Vertalo CEO Dave Hendricks on why stablecoins won 2025, what’s really happening with RWAs, and how crypto keeps “losing its mind” every cycle
As headlines obsess over stablecoin legislation and speculative tokens, the slow, unglamorous work of putting real-world assets on-chain is finally starting to look like a serious industry rather than a proof-of-concept.
Dave Hendricks, founder and CEO of Vertalo, has been building toward that reality for years. A repeat founder with exits at LiveIntent and CheetahMail, and stints at Oracle and Arthur Andersen, he’s now steering Vertalo as a software-first transfer agent focused on digital securities, tokenization, and scalable infrastructure for real-world assets (RWAs).
In this conversation, Hendricks separates signal from noise in the stablecoin debate, explains why institutional tokenization is still mostly closed off to everyday investors, and lays out what to watch as we head toward 2026. He also offers a blunt assessment of how the crypto sector periodically loses perspective — and why that keeps slowing real adoption.
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Q: Back in 2023 you reacted to PayPal’s launch of its Ethereum-based stablecoin. Since then, Visa has rolled out a stablecoin advisory practice and regulatory fights have intensified. How far have we really come on stablecoins, RWAs, and tokenized securities?
Hendricks: The distance we’ve traveled since early 2023 is dramatic, but it’s uneven.
Three years ago, most conversations about stablecoins were still framed by their role in DeFi lending and borrowing — essentially infrastructure for trading and yield-chasing. Today, stablecoins have become the political and regulatory focal point of the entire crypto market. That shift has been accelerated by legislation like the so‑called Genius Act, which, among other things, blocks banks from paying interest on stablecoin deposits.
That’s a remarkable reversal. Stablecoins started as plumbing for crypto-native finance; now they sit at the center of a policy fight about who gets to issue money-like instruments, who can offer yield, and how closely those operations must resemble traditional banking.
On the RWA side, we’ve seen clear progress, but tokenized real assets are still a drop in the bucket relative to the total market for securities, credit products, and private assets. The action is mostly clustered in what I call the “shoulder categories”:
– Institutional RWAs – tokenized Treasuries, private permissioned repo markets, and other on-chain instruments that look and behave a lot like traditional short-term funding and fixed-income activity, just with better rails.
– Marginal or quasi-RWAs – layer-1 blockchains or protocols issuing non-recourse tokens that claim some connection to real-world activity but lack meaningful collateral or legal enforceability.
Institutional RWA is leading in volume and seriousness, but most of it is federated and permissioned. It’s largely invisible and inaccessible to the broader market — especially to RIAs, wealth managers, and individual investors who would arguably benefit most from improved access and fractionalization.
At the other extreme, the “marginal” RWA products are usually easy to access if you know how to use a wallet, but I would not describe them as truly investable for anyone focused on preserving capital or generating consistent, risk-adjusted returns. They often borrow the language of RWAs without offering the protections, disclosures, or governance that real-world assets require.
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Q: Vertalo holds ETH to pay gas fees for creating tokenized share ledgers on Ethereum. What has changed at the firm in the last year as the tokenization narrative has matured?
Hendricks: We’ve doubled down on being a pure software infrastructure provider in a market that increasingly blurs the line between technology, trading, and product manufacturing.
Vertalo is, to my knowledge, one of the very few true software companies that concentrates solely on digital transfer agency and integrated tokenization. We’re not a broker-dealer. We don’t underwrite or issue financial products on our own balance sheet. We don’t originate deals and then compete with our clients for margin.
That matters. Over the past year we’ve seen a strong uptick in inbound interest from institutions that explicitly do *not* want to work with a firm that might someday trade against them or try to capture a slice of every transaction in basis points. They want a neutral infrastructure partner, not a vertically integrated competitor.
Clients typically come to us with specific operational problems:
– How do we convert an illiquid private equity structure into transferable, fractional digital securities?
– How do we maintain a compliant cap table on-chain across multiple jurisdictions?
– How do we support secondary liquidity without breaking existing regulatory or investor agreements?
These are not problems a brochure website or a generic consulting engagement can solve. They require real software, integrations, and an understanding of both capital markets and distributed ledger technology.
