Bringing Traditional Assets On-Chain: A Conversation with Vertalo’s Dave Hendricks
While stablecoins dominate regulator headlines and tokenization inches closer to institutional reality, the real work of bringing traditional assets on-chain is happening quietly in the background. Dave Hendricks, founder and CEO of Vertalo, has been building this infrastructure for years. Hendricks is a serial entrepreneur with previous exits including LiveIntent and CheetahMail and experience at Oracle and Arthur Andersen. He leads Vertalo’s push to modernize transfer agency and tokenization for real-world assets at scale.
In this Q&A session, he addresses the noise surrounding crypto policy, explains why stablecoins became the winner in 2025, and outlines what it will take for tokenized securities and private wealth to reach their next phase.
Assessing Progress in Tokenized Securities and Stablecoins
Hendricks: Obviously, we have come a long way since the beginning of 2023. Three years ago, comments on stablecoins were still rooted in the previous cycle usage model within the DeFi borrowing/lending protocol, while now late-stage stablecoins have become the most controversial topic in crypto, especially in the wake of the Genius Act, which prohibits banks from paying interest on stablecoins.
RWAs have come a long way, but they still represent a small portion of addressable markets, with brisk activity in the shoulder categories I classify as institutional (Treasuries and private approved REPOs and other similar activity) and marginal (L1s issuing non-recourse tokens with no underlying collateral).
Institutional RWAs are at the top, but the majority of them are largely federally and privately sanctioned and are not accessible or investable to the vast majority of the addressable market for RWAs, i.e., RIAs or individual investors. I would argue that the majority of marginal RWA is accessible to anyone with a wallet, but I would not consider these products investable for someone looking to protect capital or secure stable returns.
Vertalo’s Approach to Tokenized Stock Ledgers
Vertalo maintains ETH storage for payment of fees associated with creating tokenized stock ledgers on Ethereum. As one of, if not the only, true software company focused on digital transfer agencies and integrated tokenization, Vertalo continues to take a different market approach than most so-called tokenization companies. Since Vertalo is not a broker-dealer and we do not produce investment vehicles on our own account, but only for our clients, we are seeing a massive influx of inbound prospects who do not want to work with a company that could trade against them.
Customers come to Vertalo with specific problems that third-party websites and consulting firms cannot solve, and when customers work with us, they can be confident that as a software company we won’t eat up their fees by charging BPS on every transaction.
2026 Trends: Private Equity Tokenization and Packaging
The most interesting trend is the renewed interest in private equity tokenization and packaging. As a company primarily focused on converting illiquid investments into tradable and transferable (and fractional) instruments, we are pleased that the market is finally seeing what we saw almost 10 years ago, namely that distributed ledger technology represents a game-changing step-function improvement for wealth and asset management, and in particular for the transfer and distribution of these novel financial instruments.
The Industry’s Focus: Has it Lost its Way?
This year, the White House’s crypto-related announcements – a Federal Bitcoin Reserve (that didn’t go anywhere), on End of SEC supervision of crypto, digital assets in 401(k)s– have nothing to do with the core mission of Bitcoin or other blockchain networks. Every few years the “crypto” industry loses its collective mind over something new, everyone drops what they were doing, the monkey-in, the room gets crowded, some people get called names, some people get called names, and people complain that things are different than they were when they started, so they’re dissatisfied. This happens in every cycle and this one is no different. The government is helping to normalize normal activities and weak players will continue to be promoted and relegated. Nothing new!
Read the full interview with Dave Hendricks on Crypto.News: https://crypto.news/vertalo-dave-hendricks-rwas-stablecoins-2026-trends/
