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Amidst the surge in Real-World Asset (RWA) tokenization, Superstate, a tokenized asset management firm led by Robert Leshner—the "Godfather of DeFi" and founder of Compound—has quietly grown into a sizeable key player in the tokenization space, attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment with compliance as its cornerstone.


Author: Nancy, PANews


Tokenization has emerged as a narrative in this crypto cycle that rarely garners respect from Wall Street and approval from regulators. In this RWA boom, Superstate, a tokenized asset management company spearheaded by Robert Leshner—the "Godfather of DeFi" and founder of Compound—has steadily developed into a significant tokenization player with a solid foundation, drawing hundreds of millions of dollars in capital, all rooted in compliance.


Three tokenized products launched, backed by hundreds of millions of dollars

Tokenization is becoming a new growth driver in the global financial market, and the trend of on-chain real-world assets is rapidly gaining momentum. From proof-of-concept to explosive growth on a scale of hundreds of billions of dollars, RWA has attracted major Wall Street players to compete for positions. In this wave, Superstate, founded just over two years ago, has already secured a place in the tokenization market.


Superstate marks another venture for Leshner in the crypto industry. He is more widely known as the founder of Compound, which in June 2020 ignited the liquidity mining craze with its "lending as mining" mechanism, catapulting Compound to the top of the DeFi sector, with its Total Value Locked (TVL) peaking at over tens of billions of dollars.


However, as the DeFi market continued to slump, user activity dropped sharply, capital outflows became evident, and TVL declined steadily, the once thriving on-chain financial ecosystem entered a cooling-off period. Amid this downturn, Leshner chose to leave Compound and turn to the more grounded RWA track, founding Superstate.


When a leading figure in DeFi starts a new venture, venture capitalists are naturally eager to invest. In its early days, Superstate completed two rounds of financing involving well-known institutions such as ParaFi Capital, 1kx, DRW, CoinFund, Galaxy Digital, and Hack VC, with a cumulative amount reaching tens of millions of dollars.


Superstate has a clear positioning: under the U.S. financial regulatory framework, it develops on-chain financial products that are compliant and accessible to institutional investors, linked to real-world assets. Currently, Superstate has launched three tokenized products, covering three major segments—treasury bonds, crypto arbitrage, and stock assets—gradually building a diversified on-chain asset portfolio.


In February 2024, Superstate launched its first on-chain fund product, USTB. On the surface, it is a short-term U.S. Treasury fund, but it is registered with the SEC, fully compliant, and its ownership registration is regulated by U.S. federal laws. Meanwhile, its ownership records exist in token form on Ethereum, with net asset value (NAV) synchronized daily through smart contracts, allowing users to conduct on-chain subscriptions, redemptions, and transaction settlements.


USTB is mainly targeted at qualified institutional investors in the United States, supporting subscriptions and redemptions in U.S. dollars or the stablecoin USDC, and the product circulates on Ethereum, Solana, and Plume Network. Compared with traditional zero-yield stablecoins, USTB provides actual interest returns for on-chain funds while retaining the on-chain liquidity of assets, significantly reducing the opportunity cost of capital.


This design has also made USTB an increasingly important basic income asset for more DeFi protocols. For example, Frax Finance uses it as collateral for its stablecoin system, Omni Network includes USTB in its protocol balance sheet, Sky announced a $300 million investment in it for tokenized asset allocation, Arbitrum and Ethena Labs include it in their RWA portfolios, and the U.S. compliant stablecoin USD' uses USTB as part of its underlying support assets.


As of August 6, the assets under management (AUM) of USTB have grown to nearly $420 million, with a 7-day yield of 4.04%, ranking second only to the likes of Franklin, Ondo, and WisdomTree among tokenized U.S. Treasury funds.


Following the significant success of its first product, Superstate made another move in July 2024, launching its second investment product, Superstate Crypto Carry Fund (USCC). This is an on-chain crypto arbitrage fund for qualified purchasers, with a core strategy based on the "cash and carry" mechanism in traditional finance.


In traditional finance, USCC mainly focuses on the positive basis in the Bitcoin and Ethereum futures markets. By purchasing spot assets and simultaneously selling futures contracts of corresponding maturities, it locks in the spread returns, thereby building a risk-neutral investment portfolio with stable returns. Moreover, USCC also integrates Ethereum staking and short-term U.S. Treasury bonds to improve overall capital efficiency and enhance the portfolio's ability to resist volatility.


