Every crypto-native equity platform starts in the same place: US stocks.
There are good reasons. The liquidity is deepest, the names are globally recognized, the data is cheapest, and the demand is unambiguous. If you're building access to public equities from crypto rails, US stocks are where you begin.
They're also the part of the world that has already been built for.
Every international broker offers them. Every custody chain knows how to hold them. Decades of infrastructure exists to route foreign capital into US markets, because for decades that's where foreign capital wanted to go. The rails are imperfect — they still assume you have a bank that will cooperate — but they exist.
We think the interesting work is everywhere else.
The Harder Half
Korea. Japan. Taiwan. Markets with world-class companies, deep domestic liquidity, and access barriers that have nothing to do with the quality of what's listed.
These are not harder because the companies are obscure. They're harder because each one has its own regulatory perimeter, its own settlement conventions, its own rules about who may hold what and in which currency. Korea is the cleanest example — MSCI keeps it classified as emerging not because of its companies but because the won doesn't move freely offshore. The barrier is plumbing, and plumbing is specific to each building.
Which is why almost nobody does it. There is no generic solution. You cannot write one integration and deploy it across markets the way software normally scales. Each market is its own project, its own compliance work, its own set of partners, its own cost. It's the opposite of leverage.
But it's also where the demand actually is. The investors we serve are largely in Asia, and the markets they most want exposure to are frequently the ones nearest to them — the semiconductor supply chain, the companies whose products are in their homes. Offering them only US stocks solves the easy half of a problem they didn't ask us to solve that way.
So we're building the harder half deliberately, one market at a time, gated by compliance rather than by ambition. Korea is next. More will follow, and we'll announce each when it's real rather than when it's planned.
A Listing Is a Starting Line
Here's the second half of the thesis, and it's the part most people miss.
Most platforms treat "we now support this stock" as the finish line. Ship the listing, add the ticker, move to the next one. Under that model a platform is a menu, and menus compete on length.
We think a stock is raw material.
Once a user holds a real equity position, settled through real infrastructure, that position becomes something you can build on. Financing sits on top of it. Structured products sit on top of it. Yield strategies that exploit pricing differences across venues sit on top of it — we currently have one such product in internal testing, which we'll open to institutional users first and expand only as it proves out. Programmatic access sits on top of it: APIs for people who want to run their own logic, and increasingly agents that execute on a user's behalf rather than a human clicking a screen.
None of that is possible if the underlying position is synthetic, or if settlement is approximate. It's only possible when the equity is real and the plumbing beneath it is sound — which is the unglamorous work again, showing up as a precondition for the interesting work.
Breadth without depth is a menu. Depth without breadth is a niche. The combination is the thing we think is actually valuable, and it's the reason both halves have to be built.
We Don't Presuppose the Shape
One more thing, because it explains how we work.
We started with pure on-chain tokenization. It didn't hold up — not technically, but as a way of actually serving users who want to own things. So we moved to a hybrid: assets and settlement partly off-chain through licensed partners, tokenized representation on-chain where it's useful, with the form chosen by what works rather than by what's ideologically clean.
We expect to change shape again. The current structure is our best answer to the market as it exists in 2026 — not a permanent identity. If the regulatory landscape shifts, or if a cleaner architecture becomes viable, we'd rather rebuild than defend a design we've outgrown.
That sounds like a lack of conviction. We'd argue it's the opposite: the conviction is in the destination — every major market reachable from one stablecoin balance, and everything that becomes possible once it is. The shape is just the current best guess at how to get there.
Takeaway: Starting with US stocks is correct and also insufficient — it's the part of the world that already has rails. The work we think matters is the harder half: markets where access is genuinely broken, built one at a time because there's no way to do it all at once. And then the second half of the work, which is treating a position as raw material rather than a destination. Neither half is impressive on its own. Together they're the difference between a menu and infrastructure.
Next steps
For informational purposes only. Not an offer, solicitation, or investment advice. Forward-looking statements reflect our current views and are not commitments or predictions; market availability depends on regulatory progress and may change. Products described as in testing are not currently available and may not become available. Investing involves risk. Services are not available to U.S. persons or residents of restricted jurisdictions (including Hong Kong).
