Building the Onchain Brokerage: Glider's Vision for Investing | Brian Huang

Brian Huang co-founded Glider roughly a year and a half ago after stints at Morgan Stanley, a Chicago trading firm he describes as among the most profitable companies in the world per employee, and Anchorage, which provides crypto custody to major institutional clients. Glider is an automated portfolio management tool aimed at retail crypto investors and also operates B2B by embedding investment strategies into partner wallets as a revenue stream, with Base wallet among its current partners.

Tokenized real-world assets on-chain now total 34 billion dollars excluding cryptocurrencies, covering stocks, treasuries, corporate bonds, and mortgage-backed securities. On-chain tokenized stocks specifically represent roughly 2 billion dollars against a US equity market cap of about 60 trillion dollars, or approximately 0.002 to 0.003 percent of that market. Huang describes tokenization growth as parabolic at the current moment, and 92 percent of Glider users are outside the United States, for whom the platform serves as their primary access point to US assets like stocks and treasuries.

Glider is building toward what Huang calls an onchain brokerage experience comparable to Fidelity, which he says does not yet exist. No platform today strips away gas networks, DeFi protocol names, contract addresses, and token versioning complexity for mainstream users. Searching for USDC on-chain can return approximately 32 different versions of the token, and the concept of bridging USDC to USDC is conceptually nonsensical to a normal person. Existing wallets were built for crypto-native users, and Huang acknowledges that crypto-native VCs have normalized friction like MetaMask signing and forgotten it is a barrier for everyone else. He also acknowledges Glider has not yet fully achieved the seamless experience it is building toward.

On the product side, Glider offers direct-indexed ETF construction letting users set assets, weights, and rebalancing frequency from every minute to annually across any asset on any chain. On-chain composability enables actions not possible off-chain, such as automatically selling a bond at a target price into yield-bearing stablecoins or earning an additional 5 percent by lending out Nvidia stock held on-chain. Glider launched lending on Solana where depositing supported assets automatically routes into conservative curated lending products using a default opt-out rather than opt-in model. Glider describes its approach as separating the intelligence layer from the execution engine, building rules-based deterministic automation rather than giving money directly to an LLM, which Huang argues produces no long-term alpha. He cites a project called Banker as a cautionary example of losses caused by letting an LLM decide execution rather than building deterministic rails.

On liquidity for on-chain stocks, Glider works with partners like Ondo that pull liquidity from traditional markets rather than AMM-based models. Ondo has executed on-chain stock trades of approximately 20 million dollar clips without issue. AMM-based on-chain stocks can trade at severe dislocations, with an example of a stock priced at 192 dollars on-chain while trading at 200 dollars on NASDAQ. Huang also notes that permissioned on-chain assets have no DeFi composability and are effectively digital receipt tokens. On-chain stock perpetuals sometimes carry extremely high funding rates making them unsuitable for retail investors, most of whom do not trade on margin and do not understand what margin is.

Glider does not commingle user funds, with each user instance running independently with fully segregated funds, eliminating honeypot risk. Huang cites Drift losing millions of dollars because funds were held in one place as a cautionary example. Funds are held non-custodially protected by the user's seed phrase or an embedded wallet Glider cannot access. Insurance for on-chain vaults is prohibitively expensive, with Huang citing an example where a vault producing 7 percent yield could pay out 6.5 percent of that yield to an insurer, leaving almost no net return. Glider deliberately avoids marketing itself as insured because Huang believes that framing signals risk rather than building confidence.

Huang is skeptical of institutional urgency to go on-chain, arguing that large asset managers already run profitable off-chain businesses and have little incentive to put customer funds at risk. He compares much of the current institutional on-chain activity to AI washing, where tokenizing an asset is technically straightforward but genuine interoperability without full permissioning is where real complexity lies. Looking ahead, Huang sees a future on-chain environment resembling CeDeFi, with centralized issuers, more centralized lending, and greater controls around vaults and lending pools. Glider is planning to launch its own non-custodial audited vaults, is making the product fully chain abstracted so users no longer need to manually bridge between chains, and is moving toward a proactive experience that validates user risk tolerance and surfaces recommendations rather than waiting for users to know what to type.