A market analysis published by TechFlowPost argues that Wall Street’s defining edge over the past 50 years has been less about selecting assets and more about packaging them into products. In the crypto market, the same logic is now starting to form around real-world assets, or RWA.
The article’s central claim is that the global shift in capital allocation over the last half century moved from holding individual securities to holding packaged products. It cites a few markers of that transition: global ETF assets have reached $23.09 trillion, annual U.S. structured note issuance has topped $222 billion, and South Korea’s ELS issuance hit KRW 2.28 trillion in a single month. The author argues that onchain finance is now at the start of a similar migration, with sovereign funds and Wall Street asset managers among the earliest entrants.
The piece also leans on academic work to make the case that structuring is one of the most profitable segments in asset management. It says 53,541 European retail structured products generated an aggregate five-year profit margin of about 7%, and that each additional layer in a payoff structure raised annualized profitability by an average of 0.34 percentage points.
According to the article, the asset side, demand side, and policy side of the market have matured at the same time for the first time in the last 18 months. It places tokenized RWA at $33.5 billion and points to the GENIUS Act, which it says took effect in July 2025, as a key regulatory milestone. The analysis says that while several layers of crypto-financial infrastructure are already crowded, the issuance layer that turns assets into products is still largely unclaimed.
From there, the author’s thesis is straightforward: teams with backgrounds in traditional structured-product issuance are beginning to move into that gap, and some have already drawn early backing from crypto-native investors. If the product-manufacturing layer is validated and scaled, the first successful projects may follow a path similar to what Hyperliquid achieved in perpetual futures.
Not just assets, but products, are moving onchain
The article says “asset tokenization” has shifted from narrative to balance-sheet reality over the past two years. Stablecoin supply has crossed $300 billion, while tokenized RWA grew from $11.8 billion to $33.5 billion in one year.
Rules are moving as well. TechFlowPost says the GENIUS Act became law in July 2025, and market structure legislation has already entered the Senate process. In the author’s reading, assets, users, and regulation are all moving up at the same time.
Capital flows provide another signal. The article lists BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund BUIDL, whose assets at one point approached $3 billion; JPMorgan’s deployment of a deposit token on Canton; Abu Dhabi sovereign fund MGX using stablecoins for a single $2 billion settlement; and Nasdaq filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in support of tokenized stock trading.
What matters more, the author says, is that products themselves are beginning to move onchain. In August 2025, DBS placed a crypto-linked structured note on the Ethereum public chain, lowering the minimum investment from $100,000 to $1,000. During the first half of 2025 alone, its clients traded more than $1 billion in crypto options and structured notes, according to the article. In July that year, BNY Mellon and Goldman Sachs worked together to create onchain mirror tokens representing money market fund shares, with BlackRock, Fidelity, and Federated Hermes as the first participants, targeting a U.S. money market fund market worth more than $7 trillion.
The conclusion drawn in the piece is that Wall Street is no longer bringing single assets onchain one by one. It is starting to bring over full product lines.
From stock picking to product distribution
To frame the current moment, the article looks back at how capital moved through traditional finance. It cites ETFGI data showing that global ETF assets hit a record $23.09 trillion at the end of June 2026, with $1.33 trillion of net inflows in the first half of the year alone. In the U.S., more than half of households hold market exposure through funds rather than individual stocks.
Packaged products, in the author’s telling, go far beyond ETFs. Snowball products turned the view that “the market will not fall too far” into double-digit coupons and at one point exceeded RMB 300 billion in outstanding size in China. FCNs, described as the equivalent of an interest-paying limit order, became a default allocation for Asian private banking clients. Buffer ETFs traded some upside for 9% to 30% downside protection and were designed for U.S. 401(k) investors approaching retirement; the category has already reached tens of billions of dollars.
The article also points to products such as JEPI, which converted volatility into monthly cash flow and grew from zero to around $40 billion in four years. Structured deposits, pitched as principal protection plus floating returns, rose to more than RMB 12 trillion at their peak in China. It says Binance and OKX products such as dual-currency investments and shark fin structures follow the same basic logic in crypto form.
