You Cannot Outsource Risk

Yeah, look, I will always say this coming from prime. You cannot outsource risk uh and you cannot outsource, you know, liability. I think in crypto, we often try to bring tradi to us. You know, it's like how do we teach them about web 3 and bring them to us and realistically what I think is going to happen is we're actually going to come to them and we are going to take their assets um and we're going to meet them in the middle. And that's where I think you're seeing a lot of the vault um infrastructure providers like ourselves start to b build out feature sets that are very you know traditional financeoriented because we have to service those users now that's the next wave look I every single week someone tells me that 2026 is the year of the vault and I couldn't agree more and every single traditional finance you know organization that has a defi desk or a crypto desk is looking at vault you know point blank DeFi works.

It has survived multiple cycles and there's an enforcement mechanism where you don't have to trust some of that, you know, trust me bro counterparty risk um pieces that you kind of see in the space. Unfortunately, yeah, adoption is real. It's happening. So, very excited year for 2026 and most vaults lock you into one strategy type such as lending, liquidity provision, or basis trading. But what if vaults could be multi strategy portfolios that deploy anywhere yield exists?

Upshift has emerged with a modern thesis. Vaults should become the default way to access DeFi yield, evolving from simple lending to complex multi strategy products. Their goal is to make onchain finance as capital efficient as centralized finance. This means building web3 infrastructure that allows all onchain financial assets to interact and collateralize against each other through one universal margin account. I'm Dylan Hansen from DIA and today we're talking with Ya Canurovich, CEO and co-founder of Upshift Finance.

A welcome to Beyond Yield. Okay, thank you for joining us for Beyond Yield. It's great to have you here. Um before we actually get into anything, how's it going? How's your day been?

>> It's good. It's busy despite these Marcus. It's busy for us. >> Good. That's always good.

It's always busy means um progress. So, I think that that's a that's always an important thing. >> Busy is better than bored. So, we'll take it >> 100%. Um so, let's kick it off before we get into Upshift in August.

Um love to get a brief background on yourself, like history of your journey. How did you where were you before? What were you focused on and passionate about? and kind of what were the market gaps or opportunities that led you to see you know to co-found um upshift? >> Yeah, so my quick background started my career in crypto back in I believe it was 2017 um at Panta Capital and that was during the boom and bust of the ICO bubble as well as the investment into a number of different liquidity providers that were segregated by geography.

And you started as I was leaving Panta to see a bit of that aggregation happening. And so you had a number of local exchanges. Um but it was still very fragmented to buy and sell Bitcoin even in size, impossible to do in size, but also you know very difficult to do in your local geo. Um and so then I joined Falcon X and the goal there was um you know how do we create this aggregation layer of liquidity so that someone can come in and buy you know $10,000 $1 million worth of Bitcoin without crazy amount of slippage. And in order to do that you had to aggregate all of the exchange liquidity as well as OTC desk liquidity.

And so uh my journey started as part of the founding team of Falcon X. um built out the sales and trading arm there as well as a number of different biz uh dev offerings for the firm um and product lines and left after the company raised its series D in 2022. I had a lot of concerns with, you know, the way that CFI is not necessarily transparent and it's hard to, you know, really understand what your counterparty risk to different firms. Um, and obviously, you know, everything that happened with Rio's posting the same form of collateral across multiple desks, very similar to what Archaos did in traditional finance, um, was a big red flag. And for me, what I thought and knew to be true was that DeFi works.

it has survived multiple cycles and there's an enforcement mechanism where you don't have to trust some of that you know trust me bro counterparty risk um pieces that you kind of see in the space unfortunately um come in whenever there's a bull market so my focus I got very lucky I left Falcon X a month before FTX happened to double down on bringing a lot of that prime infrastructure on chain really focus on a smart contract that does cross margin so how do we take multiple assets multiple positions lend against it in a capital efficient way and make DeFi as capital efficient as CFI while still protecting that peer-to-peer, you know,ness. Um, we, you know, raised at an interesting time. It was the week that FTX collapsed and happened, got very lucky, closed a term sheet the following week and, uh, definitely lost a lot of years of my life um, then, but, you know, it was an interesting time to really double down and build on something that the industry clearly needed, um, and was just proven true, unfortunately, with FTX. And so um it really was how do we build you know infrastructure to bring back the lenders in the space because at the time after FTX people are like we are not touching this um ecosystem. This is absolutely not safe investment.

