Questions & Alpha with Alain Kunz

Questions & Alpha: Alain Kunz on Tokenization, RWAs, and the Future of Onchain Markets

Tokenized markets have quickly become crypto's next frontier. Across nearly every major blockchain, projects are racing to bring equities, commodities, fixed income, and other real-world assets onchain, transforming tokenization from a niche experiment into one of the industry's most competitive battlegrounds. In this edition of Questions & Alpha, GSR's interview series spotlighting the people building our business, Head of Strategic Communications Frank Chaparro sits down with Alain Kunz, Head of DeFi & Onchain Markets, to discuss what's driving the momentum, where the market is headed, and how GSR is helping shape the next generation of onchain capital markets.

In this conversation:

• Why tokenized equities and commodities have become the next competitive frontier for blockchains
• How GSR is positioning itself to support the growth of onchain capital markets
• What's next for RWAs, from tokenized vaults and yield products to corporate bonds and fixed income ETFs

Frank Chaparro: What's the dominant trend you're seeing across chains and venues right now?

Alain Kunz: Almost every chain and every venue on a chain is trying to get involved in the real-world asset play. Tokenized equities and commodities are where we're getting approached by foundations across the board. Optimism, Katana, and others all want to set up markets around the major equity indices and commodities, and they're looking for someone to make markets there.

We're having conversations with lighter, faster venues about becoming the primary market maker across all of this. "Real-world assets" is probably too broad a label at this point. What we're really talking about is tokenized equities and commodities. But the broader point stands. 

Everyone onchain is looking to revive the space by bringing these instruments onchain.

Frank Chaparro: RWAs have represented 25–30% of open interest on venues like Hyperliquid. 

How is GSR uniquely positioned to support projects as they roll out tokenized assets?

Alain Kunz: At a high level, it's actually core to what we already do. Running an AMM pool against USDC and SpaceX isn't structurally that different from running one against USDC and ETH. I think GSR has always had a TradFi-adjacent perception. People expect us to have some edge when the underlying instruments are more traditional. That's a reasonable expectation, and one we intend to live up to.

The key enabler for us is hedging. If the tokenized stock or commodity is listed on a reputable exchange, whether that's on a crypto exchange venue or anywhere else, we can set up the pool and hedge our exposure on those platforms. That's the clean version.

The more interesting version involves mint and redeem. If a counterparty can send back the token and take out the underlying share, you get more alpha and tighter pricing. The challenge right now is that doing that on behalf of clients requires a regulatory framework that firms like ours are working on building out.

We also need to build out more traditional brokerage infrastructure that lets us hedge against the underlying equity during market hours. There's also a separate opportunity during the hours when traditional markets are closed but the tokens keep trading 24/7. That's where some of the most interesting pricing dislocations will occur.

Frank Chaparro: What percentage of GSR's traded volume do you think will be USDC pairs with tokenized stocks versus traditional crypto assets in six to twelve months?

Alain Kunz: If we get the infrastructure and licensing right, I'd say somewhere between 5% and 15%. The two constraints are regulatory, meaning being able to do this on behalf of clients, and operational, meaning actually having the setups in place.

On the asset side — without looking at the specific numbers — when you break down which equities actually trade onchain, it's roughly 25 to 30 tickers. Mostly semiconductors and tech. The usual suspects: SpaceX, the Nasdaq, the S&P 500, gold, and silver. Oil had a moment when the war broke out. Suddenly everyone became an oil trader. But that faded.

Frank Chaparro: Beyond RWAs, where are you seeing the most client demand?

Alain Kunz: The second big area is vaults, which sits closer to asset management. As more securities and real-world assets come onchain, someone needs to manage them. Initially you'll have retail participants speculating, but once people accumulate meaningful wealth onchain, they'll want professional management. We saw JPMorgan seed an onchain vault with $700 million last week, investing in stablecoins and U.S. Treasuries. That's a signal.

We're also seeing three or four discussions with U.S. asset managers who want to tokenize mortgage portfolios, both residential and commercial, and put the cash flows into a vault. The product-market fit for yield is still very strong, especially in the current rate environment.

On the advisory side, we're prototyping something we're calling a proof-of-reserve service. If a vault holds assets that partially live offchain, like in the mortgage case, you need an independent party, similar to a fund administrator, to verify that the vault creator is actually doing what they said. That's a role GSR can play.

We're also looking at building our own product with two components: a U.S. Treasury sleeve and a DeFi yield sleeve. The logic is simple. When crypto is hot, DeFi lending and borrowing yields spike because everyone wants leverage. You see yields of 8% to 10% or more. When the market cools, those yields drop below the risk-free rate. A strategy that dynamically allocates between the two regimes, shifting into DeFi vaults when conditions support it and back into Treasuries when they don't, is something we could operate. We could even run our own vault for the higher-returning leg.

Frank Chaparro: Where does the next wave of fixed income tokenization come from?

Alain Kunz: My bet is corporate bonds. A number of teams are working on bringing a broad range of corporate bonds onchain. The pitch is simple: they offer yields above the risk-free rate, they're familiar to retail investors outside the U.S. who often have limited access to them, and they're the kind of asset people intuitively understand. A well-known corporate bond is an easier sell than sovereign debt like German bunds.

After that, I think you start to see fixed income ETFs come onchain. Bond ETFs in traditional finance often have better liquidity than the underlying bonds themselves, so they're structurally easier to make markets in. You don't need to source individual bonds—you just trade the ETF. It's regulated, standardized, and relatively straightforward to support. I could see the five biggest fixed income ETFs making the transition, probably by the end of the year.

Longer term, and this is speculation, I think you start to see smart contract ETFs. If you have enough tokenized equities already trading, you can construct something like a Magnificent Seven token that replicates the index more efficiently than a traditional ETF, simply because you remove intermediaries. Over time, a Magnificent Seven token could outperform the equivalent ETF on structural grounds—not because the underlying assets perform differently, but because the wrapper itself is more efficient.

Frank Chaparro: Any final thoughts?

Alain Kunz: The RWA space is still being figured out. One thing people consistently underestimate is the fragmentation problem. SpaceX on Arbitrum and SpaceX on Optimism are technically the same asset, but if one pool gets cleared out, the prices diverge dramatically across venues. That creates real cross-chain arbitrage opportunities, but also real risk if you're not set up for it.

The other underappreciated issue is that the same underlying, SpaceX, for example, can be tokenized by different issuers with different treatments for corporate actions. Do dividends get paid out or reinvested? What happens during a stock split? Until there's an industry standard, or until one issuer dominates through liquidity, the way Tether won stablecoins, you're going to have fragmentation at the token level too.

Solving those two problems, cross-venue imbalances and token standardization, is what determines whether tokenized equities go from a niche product to the default way people access public markets globally.

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