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The institutional shift
For years, the tokenization space has been enticed by the thought that “this might be the year" things would take off.
But according to Jason Barraza, head of institutional business at RedStone, those days of wishing for change are now past us.
"The whole narrative has shifted over to institutional," Barraza said on StrataMedia’s Talking Tokens podcast. "It's always been like, oh, this might be the year for tokenization to kick off and finally, that narrative is [happening]."
Redstone is an oracle provider powering price feeds for over 200 B2B clients including Securitize and tokenized funds like BlackRock BUIDL, Apollo ACRED, VanEck VBILL and Hamilton Lane SCOPE.
Barraza credits stablecoins with laying the groundwork for the interest in tokenization. "Stablecoins took off and found their product-market fit, which essentially is tokenized cash.”
This is a sentiment we’ve heard in the past from other guests on Talking Tokens. Max Stein, a director on the digital assets team at BlackRock, recently predicted on the podcast that there’s a huge opportunity ahead for tokenized cash, which can consist of stablecoins, money market funds, private treasury funds and more, had a huge opportunity ahead. Tokenized cash has been “successful in tokenization terms,” Stein said, though he noted the long tail hasn’t been established yet.
In a similar vein, Barraza thinks people are starting to look to the currency space for more opportunities as the infrastructure matures and growing pains fade. But the real unlock will come through collateral and liquidity, not simply tokenizing for tokenization’s sake.
"If you're gonna tokenize something and bring it onchain, it needs to increase its utility or have operational savings," Barraza said. "In the early days, everyone was like, ‘oh, tokenize this and it'll create liquidity.’ [But] it’s not always true of the more illiquid assets like real estate."
Instead, Barraza advocates for a bit of creativity, like like taking a collateralized loan and using it as margin. Even with more illiquid assets, there’s still viable collateral and utility, he argues. “It's a form of liquidity, and so it's just [about] getting creative with those new constructs." And looking ahead, he sees an opportunity for RWAs to be used as collateral in DeFi.
Indeed, beyond money market funds, where most institutional capital is parked, there’s growing interest in private credit, with new investors and protocols increasingly focusing on the asset class. To name an example, Maple Finance is one of the largest onchain asset management firms with $3.84 billion in AUM, and has provided institutional borrowers with more than $21.46 billion across over 400 loans.
Part of the appeal of onchain credit markets is the potential to reduce borrowing costs via onchain transparency, Barraza said. "If you could theoretically streamline origination, and all these other costs as well as audits and so forth, because it's all onchain, then theoretically, you should be able to borrow at cheaper rates."
With that in mind, he thinks there’s still a lot of room for the industry to evolve.
“Whether you're an asset manager, an infrastructure provider, or some other function, I think everything across capital markets will get impacted in one way or another,” Barraza said.
Check out the next section for more details and the full episode.
The latest Talking Tokens podcast 🎙️
For today’s episode, I interviewed Jason Barraza, head of institutional business development at RedStone, about why blockchain oracles are evolving from simple price feeds into the institutional intelligence layer that tokenized finance still needs. Jason, who previously served as COO at Security Token Market where he helped track over 800 tokenized real world assets, explains how RedStone powers NAV feeds for BlackRock, Apollo, and Franklin Templeton, and why the firm's acquisition of Credora for onchain risk ratings is part of building a full-stack intelligence platform.
He walks through why RWAs as DeFi collateral is the next big unlock and why the buy-build-or-lease question is splitting institutions into fundamentally different infrastructure strategies. The conversation covers why private credit is gaining so much attention, how Securitize’s Computershare partnership lowers barriers for corporates wanting to tokenize, and why standardization around compliance and portable identity is the key to scaling institutional adoption.
This episode is sponsored by Securitize, the proven leader in tokenized funds, equities, and private markets. Discover more at securitize.io.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – Intro
01:36 – What feels materially different from the last cycle
02:08 – What RedStone does: oracles, risk ratings, and the institutional intelligence layer
03:13 – Where oracle demand is highest right now: NAV feeds and RWAs as collateral
04:21 – How Credora's risk ratings help institutions compare vaults yielding the same returns
05:16 – DeFi exploits and how RWAs with transfer agents offer a safety net
07:27 – Balancing speed and safety: co-creating solutions with institutions
08:49 – What's coming in the next 6-18 months
10:12 – Why vaults are gaining traction as streamlined fund infrastructure
12:12 – Where institutional capital is being deployed today: money markets, stablecoins, and private credit
14:14 – Tracking 800+ tokenized asset and what surprised him
16:01 – Crypto native vs traditional institutions: the split in tokenization adoption
17:11 – Buy, build, or lease: how institutions are choosing their tokenization infrastructure
20:31 – What real institutional adoption looks like: full lifecycle onchain
22:10 – Why collateral is the new conversation, not just tokenization for its own sake
24:40 – Final advice to get educated and get on board
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