Uh and you know I would say 2023 was a really tough year to be building in crypto. Um and so you know we built that scaled onboarded clients and we actually had in 2024 clients ask us hey there's this new thing called vault with the birth of Morpho um that came out and we'd like to see if we can use your infrastructure for actively managed strategies because Morpho was more focused on isolated lending single protocol single asset where we are multi-protocol multiasset uh multi-chain um and so that was a really big focus for us we came to market in 2025 5 with Upshift uh with Kelp, which was a really great partnership. Um learned a lot, grew a lot. They're a fantastic team. Um and was able to scale that from 2025 launch to over 550 million in TVL at peak in Q4.

Um we're roughly flat on that. I think around the 400 mark um since given markets and pricing. Um and yeah, it's been really a tremendous journey in just figuring out, you know, I would say last year the focus for us was really protocol and ecosystem vaults and this year it's all been institutional. >> Yeah. Excellent.

I think that's really unique to your positioning is the relatively is the multistrategy approach that uh upshift takes right in in bulk curation and this is directly tied to the connection between upshift and August. So as I understand upshift is more on the retail side. August is more supporting on the institutional facing side. Can you share with us a high level as the organiz organizational structure of both of these? >> Yeah, absolutely.

So, we have a team that's focused on August and really the process there is a client comes to us if they're looking to trade over 250k in size typically looking to borrow against an asset and then looking for ancillary prime services. So, trading execution uh and so they'll go through a full KYC KYB process. we will either, you know, find them some sort of onchain liquidity to lend um against those assets uh within their portfolio that's closed in a closed ecosystem. Um so overcolateralized lending very similar to a maple structure but over portfolio of assets versus isolated single assets and then for the um other side of the lending we will connect them with other lenders who are comfortable with their infrastructure and can lend against um those assets as well. So I would say that is on the August side um the underlying risk engine monitors for both.

So we have integrations because we need to be able to um calculate the equity of a position and also be able to run liquidations. We're able to analyze over you know I think today we have over 800 assets um across 35 blockchains and over a 100 protocols where we can calculate the price of that asset at any given point in time. We have a risk ladder that calculates liquidation and secondary liquidity for those specific assets always being most conservative. uh and so that ports very well into opshift which then is also focused on NAV calculations, vault and equity P&L calculations and so forth. So you get a lot of seamlessness between the two just by the nature of the underlying calculations.

>> Yeah, there's a lot to dive into. I want to go deep into your outlook on RWAS and tokenized assets that you mentioned you guys are now very much focused on. Um but I want to take a step back and one thing that's always interesting for me is uh and I'm asking a lot of teams this is you know to what extent is all of this due diligence done in-house versus relying and utilizing external thirdparty infrastructure um resources like you just mentioned eight so many different what over 800 assets you guys are constantly monitoring and um you know analyzing the yield the nav redemption redeemability of assets. What does this look like kind of behind the hood for you guys as it relates to the due diligence process inhouse versus also utilizing what's available uh through third parties? >> Yeah, look, I will always say this coming from Prime, you cannot outsource risk uh and you cannot outsource, you know, liability um of, you know, something going uh not being priced properly or not having the proper secondary liquidity.

And so one of the things that we look for example on the vault side um when we look at different curators or vault strategies, deposit assets and so forth is what is the secondary liquidity for that specific asset. Um if someone if we think you know vault's going to go from you know for us a minimum is at least like 50 million but let's say call it starts off with 10 million what's the onchain you know secondary liquidity for that also what is the concentration risk of the wallet holders of that specific asset do are we able to have direct mint and redeem um with the company and then the other thing that we look at is we also leverage a lot of the prime desks and their compliance teams and so we can ask different exchanges and different prime desks that we're on boarded with hey do you service this asset And typically the answer will be yes or no. Here's you know kind of the overview from their compliance team as to why. And so we go through a lot of that due diligence and honestly that helped us avoid the stream finance situation. So you know we knew the team um we didn't work with them on a vault.

