Diego Perez de Ayala: Wall Street Is Going Onchain (Frictionless)

Diego Perez de Ayala argues that crypto’s strongest revenue over the past five or six years has come from trading and capital-markets activity, rather than decentralized consumer apps. He defines Wall Street as the functions of originating, warehousing, pricing, clearing, transferring, underwriting, and insuring risk—not merely the assets being traded. Tokenization has begun putting those assets onchain, but the financial functions that make markets work are still early.

Perez de Ayala sees onchain market making and order matching as ways to unbundle and improve those functions. He cited Solana spot execution outperforming Binance VIP 9 and Hyperliquid Plat 6, and said market structure can matter more than whether a venue is permissioned. Assets and order flow, in his view, will gravitate toward platforms with better execution, borrowing costs, and lending rates.

Backpack is bringing real NASDAQ shares onchain in redeemable form: tokens can be exchanged for the underlying shares and transferred to platforms such as Robinhood or Interactive Brokers. Backpack has minted SpaceX shares on Solana, while its portfolio company Titan matches orders and provides best-bid-and-offer pricing before settlement on Solana. Perez de Ayala expects tokenized equities to progress from bringing share supply onchain to enabling lending, margin, collateral use, and more trading.

A Camino vault announced for Backpack security shares would let users borrow against shares while remaining long. Perez de Ayala also described strategies that could combine spot holdings, futures shorts, and lending returns. His broader test for tokenization is whether traditional assets gain distinctive utility or velocity onchain, such as higher APY or productive collateral. He expects existing DeFi tools to help tokenized markets develop faster than crypto did, and believes onchain markets could enable derivatives and trades unavailable in traditional finance.

He compares tokenized capital markets today to 2014–2015, when issuers first brought dollars onto the internet. He expects the next stage to follow stablecoins: dollar holders will buy US-denominated assets, then lend, borrow, and use them. He said stablecoins exported the dollar over the internet, reaching 99 percent market share in digital currencies and generating more than $30 billion in Treasury demand. Tokenized securities trading was described as initially operating 23–5, with an eventual move to 24/7 expected; the discussion also cited Blockworks reporting 10–40x better fills for tokenized equities on Solana than on Robinhood Chain.

The regulatory opportunity remains uncertain. Perez de Ayala said the window is open but closing, and that agency rules following the failure of “Clarity” are preliminary rather than law. He expects licensed firms to connect centralized and decentralized finance, with unlicensed firms potentially paying for access, and anticipates a rush to secure licenses and build traction before a change in government. The discussion left open whether DTC-tokenized securities will trade permissionlessly across chains or stay on DTC-approved infrastructure; the DTC service had gone live after a pilot. Building large-scale onchain finance, the speakers argued, requires both crypto-native expertise in MEV, transaction ordering, trading, and smart contracts, and knowledge of traditional financial functions. Perez de Ayala urged investors to identify one to three protocols whose addressable markets, capital, volumes, and users could expand with tokenization, while noting that traditional finance has had more than 100 years to develop market structure and suggesting some new companies could reach a billion dollars in monthly revenue.