For the author, the explanation is simple. Investor risk preference spans a continuous spectrum, and two basic buttons, long and short, cannot meet every mix of return and risk demand. Pensions want stable cash flow. Depositors want principal protection. High-net-worth clients want enhanced returns. Trading capital wants more convexity. A single asset has one return curve; structured products exist to transform the same underlying assets into multiple risk-return profiles.
From the issuer’s side, the article says packaging broadens the addressable market. People who are willing to study single stocks in depth are a minority. A much larger group has spare cash, a financial goal, and no desire to watch markets all day. The past 50 years of asset-management growth, the author argues, came largely from bringing that latter group into markets through packaged products.
Why structured products remain attractive
The article says profitability is the core reason institutions want to bring structured products onchain. It cites research showing that 53,541 European retail structured products produced a five-year total profit margin of about 7%. It also says Morgan Stanley’s SPARQS products were issued at prices nearly 8% above fair value on average. Even after U.S. disclosure rules required issuers to publish an “estimated initial value,” issuance spreads still stayed in the 2% to 4% range, while 2025 U.S. issuance still exceeded $222 billion, based on SRP data cited in the article.
Fee comparisons in the piece make the same point. For S&P 500 exposure, it says index ETFs charge 0.03%, while Buffer ETFs charge 0.79% — a 26-fold difference — yet the latter category still reached tens of billions of dollars in size. Distribution and access fees in finance may have been compressed toward zero, but structuring beta into a specific risk-return shape still carries pricing power.
The author then extends that logic to crypto. Using a combined $330 billion base of stablecoins and RWA, the article estimates that if just one-tenth of that pool moved into the product layer, and if the blended fee were 1%, the result would be more than $300 million in annual fee revenue. It says that would already be comparable to revenue generated by some of today’s top DeFi protocols.
Three reasons Wall Street would move structured products onto blockchains
The article lays out three motives.
- New clients. Traditional structured products sit inside tightly controlled distribution channels. Private banks often require minimums in the millions of dollars, accredited-investor rules exclude most retail buyers, and cross-border sales are divided by jurisdiction. By contrast, the article describes crypto as a market with tens of millions of token holders, roughly $64 billion in idle stablecoins, and a distribution network that runs around the clock across borders.
- Profitability. Structuring is still one of the few high-margin steps left in asset management, the article says, and there is no reason that changes onchain. Issuing onchain could also cut down on layers between registration, custody, and settlement, with settlement measured in minutes rather than the longer timelines of traditional issuance.
- Large institutions are already testing the model. The article mentions UBS issuing tokenized fixed-rate notes and tokenized warrants in 2022 and 2023; Societe Generale’s SG-Forge issuing bonds on public chains several times; and BlackRock’s BUIDL as an example of “product onchain” rather than merely “asset onchain.”
At the same time, the article says these pilots remain fragmented. Each institution is building its own closed system, products cannot be distributed by third parties, and bookkeeping cannot easily be reconciled on a common ledger. In the author’s view, Wall Street still lacks a neutral issuance and operations layer.
Assets, capital, and regulation aligned over the past 18 months
The article says no one has yet fully brought a complete structured-product line onchain. It describes the closest earlier attempt as the covered-call and option-vault wave of 2021, often referred to as DOV, which briefly approached $1 billion in size before shrinking in 2022. The problem, the author argues, was not lack of interest in structured exposure, but dependence on a single architecture centered on selling volatility.
That experience matters in the article’s framework because it points to a need for infrastructure that can support many structures, not just one. And, according to the author, the three pillars needed for that infrastructure only aligned during the last 18 months.
On the asset side, the “raw material library” is now large enough, the piece says. Tokenized RWA stands at $33.5 billion after nearly tripling in a year. Tokenized equities rose from roughly $80 million to $2.7 billion, a 33-fold increase in one year, based on BlockTempo data cited in the article. It adds that Ondo’s tokenized equity segment expanded from $65,000 to $927 million in 12 months, while Binance-backed bStocks reached $624 million less than two months after launch.