Uh we also didn't have any of our vaults uh exposed to stream assets nor elixir assets. Um and so you know all of that was very intentional. And so when we think about recursive looping and um especially on some of these assets that aren't necessarily top not even like tier one tier two tier three but just you know completely at the bottom of the barrel longtail assets um that's you know really important because at the end of the day when you platform um these specific tokens, assets, strategies, you are marketing them inherently to some sort of user, right? Um and so at least we take the position that you take on some responsibility when you do that. >> Absolutely.

And and when you're referencing liquidity here, you're looking at onchain liquidity of course, but to get back to your kind of um what's next for you guys as we look into tokenizing assets, um private credit and other types of demand for like traditional financial assets being brought and utilized on chain. How does that look from a liquidity perspective? you can't really have onchain liquidity for private credit as I high level understand it. So how are you guys looking through that? >> Yeah, look I think there are things that should be tokenized and things that should not be tokenized and this goes back to like you know 2018 ICO cycle, right?

when there are things that um are natively digital and belong onchain and then you know you struggle um in general when you take something that is traditional finance or not digital and try to tokenize it and bring it on chain into a 24/7 market right you get duration mismatch you get liquidation unlock issues you get zero secondary liquidity um and then you try to put a you know 24/7 lending market on top of it and so obviously you're going to have a lot of issues um just naturally with that and so you know one of the things that we've been exploring is realistically like we view lending as a very initial first step and clear product market fit for crypto. Um in that you know if you look at overcolateral overcolateralized lending in the traditional market sense it's a very small percentage of you know overall markets larger markets is the repo market short-term repo. So, um, if you think about it, it's people trying to get in and out of assets overnight, over weekends, um, between, this is just, you know, assets that don't trade 24/7. Ideally, these assets over time will be printed, tokenized, traded, etc. on chain, but that will take time.

And so, really, realistically, what needs to happen is there needs to be a true short-term repo facility, an instant redemption facility on chain for these specific assets until we get there. And that's something that we're, you know, doubling down on. I think because of our prime background, we think about these financial primitives inherently in terms of how do you safely trade something in and out in size, right? And we're not talking like $10,000 here and there, but how does an institution who wants to trade tokenized equity basis, how is how are they able to do that when you know the 247 liquidity per ticker is $5 million? Um, you obviously have issues with a 20, you know, an 9 to5 trading asset, 9 to4 trading asset trading 24/7 on per market.

you know, how do you solve some of these very interesting liquidity needs? And so, we are working on that. Um, you know, whether you call it a vault or really just a smart contract that's enforcing the liquidity for those assets, um, you can, the nomenclature, I think, doesn't really matter, but we are really doubling down on those financial primitives. And it all really starts taking a step back to your question. You have to securitize and tokenize those assets, but you also have to figure out who wants to trade these assets and why, right?

>> Do they not already have access to it today? And if they don't, is there outsized um demand for those assets? So, something interesting that's come up this week in just conversations we've had, people, yes, they want US equities because maybe they can't get access to them, but they also want local equity markets. Um so whether, you know, specifically in Asia, um they also want, you know, specific fund structures, um ETFs, index funds, like we're finally getting to that level of curation. Um, and I think that's going to be very interesting for this next wave of institutionalization.

>> It's it's it's really exciting and I'm always curious kind of what from your internal perspective dictates whether or not to include an asset in a in from the curation side. Um, you know, like what what do you think leads to the decision for curators to include an asset within specific strategies or not? Is it is it demand for capital efficiency for these assets as you just suggested? Um or does it go deeper than that? I'm I'm always curious like what are the leading uh kind of criteria behind decision-m behind for curators?

>> Yeah, I mean look, we work with some truly excellent curators out there who have an entire risk framework for underwriting every single asset that they touch and you know to a point where sometimes we're asking them to support an asset and they're like absolutely not. So um that is a really good push pull that you get from you know a BD team and a risk team. Uh, but I would say, you know, a lot of it is very similar to what I mentioned in terms of the risk underwriting that we do. And they go a little bit deeper. I would say there are some curators that are exceptional at private credit and just credit markets.

And so they're constantly looking at wall concentration. Um, they're looking at having direct relationship with each of the individual teams. Uh, like I said, direct mint and redeem. Um, and also understanding like specifically on the smart contract sense, how is the company built? what's the underlying equity yield and corp structure uh of each of these assets.

