Ep. 739 The Crypto Data Company Powering Wall Street’s Digital Asset Push

Josh Frank, founder and CEO of The Tie, runs a roughly 100-person crypto data company that operates a terminal and API suite positioned as a Bloomberg or FactSet equivalent for digital assets, serving hedge funds, asset managers, venture capital firms, banks, market makers, and OTC desks.

The Tie has expanded beyond data into events, identifying a gap between protocols and institutions that Frank compared to the role sell-side research conferences play in traditional capital markets. The company's Out East summit, held at the North Fork of Long Island and invite-only by design, explicitly excludes sales and business development attendees. Recent participants included representatives from Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, Invesco, Galaxy, and Coinbase.

The company has pursued three acquisitions to broaden its model. It acquired Staken, a staking business managing approximately two billion dollars in assets under delegation, on the rationale that staking providers offer undifferentiated rates and uptime, so bundling staking with data and events creates incremental value. It also acquired StakingRewards.com, which draws roughly one million visitors per year, with plans to expand it into DeFi yield, real-world asset yield, and a broader yield-focused platform. A third acquisition, Liquidity Land, helps DeFi projects raise total value locked by offering users incremental yield incentives funded by protocol bootstrap capital, and has collectively helped projects raise over 100 million dollars in TVL. The Liquidity Land deal closed in approximately 100 days from first conversation. Frank indicated the company may pause further acquisitions for three to six months and noted a pending public announcement withheld for regulatory reasons.

Frank argued that the most underappreciated near-term opportunity in crypto is converting tokens into equity, not the more commonly discussed reverse direction. He identified several structural failures in token-based governance. Protocol founders typically hold only 2 to 3 percent of tokens, meaning a founder at a 50 million dollar market cap controls roughly 100 thousand dollars worth of tokens and faces little financial cost to leaving. Token structures also prevent founders from expanding employee option pools through dilution the way equity companies can. A foundation holding 5 percent of tokens at a 100 million dollar market cap controls only 5 million dollars, which is insufficient if 10 million in capital is needed. Buyback pressure from token holders forces early-stage protocols to return capital rather than reinvest in growth, and Frank noted that buybacks frequently do not result in token price appreciation.

The conversion structure Frank described would bring the top 5 to 10 token holders directly onto an equity cap table, place holders ranked 10 through 100 into an SPV, and buy out remaining token holders at a premium to the current token price, for example at 1.05 dollars if the token trades at 1.00 dollar. After conversion, founders and employees would receive new common stock and a new employee option pool would be issued. Tokenized equity would then be issued to allow broader investor access. Frank argued tokenized equity is a superior instrument to a governance token because equity holders have legal protections whereas token holders have no investor rights and are exposed to rug pulls.

Several constraints limit where this structure applies. It is not relevant for L1 protocols with a native gas token and is most applicable to DeFi, real-world asset, and AI projects with real revenue. Current regulatory restrictions also limit the ability to move token holders directly into tokenized equity. Because tokens are classified as property and cannot legally be destroyed, the original token would continue to exist in parallel after conversion, effectively becoming a meme coin. Frank said an announcement related to this concept from The Tie is expected within a couple of weeks and emphasized the goal is to ensure token holders receive at least as much value as their tokens are worth at the time of conversion.