From Goldman to DeFi: Building Institutional Yields for Stablecoins and BTC

1. Closing

The things that they often ask the most questions about, where there is the largest gap between what they’re looking for and what we can offer, are true institutional-grade infrastructure and risk management. Again, I think we have some of the most advanced risk management and infrastructure in this space, so we are starting to make some inroads there. But it is stunning to me how a lot of institutions come to us and say, “We haven’t seen X, Y, or Z before from other similar players to you guys,” even though those things are very standard in this industry, in the TradFi space. So I think those are probably the three things you’re looking for: yield is easy to achieve; infrastructure and risk management, I think, less so in our space. But I think, again, we’re constantly getting better.

Arpan, thanks for joining us. How are you doing?

2. Arpan’s background

Great. Thank you guys so much for having me. Really excited to chat with you all.

Arpan, I think the only reason I use LinkedIn these days is to look into the backgrounds of guests who come on our show. Looking into yours, I saw that you went to Wharton, you worked at McKinsey, and you worked at Goldman—sort of all the heavyweights of traditional finance. What did you see? Maybe tell us a bit about that, and what did you see working at all those institutions that then made you want to come build in DeFi?

Yeah. I started off my career at McKinsey and Goldman. I decided I didn’t want to be an advisor after working at those 2 because, again, I loved my experience there, but I just wanted to build something myself, right? So I actually started building a bank in the UK, which was going really well until COVID, at which point it unfortunately wasn’t.

At that point, after we made sure that everyone landed on their feet, I stepped back and asked the same 3 questions that I think most people do when they’re looking to pivot their careers: What do I like doing? What am I good at? And what do I think can make a difference? I think the answer for me, when I ranked everything, was that DeFi, blockchain, and crypto were at the very top of that list.

I think what really drew me to it was how transformative this space has the potential to be, and frankly, how early we were then—and we still are now—in that journey, right? Funny enough, I was literally just sent an article by McKinsey yesterday saying how stablecoins and payments are really big, exciting topics for DeFi and blockchain, especially with a lot of interest from Web2 firms looking at using these for payment rails.

But the slice of the payments pie that’s made up by stablecoins is still literally a fraction of a percent, right? So no matter how big we think we are, or how many hundreds of billions we have in the stablecoin space, it’s still step 1 of a 1,000-mile journey. I think that all makes this really, really exciting.

3. Why choose to build in DeFi

Given the work you’ve done in consulting, banking, and quant trading and so forth, you really do understand the status quo. I’d love to talk a little bit more about how you saw the opportunity for improvement in DeFi—improving upon that status quo. How did those experiences inform the direction you took in terms of building Noon?

Yeah, I think there are really 2 things that were really interesting, coming from that TradFi world into digital assets. There’s more stuff that’s just within digital assets, which we can get to later on. But coming from the TradFi world, there’s something around legacy friction, right?

A lot of these systems have been around for decades, and they have certain friction points that, no matter how technologically advanced we get, just fundamentally cannot be fixed—or take a very long time and a lot of effort to get right. One of the examples that has just been in the news—I think it was last week or this week—was Anthropic and COBOL. Did you guys see that?

You know what? I don’t know if I did. Can you fill me in?

Yeah, I’ll give you the overview very quickly. COBOL is a very old programming language that a lot of—most of the big financial institutions—

Oh, sorry. Was this the IBM thing? Is that the language that they kind of nuked?

Yeah, yeah. So basically, all the big financial institutions and banks have, at their core, something—an important part of their stack—written in COBOL. This was invented in the ’50s and ’60s, and this is certainly not the first time I’m hearing about this. This is a problem that most large financial institutions face. Literally everyone who knows this language is dying, right? That’s how antiquated it is. It’s not fit for purpose anymore, but they can’t do anything—or they couldn’t do anything—about it.

They had people like IBM coming in to help them, and now Anthropic has come in and said, “Hey, we can just rewrite all of this,” which is fantastic, right? But those are the types of things that you see as legacy friction. For example, before TransferWise, why am I spending so much just to move currencies from one country to the other? If the midpoint price is this, why am I paying 5% or 10%?