Um and then we have you know clients who are or curators that are exceptional at you know um aggregating curation across number of ex um excuse me chains. And so for us you know by in the nature of being multi-protocol but also multi-chain by supporting 35 chains. I believe we're the only ones that are live on Salana today. You know we have to partner with curators who are also equally exceptional at being able to underwrite all of the risks across these different chains. And so um yeah we're very lucky to work with some exceptional curators.

Uh, I know it's always a very spicy market. You know, curators will try to compete for a lot of these deals, but the market is huge and um we think there's room for everyone and you know, there's definitely niches of curators who offer really exceptional unique strategies for certain asset types. Yeah, I want to spend some time to go back into Upshift as an uh as an institutional grid infrastructure platform essentially for not only August but curators to come and deploy vaults. Um we had a quick chat about this before before we jumped on here but I always find it to be an interesting discussion you know to put it like that uh between the security requirements or rather um who's responsible for the security uh whether it be the vault platform itself or the curator themselves the trade-off there between responsibility is super interesting. Um you see that there is per permissionless very open-source uh essentially markets on which curators can come and list anything.

How do you guys look at this especially with such an institution focus? >> Yeah, it's a really great question and I'll actually break it down into uh two-party versus three-party relationships. Two-party relationship is between the curator and the infrastructure provider. And on the two-party relationship, the infrastructure provider is technically the one that's responsible for deposit flows in and out. you know, making sure that redemptions run properly.

Um, integrations into all the underlying um, chains and protocols are seamless. And then, of course, nav calculation is very, very important and very differentiated. Most vault providers that we've seen do self-reported nav, which we think is pretty insane. In traditional finance, you would never have the fund admin be the same as the trading desk. Um, those two have to be separated.

So, um, I would say those fall under the jurisdiction of the infrastructure provider. Now there's also the question of um all of the things the curator is trading for example whether or not those fall within the regulatory um requirements of the infrastructure provider and of course also if it runs through just you know integration nav and risk of the infrastructure provider. I will say I think we tend to be a little bit more um hands-on in our approach to whether or not we think a curator should touch a specific asset. Um, again to be fair, we have worked with curators that are equally on that same risk caliber as we are. So there has rarely been a time where a curator has brought us an asset and we've said no, we actually do not agree with this.

Um, and we, you know, think that this fails, uh, a compliance and risk review and here's our reasoning for why. Um, and so we're not, you know, we're not going to be comfortable being able to put this on, you know, the front end um, in the specific vault. And but again like I can say it has happened on you know uh less than five times and so um we really pride ourselves in the curators that we work with. Um with regards to that now when there's a three-party that's where it becomes a little bit trickier because you're working with a curator the infrastructure provider and now a protocol or ecosystem. Um and typically the vault itself is created as an ecosystem vault um which is meant to provide liquidity to the ecosystem and really like help stand up you know secondary liquidity markets um on lending desks um other you know ecosystem report codes and that's where it gets a little bit uh trickier because typically with these vaults you do not want to be more than you know 20 to 30% of the liquidity in pool um because suddenly you are the concentration risk and so in a lot of these instances is you'll get direction from these protocol and ecosystems which will say hey we want to direct and be now 100% um of this uh liquidity pool and I will say that's typically where you get a lot of push pull um between the infrastructure provider the curator and the protocol and it really depends on what the structure is there and kind of who holds the responsibility for underwriting the smart contract um the due diligence on the team um as well as driving the decisions for those specific um you know call it uh investments or um asset allocation.

And so I would say that's where it's been a little bit trickier, but um and that's at least where we've had to get a little bit more involved. >> Yeah, very clear. Um I think that's super exciting and one of the things you touched on that clarifies for me is that you're working very specifically with certain curators. It's not just anybody who can claim to be a curator that can list a creative vault on Upshift. um this is a select due diligence process even into the curator themselves.

Is that correct? That that are essentially creating vaults on the platform. >> Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean look, we have to KYC the team. Um we have to know the team.

We take rough, you know, checks on them. We have to actually see that they've traded something historically in the past. We actually typically for all of the vaults that you see on our platform, there'll be a sandbox. They have to test it. we have to make sure that there's actual historical P&L um for those specific strategies uh and then we will scale them up until we will actually list it on our front end.