We committed to this enterprise software strategy in mid‑2022 and have not deviated. That consistency has been important. While other firms chased whichever tokenization buzzword was hot that quarter, we focused on building reliable transfer agency infrastructure that meets institutional standards.
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Q: Looking ahead, which trends are you watching most closely as we move toward 2026?
Hendricks: The resurgence of interest in tokenizing private equity and other illiquid alternatives is the most significant development.
Our core thesis from almost a decade ago was that distributed ledger technology is a step-change for asset and wealth management. Not because it makes speculation easier, but because it dramatically improves the transfer, servicing, and distribution of complex financial instruments.
What we’re seeing now is the market waking up to that. Private equity, venture capital, private credit, and real estate funds are all wrestling with:
– Longer fund lifecycles
– Investor demand for more frequent liquidity options
– Pressure from wealth platforms to make alternative assets more accessible and transparent
Tokenization isn’t a magic wand, but it provides a native way to represent fractional interests, automate ownership updates, and enforce restrictions through code instead of paperwork. That’s extremely powerful in illiquid markets where operational friction has historically been accepted as “just the way it is.”
I expect tokenized equities — especially in private markets and eventually in public markets — to be a much bigger story in 2026. Regulatory developments, including the SEC’s evolving stance and the anticipated Clarity Act, are laying the groundwork for a more standardized, compliant approach to digital securities. Once a few large, credible issuers prove the model at scale, the herd will move quickly.
In parallel, we’ll see stablecoins continue to function as the primary on-ramp for institutions. They are simple to understand, tightly connected to payments and deposits, and familiar enough to fit into existing risk frameworks. That is why 2025 became the “year of the stablecoin” for banks and non‑banks that wanted crypto exposure without taking token price risk.
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Q: You mentioned 2025 as the year stablecoins became the institutional gateway. How did that happen, and how has regulation shaped it?
Hendricks: Stablecoins sit at the intersection of two worlds: banking and blockchains. That makes them attractive and controversial at the same time.
For large institutions, the appeal has been straightforward. Banks care about:
– Deposits
– Payments
– Settlement speed and cost
Stablecoins offer a way to move value 24/7 with near‑instant settlement, programmable flows, and global reach. They resemble deposits in function but live on new rails. From a strategic standpoint, banks cannot ignore that.
However, the regulatory overlay has produced some paradoxes. Many assumed legislation like the Genius Act would be a win for banks and their lobbyists — a way to box out non‑bank issuers and pull stablecoins into a traditional regulatory perimeter. In practice, the restriction on paying interest on stablecoin balances has had the opposite effect in some areas.
Banks now find themselves in a strange position:
– They’re highly motivated to use stablecoins for payments and operational efficiency.
– But they’re barred from issuing yield‑bearing stablecoins, which would be the most obvious way to compete with money market funds and on-chain Treasury products.
The result is a fragmented market where some of the most sophisticated players are allowed to touch only the low‑margin, non‑yield side of the stablecoin stack, while yield and credit risk migrate elsewhere. That tension is unresolved and will shape the next few years of product design and lobbying.
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Q: The White House floated ideas like a federal Bitcoin reserve, removing the SEC from crypto oversight, and putting digital assets into retirement plans — most of which went nowhere. None of that seems tied to Bitcoin’s original purpose. Has the crypto sector lost its way?
Hendricks: The sector doesn’t just lose its way — it periodically loses its collective mind.
Every couple of years, a new narrative sweeps through the industry and politics at the same time. In one cycle it’s ICOs democratizing fundraising. In another, it’s DeFi killing banks. Then NFTs are going to reinvent culture. Then meme coins are “community money.” Most recently it’s been RWAs as the panacea for everything from liquidity to capital formation.
Policy discussions too often latch onto those narratives without grounding them in the actual capabilities and limitations of the technology. That’s how you end up with headlines about federal Bitcoin reserves or sweeping jurisdiction changes that have little to do with the core value proposition of blockchains: transparent, verifiable, censorship‑resistant settlement infrastructure.
Bitcoin did not emerge to solve retirement plan allocation or to create a new flavor of central banking. Most blockchains weren’t built to backstop political agendas. They were built to provide new mechanisms for ownership and transfer of value, with different trust assumptions than legacy systems. When the conversation drifts too far from that, you get policy theater instead of progress.