On the demand side, the author points to the long-running popularity of dual-currency investments and shark fin products at centralized exchanges as evidence that retail crypto users have long wanted structured returns. The missing piece, in this telling, is transparent supply.
On the regulatory side, the article says the GENIUS Act addressed the question of what can be used for subscription by giving stablecoins a federal framework. That, in the author’s phrasing, means compliance departments can now write “can hold” in internal memos for the first time. Proposed market structure legislation moving through the Senate would then tackle the question of what the product itself is. The article compares this stage of regulatory clarification to earlier periods in traditional markets, noting that ETFs took off after SEC approval in 1993 and money market funds gained momentum after interest-rate controls eased.
Four crowded layers, one open slot
The article maps the current crypto-financial stack into layers drawn from traditional finance.
- Asset layer. This is where assets are brought onchain. The article places Ondo, bStocks, and xStocks here, with tokenized equities totaling about $2.7 billion.
- Institutional settlement layer. This is the layer meant to make banks comfortable coming in. Canton is the example used, and the article says JPMorgan’s deposit token is already live there, while CC has a market cap of about $4.8 billion.
- Open issuance layer. This layer handles open issuance of assets. The piece says Centrifuge, with roughly $1.6 billion in TVL, effectively stands alone here and is still the only platform that supports true third-party issuance.
- Single-strategy product layer. This is where one strategy is scaled into a business. The article names Ethena, Maple, Midas, and Upshift, and says Maple’s TVL is about $2.5 billion.
Above those layers, the author says there should be a “product manufacturing layer” that can turn any asset and any strategy into a standardized product with NAV, subscriptions and redemptions, and risk controls. That layer, in the article’s view, is still missing.
The piece spends time on why this matters. Today’s successful single-strategy protocols mostly follow a “one protocol for one product” design. Ethena built out minting, custody, hedging, redemption, and distribution for a basis-trade product. Maple did the same around institutional credit. Midas rebuilt similar rails for yield certificates. Every strategy starts by rebuilding the stack, which means only products with enough scale potential can justify the fixed cost.
Traditional finance solved this long ago, the article says. After SPY launched, State Street did not need to rebuild a registration and settlement system for every new ETF. Mutual fund markets can support tens of thousands of products because they rely on shared components such as fund accounts, custodians, transfer agents, and disclosure systems.
The article then contrasts two projects it sees as the nearest to this missing layer. Centrifuge supports third-party issuance, but the service is still focused on tokenizing pools of assets, with structures that remain at the asset-share level. Upshift built embedded vaults, but stops at vault-share pricing and lacks product-level NAV, which the article says makes it difficult to support coupon products or range structures that depend on daily valuation and condition triggers.
That leaves products such as snowballs, FCNs, and buffered structures without a reusable production line onchain, according to the article. In traditional finance, those capabilities were spread across fund-company middle and back offices, custodians, and transfer agents. Onchain, the author argues, they may be assembled for the first time into an independent and neutral protocol layer.
City Protocol as a case study
The article says a few projects are starting to target that opening, and it presents City Protocol as a representative example.
TechFlowPost describes City Protocol as an issuance and operations layer for onchain structured products. Issuers can define strategy mandates and connect named managers through the protocol. The system then provides product-level NAV, epoch-based subscriptions and redemptions, and onchain enforcement of valuation and risk-control rules. Depositors subscribe with stablecoins at NAV, and execution, valuation, accounting, and redemption all run inside the same ruleset. Each new product launched later can inherit that operating path.
In the article’s framing, that turns what projects such as Ethena had to build separately into shared infrastructure. Launching a new product becomes less like starting a new engineering project and more like configuration. The author ties this directly back to the profit thesis: structured-product spreads are among the most stable revenue sources in asset management, and how much profit remains depends in part on how far manufacturing costs can be reduced. Converting the manufacturing step into shared infrastructure spreads the most expensive fixed costs across scale.