Um and so yeah, I mean look transparently that's what saved us with stream finance. Um we had a member of the team as to be a curator on the platform. We were not comfortable with that individual's you know background and experience and um weren't comfortable at all with this recursive lending strategy. And uh yeah, I think look the downside is that you haven't seen our TVL go from you know whatever it is and call it like 3 5x but the upside is that our TVL also hasn't gone down 5x as recursive lending blew up. So, um, you know, I think by being sticky and having non- mercenary capital, it also really differentiates us in the distribution conversations that we're having in telling users and these different um, you know, partners, hey, we have sticky capital and the strategies here are not ones where you're just going to go to whoever throws, you know, more incentives and more coins your way.

So, um, I do think that's another differentiation that we'd like to think of. Mhm. One of the one of the aspects you touched on is that vaults, you know, ERC 4626 is not new is but it's recently gained such prominence, right? In the last two years, the curators TVL grew from I think 46 million to I roughly today 7.1 billion um huge growth. I think it's kind of a argument that these vaults are the flagship DeFi product for bringing institutions on chain.

um based on your positioning it would suggest that you believe this to be the case but I want to dive deeper into this. Do you when you have when you're having you know institution facing conversations do you find that this that all the tooling and the transparency the education everything is needed that's needed is available for them or are you still experiencing blockers as it relates to just basically web 3 infrastructure web 3 awareness um do you essentially feel like the floodgates are open for institutions and it's just now you know a matter of onboarding or that you still have blockers in some of these conversations >> look I every single week someone tells me that 2026 is the year of the vault and I couldn't agree more and every single traditional finance you know organization that has a defi desk or a crypto desk is looking at vault you know point blank so what I will say is where is the infrastructure a vault today is a very commoditized asset right it is just a deposit and withdrawal flow as you mentioned just a smart contract for that now what's interesting are the modules that kind of sit around that create the customization and so I would say like where for example we're building towards is you know GAP accounting uh reporting and analysis being able to share our like NAV reporting with you know a top accounting firm like a deote a KPMG and being able to really go through that and accept it and so you know I would say that's really where a lot of the work is being done this year um and you know again it's why vaults the reason is it is cheaper and operationally more seamless um to you know run these strategies in a vault versus doing it with the operational overhead that is required in the traditional sense. And so um it really is in a way a very unsexy but more seamless way to you know squeeze the um costs that a lot of these uh managers have when they produce these assets and share them and u distribute them. Um and what I will say is today I think roughly 50% of liquid financial assets are sitting in managed accounts. So it is a very big market in terms of you know the user base that does not want to actively trade um you know their own assets.

The Robin Hood user will always exist and we may see that number go up and to the right but for the most part you know Robin Hood just added banking. Um you know people want their funds managed and so um I definitely think we're going to see more of that. We're also seeing and love to get your insight on this teams like Fidelity posting hiring job descriptions for DeFi strategies for curation. So we're seeing more t uh traditional financial institutions look into this space. Um love to get your thought on this as you see the competition sorry the competition evolving here.

Do you think that what types of strategies or assets do you think that these institutions will be interested in? Do you do you envision them going as deep into traditional crypto native tokens as um current curators do or like do you see kind of a separation here or that this is just becoming um obviously more competitive due to the growth of this vertical? >> Yeah, I would say look if you know a morpho rates on stables right now tell you anything is that there's way too much cash and not enough use case on chain uh to be able to put that cash to work, right? Um, and so realistically, I don't think that Fidelity is going to come on and start to do like yield farming and recursive lending and point, you know, arbitrage. Um, what I think will likely happen is they're going to tokenize their existing assets.

Real world assets are going to come on chain. They're going to use platforms like securitized and superstate. Um, and you know, then we'll get true repo markets. Uh, we've already seen huge demand for um, tokenized basis uh, on equities, commodity demand. Um, and so I think we'll just see these slowly come into um, you know, the onchain markets and also just become 247 and more readily available.