Meanwhile, the work that really matters — things like modernizing transfer agency, improving post‑trade processes, reducing reconciliation overhead, and expanding access to high‑quality assets — is happening in the background with almost no fanfare. That disconnect is why seasoned operators often tune out the noise and just keep building.
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Q: You’ve been vocal about separating real RWAs from “RWA‑the‑narrative.” What needs to happen for tokenized securities and private assets to enter their next phase?
Hendricks: Three things: credibility, connectivity, and clarity.
1. Credibility
We need more large, reputable issuers and service providers willing to tokenize *real* instruments — not synthetic proxies or experimental wrappers — under familiar legal structures. When investors see well‑known asset managers, transfer agents, custodians, and auditors involved, they’re far more likely to treat tokenization as an infrastructure upgrade rather than a speculative bet.
2. Connectivity
Tokenized assets must plug into the systems investors already use: portfolio management tools, custodial platforms, wealth dashboards, and tax reporting workflows. If a tokenized fund can’t be held by a mainstream custodian or reported properly at year‑end, it becomes a curiosity, not a product. This is the kind of plumbing Vertalo focuses on: making digital cap tables and tokenized instruments compatible with existing rails.
3. Regulatory clarity
Uncertainty about how regulators will treat tokenized securities has slowed adoption. Frameworks that clarify what is permissible — both for issuers and intermediaries — will unlock much more activity. That’s why initiatives like the Clarity Act matter: they can create enough predictability for large institutions to commit real resources.
When those three elements align, tokenization shifts from concept to default setting. Investors don’t care that their ownership is represented digitally; they care that it’s cheaper, faster, safer, and easier to manage.
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Q: You’ve described Vertalo as an “enterprise software” company rather than a financial engineering shop. Why is that distinction important for the long-term evolution of tokenization?
Hendricks: Because infrastructure companies and product manufacturers have fundamentally different incentives.
A product firm wants to:
– Package assets
– Capture spread
– Generate yield
– Maximize AUM and transaction volume
A software infrastructure firm wants to:
– Improve efficiency
– Reduce operational risk
– Enable compliance
– Scale throughput for many different clients
If you’re a bank, asset manager, or issuer, you don’t necessarily want your infrastructure provider to also be your competitor in product design and distribution. You want a neutral party who will not build house products that undercut or front‑run you.
By staying out of deal origination and trading, we’ve been able to work with clients that want to tokenize private equity, credit funds, or real estate *their way* — with their economics and branding intact. Our role is to provide the digital transfer agency and tokenization rails, not to dictate terms or take a slice of every trade.
In the long run, that separation is healthy for the ecosystem. It creates a layered architecture where:
– Protocols handle settlement and consensus
– Software platforms handle issuance, ownership, and compliance
– Financial firms handle product design, capital raising, and relationship management
That’s how you get scale without everyone stepping on each other’s toes.
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Q: For investors and builders trying to navigate 2026 and beyond, what signals should they pay attention to — and what should they ignore?
Hendricks: Pay attention to what quietly scales, not what trends on social media.
Watch for:
– Institutional pilots turning into standard workflows – for example, when a bank or asset manager moves from a single tokenized fund experiment to a full program across multiple products.
– Regulatory language that becomes repeatable – rulings, exemptions, or guidance that others can copy and rely on, rather than one‑off approvals.
– Service provider adoption – custodians, fund administrators, and transfer agents integrating tokenization into their core offerings.
Ignore:
– Claims that some new token will “replace” a heavily regulated product overnight.
– Narratives that promise high yield with no clear explanation of risk, collateral, and recourse.
– Policy proposals that sound more like campaign slogans than infrastructure reforms.
The real transformation of capital markets will not arrive as a single dramatic moment. It will show up as incremental improvements: shorter settlement cycles, lower admin costs, better data, and broader access to assets that used to be reserved for a narrow slice of investors.
That is what RWAs, tokenization, and stablecoins can deliver when the industry stops chasing its latest collective obsession and focuses on building durable, boring, but incredibly valuable infrastructure.