The article also argues that structured products are highly dependent on experience in pricing, hedging, and term-sheet design. It says public information shows City Protocol’s core members come from institutions including HSBC and UBS, both named earlier in the piece as relatively early participants in tokenized notes and digital bonds. It also says team members have managed crypto assets for large family offices tied to the Rothschild family, the Charoen Pokphand family, Hanwha, and Shinsegae.
On funding, the article says the project has raised about $11 million across a seed round and a private round. Backers include Dragonfly, which it says invested early in Ethena, as well as Jump and CMT Digital, firms with trading and market-making backgrounds. The author reads that investor list as a sign that capital which previously benefited from single-strategy products is now moving one step upstream.
From that case study, the article draws three conclusions. First, the project is trying to solve a missing assembly step onchain: turning assets and strategies into products with NAV, subscriptions, redemptions, and risk controls. Second, it sits at the intersection of two shifts — crypto competition moving from the asset and trading layers toward product manufacturing, and Wall Street moving full product lines onchain while still relying on closed pilots. Third, success from here will depend on whether product breadth keeps expanding, whether more managers and channels aggregate on the platform, and whether valuation and redemption rules hold up under stress.
How distribution could work
The article does not frame mass adoption as a standalone-app story. Instead, it says onchain structured products are more likely to spread through embedding: interfaces for NAV-based subscriptions and epoch-based settlements could be built directly into wallets, exchanges, and payment apps. More institutions could list products as named managers. Tokenized-asset partners could expand the underlying asset pool. Issuance could also be offered to partners as a white-label capability.
The piece cites forecasts from large financial institutions to sketch out the scale of the market. Citi is said to expect stablecoins to reach $1.6 trillion by 2030. McKinsey projects tokenized assets at roughly $2 trillion by the same point. Standard Chartered is cited as seeing $30 trillion by 2034. Even if onchain product penetration reached only one-fifth of traditional-market levels, the author says the product layer would still represent a market measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, with annual fee revenue in the tens of billions, while the entire sector today remains only in the tens of billions.
The article compares that migration to the previous cycle. It says the asset layer and the trading layer are already becoming more fixed in their competitive structure, and competition is shifting toward the product layer — toward deciding what form an investor actually buys. Hyperliquid is used as the example from the last cycle: the article says it captured about 70% of perpetual futures share by building high-performance infrastructure. By the same logic, the next winner could be the project that first standardizes issuance, valuation, and redemption while pulling managers and distribution into one common production line.
Conclusion in the original analysis
The article closes with a comparison from traditional finance. In 1976, the first index fund reportedly raised only $11 million and was mocked by peers as “Bogle’s folly.” Five decades later, packaged investment products make up a $23 trillion market. TechFlowPost notes that the original $11 million figure happens to match City Protocol’s current funding tally.
For the author, the setup is visible in four directions at once. Demand is real: from snowballs to Buffer ETFs, every category of structured product has a validated buyer base, and even in South Korea, where parts of the category previously blew up, issuance rebounded 39% in two years. Profitability is real: in an era when distribution fees are being compressed toward zero, structured products still preserve pricing power measured in percentage points. Conditions are in place: the raw-material library was built in roughly a year, projects such as Ethena demonstrated willingness to pay onchain, and the GENIUS Act opened a clearer compliance path. The white space is also visible: in the five-layer map laid out by the article, the product-manufacturing layer is the only one still largely unoccupied.
The five-year picture imagined by the piece is not subtle. It says the number of onchain products could move from dozens today to tens of thousands. Launching a structured product could become as ordinary as deploying a smart contract. Snowballs, FCNs, and buffered exposures could be sold onchain for the first time to ordinary users outside private-banking channels, with daily NAV visibility, public audits, and fee disclosures written directly onchain.
The analysis ends where it began: Wall Street’s most valuable skill was not choosing assets, but manufacturing products. That skill is now moving onto blockchains, and large pools of capital have already taken their seats. In the author’s view, whoever builds the production line first may end up sitting on the path every later product has to take.