And so it almost I think in crypto we often try to bring Tradfi to us. You know, it's like how do we teach them about web 3 and bring them to us and realistically what I think is going to happen is we're actually going to come to them and we are going to take their assets um, and we're going to meet them in the middle. And that's where I think you're seeing a lot of the vault um infrastructure providers like ourselves start to b build out feature sets that are very you know traditional finance oriented because we have to service those users now. That's the next wave. Um and so yeah I don't think I mean you know let's see that will be my 2026 bat.

I don't think Fidelity is going to be um a DeFi degenerator but you know you I I'd love to be proven wrong. No, I think that's probably a pretty safe uh bet there. Um, and I want to take a look at this through the lens of the multistrategy portfolios that Upshift and August effectively enable here and dive deeper into this perspective of curators within this. So, are you seeing that curators are really taking advantage of this in effectively implementing multistrategy portfolios as it relates to exposure to different asset classes, not just crypto tokens, right? But literally taking advantage of multistrategy or multiasset exposure and for like you know the the common you know uh web 3 user here can you explain kind of what the edge is here?

Does this increase yield? Does it hedge risk? Kind of what are the benefits of collectively having a portfolio that's more uh exposed and agnostic to the underlying asset class which is within it? >> Sure. Yeah.

So, we actually ran uh this review and I spoke to um a very large exchange treasury manager yesterday who confirmed it, which is um if you take stable coins and you lend those stable coins against Bitcoin and ETH, if you were to do it on mainet with, you know, single protocol versus if you were to do it on let's say Morpho, a Camino, and Jupiter, you would actually get a 2% higher yield return on the diversified portfolio as well as a 40% less var variable rate and the that is very important. Um and so you know at the end of the day there's a reason why you are you know you want to have a risk adjusted return and it's because you don't want single protocol exposure you don't want single chain exposure and you also don't want single rate variability exposure and so you know it really does help having the diversified um exposure and for us it's so important that we are live on all of these different chains because there are uniquely some assets that are launching on just specific chains they're not fully crosschain yet and so by being the bridge and working with curators who know how to trade across those different train uh chains and having the risk systems to monitor risk across those different chains um is a big differentiation both for us and then for the curators we work with. >> Yeah. So, a little bit outside the main uh wheelhouse here, but how are you envisioning chain expansion? Like two years ago, every new week there's a new chain.

It's an exciting time in that regard, but ch is being consolidated. Users are arguably being consolidated. Um what's your outlook for how you mentioned you guys are supporting I think 27 different >> 35 now. >> 35. Exactly.

>> 35. >> What's the future look like for within your kind of you know expectation here? Do you guys see that there's continual new opportunities amongst many chains? Do you see this consolidated? Where's the where's the industry of kind of, you know, multi-chain heading?

>> Yeah. So, look, I think um I do think the future will be multi-chain. I think everyone always thinks that uh that we will consolidate to Ethereum and I'm not actually sure that's true. It is very hard and look we've seen this with everything that's happened with the Ethereum Foundation over the last call it you know one year or a couple months. it is very hard to double down a team, focus on growth, focus on adoption and tailor to a specific subset of users.

And so, you know, we've seen chains that have built exceptional products for payi and remittances. Um, we have seen and trade financing. We have seen um, you know, uh, exchange, excuse me, blockchains that have done an exceptional job with gaming. We've seen blockchains that have done an exceptional job with private credit and that's their niche. We have seen blockchains that have done an exceptional job with, you know, um really high latency trading and HFT um type tooling.

And so I think at the end of the day um and some for RWAS at the end of the day you will still have that separation based off of where chains really doubling down on and what their feature set is best suited for because you know it's not always the same across these different companies and niches and so um being crosschain is just going to continue to be you know most important. Now from the user perspective I don't think they care right and so when you think about how do we always talk about this how do we abstract that layer away and you know the crypto experience is the worst UI ever we still have not managed to do it and so really what I think is going to happen is you're just going to continue to plug into more of these distribution paths which is exchanges neo banks wallets and they will be the abstraction layer and then on the back end you'll have you know infrastructure like us that are really operating the pipes to allow you to do that very similar to you know Falcon X um which abstracted away all the liquidity pipes across OTC desk exchanges prime desks whatever it was high net worth individuals um and could plug their liquidity into like a you know a PayPal um so it's just an abstraction layer so I think it's very similar but um for on you know more onchain uh assets >> I completely agree with that I'm seeing more and more in the everyday discussions um kind of distinctions amongst chains unique uh architectural designs and decisions of moving or pivoting away from just general agnostic uh all use case type of smart contract platforms. So I think it's really exciting to see this like you suggested um kind of like the verticalization of individual blockchain networks whether it's RWAS, stables, HFT kind of like um Salana. Well I guess Salana's done quite well at I don't want to narrow them into one category because they've actually disproven that argument. Um, so they've done quite well with RWAS and um a bunch of the >> Okay, that's who I had in mind for HFT2.

