Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️
Robert Leshner is one of the rare founders who built one of DeFi’s defining protocols, Compound, in 2017 and then walked away from it to do something harder. His pitch was simple: The crypto-native market is capped at $2T. The real prize is the $700T of stocks, bonds, real estate, and private credit still living in spreadsheets. Superstate is the rail he's building to move it.
That’s why he built Superstate. Three years later, that thesis has become a reality and is building the market structure. From BlackRock to Morgan Stanley, all the major U.S. banks and asset managers have entered the space, and the total value of RWAs has crossed $55.7B (excluding stablecoin and repurchase agreement).
“The ceiling for DeFi is too low if all we have are native tokens of other crypto projects. We need the $700T of stuff, of wealth, of assets, of ownership to make its way on-chain.”
About Robert: Robert Leshner is a prominent entrepreneur and investor, serving currently as the CEO of Superstate, a SEC-registered asset tokenisation platform. In 2017, he also founded Compound, the DeFi lending protocol and grew it into one of the largest in crypto, with billions in deposits at peak.
Superstate is now the issuer-led tokenization layer behind two on-chain Treasury and basis funds with roughly $1B in combined AUM and Opening Bell, the platform tokenizing the SEC-registered shares of NASDAQ-listed public companies. On March 24, Invesco took over portfolio management of Superstate’s USTB fund, a $967M tokenized Treasury vehicle. Three weeks later, Invesco invested in Superstate’s $82.5M Series B. This is the first time a global asset manager has plugged into someone else’s tokenization stack instead of building its own.In April 2026,
By the data: The tokenised U.S. Treasuries market crossed $15B in the first quarter of 2026, with USTB now ranking among the 7 largest tokenised Treasury funds globally.
NYSE, NASDAQ, Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance have all publicly committed to listing tokenized securities. The SEC’s Project Crypto initiative is drafting the rules that will define how regulated securities behave on blockchains. And Forward Industries (NASDAQ: FWDI), the largest Solana digital asset treasury company at 6.8M SOL, has ~8% of its public shares now living as tokens on Solana via Superstate’s Opening Bell, actively used as collateral on Kamino.
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🎧 Jump to the best parts
00:00 Why Institutions Came for Tokenization
03:05 What SuperState Actually Does
07:57 How SuperState Differs From Other Players
12:50 Where We Are in the Tokenization Race
17:54 Inside the Invesco Partnership
22:12 What Tokenized Funds Unlock
29:14 Opening Bell Explained
32:16 How This Differs From ICOs
34:07 Tokenized Shares as DeFi Collateral
35:54 Regulation, Project Crypto and Clarity Act
40:01 Message to Corporate Leaders
Important Links
Superstate: https://superstate.com/about
Compound: https://compound.finance/
Opening Bell platform: https://superstate.com/opening-bell
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Our biggest takeaways from this conversation:
1. Tokenization isn't a new asset class. It's a record-keeping change.
Most people hear “tokenized stock” and picture a synthetic. A digital wrapper around a real share, sitting on a chain somewhere, with a startup holding the actual paper. Robert is quick to correct that framing.
“The token on the blockchain is the same share of a company as the one that’s trading on the Nasdaq. And you can actually bridge shares back and forth between those two systems.”
What Superstate does is operate as the public company's SEC-registered transfer agent. The transfer agent is the entity that legally records who owns what. Move that record onto a blockchain, and the token is the share. Same rights, same dividends, same proxy votes. You can move it from your brokerage account into a wallet on Solana, and back, and nothing about the underlying ownership changes.
“The token on the blockchain is the same share of a company as the one that’s trading on the Nasdaq. And you can actually bridge shares back and forth between those two systems.”
Why this upgrade: In traditional financial markets, transferring shares between parties, settling trades, and using assets as collateral all involve layers of intermediaries, delays, and batch processes tied to business-day cycles.
Blockchain infrastructure eliminates much of this friction. As Robert explains, interest on tokenised T-bills through SuperState's USTB product accrues in real time, by the block, not by the business day.
“Something as simple as transferring shares between two parties is just clunky in traditional markets. But trying to get between two wallets, it’s trivial. It’s like one click.”
A watershed moment came with SuperState's recent partnership with Invesco, one of Wall Street's largest asset managers. It became the first major incumbent asset manager to run a product on SuperState's tokenisation platform. Invesco has also invested in SuperState.
“What we’re swapping is our own products for someone else’s products... This is us finally opening our platform to those asset managers.”
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2. Superstate’s job is to lift it to $700T
The whole industry has spent the last cycle arguing about which crypto-native chain wins. According to Robert, the crypto-native race is capped at $2T (with respect to Compound Finance) and he sees $700T as the real prize, which includes stocks, bonds, real estate, and private credit currently sitting in spreadsheets, paper contracts, and DTC databases.
Right now, the total DeFi TVL is $83.27B and tokenised RWAs already sits at $55.7B (excluding stablecoin and repurchase agreement). And, the TAM is traditional finance.
“The upper bound of DeFi is $700 trillion. If that doesn’t happen, the upper bound of DeFi is roughly the same as it was in 2019.”
One of the important things I liked about Superstate is that they are trying to make sure his company is the regulated intermediary issuers use when they decide to bring their assets on-chain. The entire thesis sits or falls on whether off-chain securities meaningfully migrate.
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