These kinds of legacy frictions, I felt, were things that blockchain technology and DeFi were really, really well-equipped to solve. Then the second piece, other than legacy friction, is how—one thing that blockchain technology is great at is kind of leveling the playing field, right?

That’s something that we really saw in the difference between the US financial services market and even, for example, the UK financial services market. We’re not talking about the developing world or anything like that, but the US and Western Europe are still dramatically different. You can see it in every single element of financial services, from bank accounts—in terms of the interest rates on the different types of savings products you have—to credit cards, simple things like foreign transaction fees.

That difference is massive in terms of the quality of service and the offering that the user gets. That’s something else that I think DeFi has the ability to level, which is really, really powerful and was really compelling for me to come in and try to bring about.

4. What institutions want: Yield, infrastructure, and risk management

Yeah, that all makes total sense, and I think what you are seeing being built is these universal rails and the taking down of these walled gardens. But more specifically, with institutions, we’ve been talking about it in the space: institutions are going to come. They’re going to come. They’re here now. They’re moving in, I think, pretty aggressively.

I want to ask you, as somebody building on the forefront of DeFi, who I assume is definitely catering to a lot of these institutional allocators and players: What are they looking for when they’re coming to you and asking you questions? I’m assuming it’s not primarily yield. I’m sure it’s transparency, compliance, infrastructure, maybe something else. What are the main things that you continually hear?

Yeah, it’s a really good question. One thing I will say is that there are 2 things to this, right? Before we get into the question, I will say I think institutions, even to this day, are still just dipping their toes in.

Going back to this being step 1 of a 1,000-mile journey, institutions aren’t looking at this space—certainly everyone is looking at this space—but they’re looking at it in a way that means they can dip their toes in and dip their toes back out. That’s why, frankly, you’re seeing massive BTC and ETH ETF outflows right now, precisely because institutions are like, “Nope, never mind. Let me go back,” right?

Part of that is just our industry is not even close to being mature enough for institutions to actually make any really serious deployments into, right? Part of that is infrastructure, and part of that is just, frankly, credibility and longevity. We have to remember, a lot of these institutions have been around for decades, some centuries, and they’re not going to move a large part of their asset base or deploy serious amounts of capital into an industry that wasn’t even around 2 decades ago, right?

So I think it’s definitely going to take time, and we’re at the very start of this journey. A lot of institutions are trying to figure out how this looks. What we’re seeing right now is, I think, a lot of early exploratory tests from the early adopters. We haven’t even got to mid- or late-stage adoption anywhere close to it at this point, right?

So I think that’s the first piece. The second piece was around what these early adopters are looking for, and I think it’s a combination of things.

When you're looking at most institutions in the space, the yields are actually pretty good, right? So, obviously, that's the stakes, right? They have to come in and see some evidence of high yield compared to what they can get anywhere else. And that, I think, we're able to offer.

I think the thing they often ask the most questions about, where there's the largest gap between what they're looking for and what we can offer, is true institutional-grade infrastructure and risk management. Again, I think we have some of the most advanced risk management and infrastructure in this space, so we are starting to make some inroads there.

But it is stunning to me how a lot of institutions come to us and say, "We haven't seen X, Y, or Z before from other similar players to you guys," which are very standard in this industry and in the TradFi space. So I think those are probably the 3 things they're looking for. Yield is easy to achieve; infrastructure and risk management, I think, less so in our space. But, again, we're constantly getting that feedback.

5. Retail vs. institutional: Navigating the changing DeFi landscape

Yeah, makes sense. And then I guess a lot of these players could have built their entire legacy business on being an intermediary, and they aren't excited to see themselves become irrelevant overnight, so they're not going to be leading the charge there.

Another thing on the same tangent is in regard to institutional products and retail products. I'm curious how you're navigating your customer base, because I know even people who watch the show—we have a lot more, I'd call them, institutional viewers now. It's people who work at a hedge fund or a VC fund, or whatever, they're in traditional finance and they're starting to watch.

I even see the DeFi landscape changing, where I'm actually wondering how much of retail is still here and how much is moving into a different customer type. My point in framing this is to say: how does this impact your product going forward? Are you finding yourselves catering more to this institutional base, or is retail still here? I have fears that retail somewhat died on October 10, 2025, but I hope that's not true.

