context, this is exciting.
Tyler
One hundred percent. This is the biggest development in the RWA space. All three of us have been doing this since the late teens, 2017, 2018, and there have been numerous false starts. But this, to me, is the flywheel moment where we get beyond treasuries.
Brandi
I’m excited for my fund to be able to sit – not all of my portcos have to go IPO – where we can have liquidity within them. That’s important for sure. And having these types of platforms to do it on.
Tyler
You mentioned Wormhole. Big fan of Wormhole. I was sitting at Breakpoint in Singapore when Wormhole came out and announced the collab with Securitize. That was probably the biggest thing that got announced. It got some publicity, but I think it deserved more. Splice is a Wormhole recipient where we’re currently working on getting multi-chain assets into the same decentralized ETF.
How do you guys see Wormhole? They had the hack a couple of years ago. It seems like they’ve really doubled down and rebuilt on a stronger foundation. How do you see the Wormhole team being instrumental in this new RWA ecosystem with permissionless assets?
Dave
It depends on whether you’re dealing in actual layer one primitives or whether you’re dealing with the endogenous stablecoins. If you’re a trading desk and you want to be able to balance really quickly, you’re going to want to move between where your safety is. You’ll want to do it low slippage, instantaneous, and not have a lot of crazy bridging.
As far as Wormhole goes, I don’t see it as an element for tokenized primitives, but I do see it as a way that if you have that tokenized endogenous stablecoin, which is written effectively in a layer two but coded in a layer one, you should be able to Wormhole that. That means working with five different chains that we tokenize things in.
People have a deep focus on layer ones. It’s a distraction. You don’t need more layer ones, but you need more ability to move between layer ones.
Brandi
I agree. I wouldn’t add anything else to that.
Tyler
I cringe whenever I see a new layer one being launched at this point in time, but that’s a different topic.
So we’re coming up close to the end of time. By far the biggest success in RWA has been tokenized treasuries. But that’s a boring asset, and it’s also a small fraction of overall capital markets that can be put on-chain.
Next after treasuries, what asset class are you most excited about? Where do you think we’ll see the most demand?
Brandi
For me, it’s going to be in the energy space, because the data centers – the energy that’s powering the data centers to power everything we’re doing in this room – I think that’s important.
Dave
It’s definitely real estate. I love energy, but…
Brandi
Real estate is energy, because you can’t get energy unless you have the real estate.
Dave
The reason why real estate is exciting is that if you’ve got a performing real estate asset, it’s throwing off a 7% plus coupon, sometimes 9%, sometimes 11% or 12%. It’s got great disclosures. It’s also not subject to the Fed suddenly changing interest rates.
Because the endogenous stablecoins in the Senate bill do not need to be pegged one-to-one, you don’t have to worry about instant redemption, which is in the bill for payment stablecoins. Real estate is in a dire state right now, but a lot of it performs, and it’s yield-bearing. That may be boring, but it’s going to produce a lot of endogenous stablecoins because it’s performing.
Tyler
Yeah, I think if we had more time, the next thread would be yield-bearing stablecoins and how that interacts with PayFi. That could be one of the biggest flywheel drivers – people actually using these things in payments.
But I think we are at time. So I just want to thank our panelists today. Great discussion for a somewhat dry topic, occasionally, but now probably one of the most important topics in the space.
Dave
If you hire, you don’t have to join the Navy. You can be a privateer, which means you get all the fun stuff without being a pirate or Navy.
So let’s be privateers.
