A 25-Year TradFi Veteran's Case for RWAs | Chuck Mounts, S&P Global — S1 E3
DeFi Drip Podcast | Tokenized Assets & Onchain FinanceShow Notes
Chuck Mounts spent 25 years covering global banks and sovereigns at Goldman Sachs, UBS, and Merrill Lynch before becoming Chief DeFi Officer at S&P Global. In this 2023 episode he maps out what he sees as the difference between DeFi's evolution phase — reducing friction, streamlining execution — and the revolution that follows: new pools of capital, democratized access, and real-world income onchain at a scale traditional markets have never seen. The end game, in his view, is not a question of if but when.
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Benjamin Sarquis Peillard, founder and CEO of Cap, argues DeFi yield has been circular from the start. Bitcoin-backed lending, basis trading, inflationary tokens: on his read, the returns come from crypto paying crypto. Cap connects onchain capital to the productive economy through unsecured credit, the largest credit market in the world, and one DeFi has never been able to touch.
DeFi lending has always run on crypto-native collateral. Jonathan Han, CEO of Euler Labs, argues that's a structural problem — correlated assets move together in a downturn, creating cascading liquidations. RWAs fix that by providing a critical layer of diversification.
Vaults started as a yield product for DeFi users. Jeroen Offerijns, CTO at Centrifuge Labs, and Frederik Gartenmeister, Head of Product at Centrifuge Labs, argue they're becoming the core primitive that enables any financial product — funds, ETFs, securitizations — to run natively onchain.
Jonathan Casterline, Product Manager for Digital Assets at Van Eck, discusses where the firm goes next in tokenization. Van Eck holds roughly $4 to $5 billion in digital assets, primarily within the ETF space.
RWAs can be used as collateral onchain. That part is proven. Sebastian Pulido, Director, Institutional & DeFi Business, at Aave Labs, argues the harder problem is what comes next: market structure, liquidation speed, and getting tokenized assets into the hands of investors who will never touch a Web3 wallet.