Yeah, kind of like the day the music died, right? I think that's a really good question. As a caveat to that, I always have to remind myself that when we say retail, we don't mean retail the way that a bank means retail, right? We mean DeFi crypto retail, which is a super-small subset of retail, right?

I think the way that traditional financial institutions look at retail, that retail has never been here. And I think that's probably going to be the biggest challenge of our times: how do we take these products that we think are fantastic and actually meet a real need, like the product that we're building, and get it out to mass-market retail?

The way we're thinking about this is a 3-step approach. The first step, in the short term, is all about focusing on crypto, digital-asset-native institutions and retail, right? There's a little bit of a distinction there that I won't necessarily bore you guys with, but that's phase 1. That's the short-term target, but that's probably the smallest part of the market, right?

Medium term, you get to a slightly larger part of the market. That's where we look at TradFi or Web2 institutions, and we look at that both as end customers and as intermediaries with distribution channels. With end customers, you see a bunch of TradFi funds and stuff like that looking at the space. They're sometimes really stymied by regulation and licensing in terms of what they can and can't do in the space, but we still only see a few signs of really big inroads.

The second part, which I think is more interesting because of the foothold it gives us, is that distribution. It's the typical B2B2C play, where we are a business selling to a Web2 or TradFi business, which then sort of sells our product or distributes our product onward toward a much larger customer base because it's much more established. So that's the second phase of it.

Then, finally, the third phase—and frankly, I don't think we're getting here anytime soon—is the direct-to-retail route. It's going to take us a long time, a lot of awareness-building, education, trust-building, and, frankly, product simplification. Retail here means mass-market retail, and exactly as you said, each of those means different products, different UI/UXs—different everything.

That's why it is incredibly challenging, but also incredibly exciting, to be in the space right now.

6. What is Noon? “The highest, safest stablecoin yield”

Arpan, maybe we should talk about the elevator pitch first for Noon, because I think it informs more of the points you're making about building for retail and building for institutions. A lot of what you've described here, we've seen you put into practice with Noon. So, talk to us about Noon.

Yeah, for sure. The very short elevator pitch is: it is the highest-yielding, safest yield-bearing stablecoin that's built for the long term.

Now, let me go into each of those. Highest-yielding means out of all the other safe stablecoins. I'm not talking about tokenized hedge funds, which are super opaque and are doing some sort of trading, and you have no idea what they're doing. I'm talking about guys who are transparent, tell you exactly what they're doing, and do low-risk stuff. We've been able to outperform those guys by about 50% to 100% over the last 6 months.

These are your Ethena, Resolv, and Cap. Cap has done a great job growing recently. USDai has done a great job recently. All these guys, including Sky, are kind of around the 4% to 6% range in terms of APY. We're consistently at 7%, 8%, 9%, 10%, 11%, right? That is obviously the headline number, what a lot of people care a lot about. That's the first piece of it.

The second piece is that we pride ourselves on being the safest of the bunch, right? That means not only do we have really robust institutional TradFi assessment and risk management in terms of what strategies we deploy into and how we deploy into them, which has allowed us to be around for 18-plus months without a single security incident or a down day, but on top of that, the level of transparency that we have is, I think, unparalleled in the space.

Through one of our partners, who I know you guys know well, Accountable, we have an independent, live proof-of-solvency dashboard. That means you don't just have to trust us in terms of where our reserves are or where our money is. You can actually see this reported live in real time.

This isn't self-reported data that we're just publishing ourselves. This is a third party going directly to the source—our custodial wallets or onchain wallets—and pulling all this information for your benefit, right? That's the second piece of it: the safety.

The third piece, which I think is equally important, is how we've really built this protocol for the long term. If I step back, whenever I talk about this, everyone's like, "I don't get it. Isn't everything built for the long term? What are you talking about?"

It was really interesting for me when we came upon this idea. We were like, "Hey, let's build a yield-bearing stablecoin." Ethena had already been out. We said, "Listen, we're only going to do this if we think we can do something better."

So we stepped back and literally went through every single decision point and said, "What is the best version of this decision point? What is going to be best for users?" Then we compared it to what else was in the market. We were like, "Yes, there's an obvious gap that we can meet," right?