It can be said that USCC represents another exploration of integrating on-chain asset composability with off-chain compliance. To date, the AUM of USCC has exceeded $220 million, with an annualized strategy yield of approximately 16.17%, far higher than the industry average of traditional arbitrage products, and it has established partnerships with protocols such as Morpho, Frax, Resolv, Steakhouse Financial, and Anzen.


Laying out tokenized stocks, promoting the compliance process of tokenization

In May of this year, Superstate further expanded its product line, entering the tokenized stock track and launching a new platform, Opening Bell. This platform supports the direct issuance and trading of SEC-registered public stocks on blockchain networks, with the first batch supporting Solana and gradually expanding to more on-chain ecosystems. Investors can directly hold and trade these compliant stock assets through crypto wallets, enabling direct interaction between traditional equity and DeFi protocols. Currently, Opening Bell has collaborated with Upexi, SOL Strategies, Galaxy, etc., to promote the on-chain tokenization of their stock assets.


To drive the adoption of tokenization in the financial market, Superstate also launched the Superstate Industry Council (SIC), which has so far attracted over 50 members from both traditional and crypto sectors, including 1KX, Aave, Uniswap, Solana Foundation, BitGo, Galaxy Digital, Bitwise, Maple Finance, and Plume.


As early as his time at Compound, Leshner saw the trend of integrating DeFi with traditional finance, but progress was hindered by regulatory pressures. Before formally founding Superstate, Compound, in conjunction with Fireblocks and Circle, launched Compound Treasury, a fixed-rate product for enterprises and institutions, which deployed USDC in the Compound protocol with a guaranteed interest rate of 4%, a rate that far exceeded U.S. Treasury yields at that time. However, due to severe fluctuations in the DeFi market, declining yields, and compliance pressures, Compound Treasury was ultimately shut down in the first quarter of 2023.


"The main limitation of DeFi is that crypto-native assets are the only interoperable assets," Leshner stated when launching Superstate. He is very optimistic about the potential of asset tokenization. On multiple public occasions, he has noted that in traditional financial markets, changing asset ownership is a complex and inefficient process. Every change in asset ownership involves a large number of back-office, settlement, and clearing procedures. Tokenization is a more efficient way to record ownership, eliminating cumbersome intermediary links and significantly reducing transaction and settlement costs. In his view, tokenization will become a core trend in future financial markets, introducing various assets such as stocks, bonds, and real estate into the blockchain to achieve a more efficient, transparent, and compliant market structure.


At the same time, Leshner has always regarded prioritizing compliance as a core strategy. He believes that appropriate regulation should not be an obstacle but a tool to make DeFi more inclusive, secure, and widely accepted. The SEC's guidance in the field of crypto assets and security tokenization is gradually taking shape, with multiple guidelines issued and even possible exemptions. It is predicted that by the end of 2025, the security tokenization market will truly take off in a more mature regulatory environment.


Focusing on compliance, Superstate has stepped up its efforts this year. In addition to registering as a transfer agent with the U.S. SEC, aiming to fully integrate tokenized assets into the existing financial regulatory framework, it has also actively promoted breakthroughs in tokenization policies and the establishment of industry standards. For example, a few months ago, Superstate, together with the newly established Washington lobbying organization Solana Policy Institute (SPI), submitted a proposal called Project Open, advocating for the issuance and trading of securities on public blockchains, and submitted relevant legal framework proposals, advocating for allowing traditional assets such as stocks and bonds to be on-chain, and providing specific regulatory exemptions for non-custodial blockchain protocols.


It is worth mentioning that Leshner himself has also actively participated in the current popular crypto-stock gameplay. For instance, he exchanged the NFT CryptoPunk #5577 for preferred shares of GameSquare worth $5.15 million; he also spent approximately $2.03 million to acquire more than half of the shares of the liquor company LQR House Inc., attempting to establish a crypto treasury plan, which once triggered a battle for corporate control.


Disclaimer: The views in this article only represent the author's personal opinions and do not constitute investment advice for this platform. This platform does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, originality, and timeliness of the article information, nor does it bear any responsibility for any losses caused by the use or reliance on the article information.





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