So, uh, don't worry, you're spot on. >> Okay. Well, I was I've been like super impressed lately by the amount of teams moving over to Salana um in the RWA space as well. And so, you touched on Salana as one of the um arguably the only platform that's that's supporting this right now on the curation side. Um, I would have >> I would say look I would say Salana is not the only one.

Um there's a lot of other blockchains that are making a push here. Um Monad, Stellar, Ripple. Uh these are, you know, they have a number of really cool things in the works that will be announced this year, but everyone has a specific angle they're focused on, right? Ripple has Ripple prime within road. And so, you know, their bread and butter is margin lending um and cross margin.

And so how do you double down into that and then unlock XRP as a yield source um which is an asset you know so many retail folks have um and then you know Stellar's really doubling down in PayFi um and trade financing remittances I mean it's been phenomenal and such a fun experience to see to your point that verticalization um but yes I agree with you Solana has done a really good job as well >> also tempo mainet today uh so >> yes >> interesting there >> um we're seeing and not to go too off topic But we saw Kathy Wood announce that she's joining the board of um zero the network that layer zero has announced. So also interesting to see the backing of tradi personas like well you know well reputable people within the trady space actually expressing a vested interest in some of these networks. Um but nonetheless I think I want to kind of wrap and and say first of all thank you for joining us like a wealth of information. I'm going to rewatch and digest a lot more I I assume here. Um and I want to also ask you if there's anything we missed.

I don't want to cut over anything that you want to highlight on Upshift or August that we might have not dove into. >> No, I think look, you were spot on. So, exceptional questioning. Uh you know, we really think of ourselves as multi-chain, multi-protocol, but then institutional and how do we bring, you know, the vault infrastructure to build other financial primitives. We're excited to be on Salana.

We're excited to be on a number of other chains. This will be a big year for us on announcements. And then shout out to the layer zero team. We all of our uh tokens are often doing there too. So uh yeah, it's been fun to work with other teams that are just um really grinding it out and uh going after the multi-chain thesis in the way that we are and yeah, adoption is real.

It's happening. So very excited year for 2026 and vault. >> 100%. It's great to have optimism. Um I love it actually.

It's funny like at the crypto I was in ETH Denver a couple weeks ago. It was a very kind of bearish sentiment. Um and I find it a very interesting dichotomy between like dichotomy between web 3 sentiment and institutional facing sentiment. It seems like you see what Kathy would and and some of these kind of >> yeah larger institution people are saying and they're very bullish. Um but web 3 sentiment is like uh oh we're in a bare market for a couple months.

So I think I'm personally an optimist on kind of the structure right now. Um, and great to see vaults and curation as a tool to bring in more adoption, accessibility to users, and not just crypto native tokens, but um, you know, multiasset strategy. So, thank you for joining us. Last thing I've got for you is where can people go to like kind of keep up with what's coming for you guys and explore the vaults? >> Yeah, absolutely.

So, um, my, uh, my Twitter is a YA_cantor, KA N T O R. And then I believe our, I should know this off the top of my head, but, um, Upshift Finance is our, uh, Telegram for Upshift as well. And then Upshift. Finance is our website. Um, please engage with us in Discord, uh, Twitter or X, um, whatever it might be.

Telegram. We also have a Telegram chat. So, uh, love to hear feedback from users. Always looking to build new things. definitely reach out and um if you're interested in vaults tech or whatever it might be uh and we're always hiring so if um you know you want a job uh in the 2026 year of vaults definitely looking to bring folks on board.

>> Nice. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for joining and and diving deep with us today and um thank you for everybody who tuned in to this episode of Beyond Yield. We'll see you on the next one. Cheers.

Thanks.