Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️
“The next cycle is gonna be defined by on-chain asset management and what does it mean to be a fiduciary for your customers on chain.”
My guest this week is Anthony Bassili, who runs Coinbase Asset Management. He spent a decade at BlackRock selling institutions the most traditional products in finance, the iShares pension business. Now he sells the same institutions Bitcoin and digital asset strategies. We recorded this deep in the bear market, with Bitcoin down roughly 50% from its November 2025 peak of $126,000.
His big idea is simple. The last cycle settled whether a token is a security. The next one settles a harder question: what does it mean to manage other people’s money on-chain? Whoever answers that first gets to manage the money.
About Anthony Bassili: Anthony Bassili runs Coinbase Asset Management, the institutional asset management arm of Coinbase. He spent ten years at BlackRock in the iShares pension business before joining Coinbase in 2021 with a simple pitch: pensions should hold Bitcoin. He led Coinbase’s institutional business before moving over to run the asset manager, where his team’s backgrounds span BlackRock, Millennium, AQR, and Bridgewater. He is the author of “Get Off Zero,” a paper urging every investor to hold at least a small Bitcoin allocation. He is active on X at @smartestbeta.
“You’re not gonna catch the low. You just need to start allocating and do it consistently over time.”
Why this matters: Bitcoin peaked at $126,000 in November 2025 and is down about 50%. The October 10 leverage wipeout took out $25+ billion and started this bear market. Meanwhile, the incumbents aren’t waiting for the recovery: JPMorgan announced vaults on Kinexys, Grayscale announced on-chain asset management, Bitwise is in, and Anthony expects Fidelity and everyone else to follow. The fight over who gets to be a fiduciary on-chain is starting now, in the bear market, exactly when nobody is watching. This is the map.
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🎯 Jump to the best parts
00:00 The Next Big Crypto Opportunity
01:00 Anthony B.'s Journey from BlackRock to Coinbase
02:11 Is This a Good Time to Buy Bitcoin?
07:16 The Fat Protocol Thesis Is Dead?
08:36 Where Does Crypto Value Actually Accrue?
12:00 How Bitcoin Yield Works
18:07 Coinbase's Stablecoin Credit Strategy
23:08 Managing Onchain Credit Risk
26:21 The Future of Onchain Asset Management
32:56 What Regulators Need to Fix
35:08 When Bitcoin Became a Real Asset Class
39:23 Lightning Round
40:03 What Anthony B. Is Excited About for 2027
40:15 Stablecoin Credit vs Tokenized Treasuries
40:19 Crypto's Most Underrated Narrative
41:51 Where to Learn More
Important Links
Coinbase Asset Management: https://www.coinbase.com/institutional/asset-management
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🔒 The full breakdown is for subscribers
Our biggest takeaways from this conversation
1. The next cycle is on-chain asset management
The last four years were spent arguing whether a token is a security. The Clarity Act is codifying the answer. Anthony says the next fight is bigger: what does it mean to be a fiduciary on-chain?
“The next cycle is gonna be defined by on-chain asset management and what does it mean to be a fiduciary for your customers on chain.”
The test case is DeFi vaults. Lenders park stablecoins permissionlessly, and the dollars get allocated against collateral through smart-contract rules written by engineers. Is that discretionary asset management, with fiduciary duties and custody rules? Or just technology, user beware? Nobody knows yet.
Hester Peirce’s recent comments on vaults opened the dialogue without settling it. Anthony’s read: that alone is progress. “We did not think that we’d get that kind of treatment back in the Gensler era.”
The incumbents aren’t waiting: JPMorgan announced vaults on Kinexys, Grayscale announced on-chain asset management, Bitwise is in. “Everyone recognizes in the asset management community from BlackRock down that we need vault infrastructure.”
Expect the old fight to reignite: “not your keys, not your coins” collides directly with “if you want risk management, I need discretion over some of your assets.”
What to do with this: vaults are a settled technology and an unsettled legal category. Watch the fiduciary framework, not the tech. That’s where the next cycle’s winners get decided.
Related reads:
→ Banks went onchain
2. Coinbase’s stablecoin fund is 80% off-chain
In April 2026, CBAM launched CUSHY, its stablecoin high-yield credit strategy. Investors subscribe with stablecoins, and the fund shares are tokenized by Superstate on Base, Solana, and Ethereum mainnet. The crypto-native wrapper hides a very traditional core, and that’s the point.
“Everything in crypto is floating rate.”
On-chain and off-chain credit are two parallel worlds that haven’t intersected. On-chain: floating rate, transparent, crypto-backed (staking, lending pools, basis-trade products). Off-chain: fixed rate, longer duration, wrapped in funds that don’t work on-chain.
There isn’t enough high-quality credit on-chain to fill a fund that wants to be billions. So the portfolio is 80% traditional structured credit (CLOs, trade finance, asset-backed securities, receivables) and 20% tokenized, diversified across hundreds of names with 90 to 100 day liquidity.
The core tenet: only work with originators, like Apollo, that are on a tokenization pathway. When the two worlds connect, CBAM can hold the tokenized or the traditional version of the same asset and arb the spread between them.
And on-chain leverage cuts both ways. Looped positions in tokenized credit can unwind and force selling: “I may choose to just wait for the unwind to happen in the on-chain market and then go in and buy everything at a discount.”
What to do with this: treat the 80/20 as a live gauge of tokenization’s real progress. When that ratio flips, the two credit worlds have actually merged. Until then, the alpha is in straddling both.
Related reads:
→ Same loans, better rails: the tokenized private credit opportunity
3. Tokens are cheap equity, and that’s why protocols don’t earn
Two weeks before this episode we published our case that the fat protocol thesis is dead: ten years on, value hasn’t accrued to the base layers. Ethereum earned about $1,500 from Robinhood’s launch on $600 to 700 million of daily volume. I put the thesis to a man whose employer is the strongest counterargument, the biggest distribution platform in crypto.
“It’s very cheap equity. It’s probably the lowest cost of capital financing you could utilize.”
His explanation of why protocols don’t earn is the sharpest I’ve heard: tokens aren’t a business model, they’re financing. Protocols pay customer acquisition costs with tokens created out of thin air, granting distribution platforms hundreds of millions in tokens for priority access to customers.
TVL grows, usage grows, customers grow. But “where does the revenue switch turn on?” The moment it does, a competitor with a fresh token undercuts you.
And the thesis eats itself: crypto was supposed to be a public good, nearly free. A protocol that captures enormous value stops being the thing it claimed to be.
The direction of travel: “it’s the distribution platforms who have the customer relationship” that accrue value. His honest caveat: jury’s still out. Some once crypto-native protocols are now integrating into fintechs and brokerages serving hundreds of millions of customers.
What to do with this: when you underwrite a token, ask who pays the revenue and who owns the customer. If the answer to both is “someone else,” you’re holding the financing, not the business.
Related reads:
→ There Won’t Be Another Cycle: the fat protocol thesis is dead