It starts with simple token allocation, right? Where are your governance tokens going? We self-funded entirely. We decided not to have any investors or VCs on our cap table because we didn't want any sell-side pressure on our users.

We didn't give any tokens away to early LPs in sweetheart deals to try to get temporary TVL. We didn't give any tokens to KOLs or influencers, because, again, all of this just ends up with these insiders using our users as exit liquidity.

The same thing applied to our team tokens. We said, "All right, what's the average percentage of tokens a team gets? Is it 20%, 25%, 30%, sometimes more?" We said, "Let's go on the low end. Let's do 20%." Then we said, "Okay, what about team vesting?" Usually teams vest for 2 to 3 years.

We said, “No, we’re going to do a 7-year vesting period because we want to truly build this for the long term. We want to be able to look each of our users in the eyes and tell them, hey, listen, this isn’t us trying to grab some money and then disappear into the sunset. This is us truly wanting to build a project and a community that grows over time. So, everything that we’ve done is long-term oriented.”

Yeah. Just listening to all that, what you just said is incredibly rare for the space. We know this because we’ve talked to many teams, and we’ve been investors ourselves. I think where you guys came up on our radar was the Accountable connection.

DeFi Dad and I were getting more into Accountable, and we were like, “Wow, this is amazing.” I’m so glad this exists because we first learned about it shortly after Stream Finance. I think it almost emerged out of the darkness at a time of need. Not to say that it’s some magic thing that you sprinkle on your protocol and everything works, and nothing will ever be exploited or go wrong, but it’s an incredible upgrade for DeFi.

7. Evolving beyond self-reported transparency dashboards

Then, just in talking to you guys, the amount of first-principles thinking built into the protocol from day 1 is rare. The fact that there are no VCs is rare. No LP deals is rare. Do you think this is going to become sort of table stakes for this kind of verification, maybe for institutional capital? I even think retail is going to start demanding this. What’s your take?

I think it’s going to be really interesting once people get educated enough to demand it, right? There are still a lot of projects out there that look like they have this kind of transparency, but you really have to educate yourself to look under the hood and say, “Actually, this is all self-reported data.” I think it will certainly become table stakes at some point when people get educated enough.

The issue that a lot of people will have is that if they built their own project or stablecoin without this kind of vision, they may never be able to get to that full amount of transparency. Again, I think you’ll have to be really, really educated even today. There are a lot of protocols out there that look like they’re super transparent. You’re like, “Oh, yeah, cool. Transparency dashboard, check, got it.”

But look a level deeper and you’re like, “No, all right. The transparency dashboard is reported by themselves, or reported by a third party that gets the data from the protocol itself.” So, yes, it will become table stakes. I think institutions will start demanding it, and retail will probably follow because it’s very hard for retail to demand these kinds of things in enough volume.

No matter what, you will still have to be really, really careful because, in this day and age, faking it till you make it takes you a long way. There are a lot of people who are really, really good at faking it.

Yeah, the whole industry has been growing up very quickly. It did seem to accelerate after October 10th. I think it’s also because it was the greatest elevator pitch for a number of these teams and services. Accountable existed before this. You guys had implemented an Accountable proof-of-solvency dashboard in January 2025, but I don’t think anybody could have cared less about it back then, right?

Then Stream Finance blows up, and suddenly everyone’s not seeking the highest yields anymore. This stuff is all normal in every bull market. We’re kind of seeing the same stuff play out in the bear market. Fundamentally sound teams continue to build. They’re committed to the promises they made about what they’re going to build, and the best teams are executing on that.

We’ve got a service like Accountable to help verify the backing of different stablecoins and yield products. We just did a podcast with Credora. I have no idea if it’ll be out by the time folks are listening to this podcast, but either way, look out for that. That’s great because they’re doing ratings.

8. Noon's multi-strategy yield engine: DeFi, CeFi, and TradFi

We’ve loved covering the curator space. I think the curator space is clearly hand in hand with the kind of work that you guys are doing. I imagine there will be curators that are going to be funneling more and more of the vault deposits into Noon. Speaking of those deposits into Noon, can you talk us through the products that are available on Noon? Where can folks deposit, and what sorts of strategies are under the hood?

Really good question. We started off our journey with the very simple dual-stablecoin structure popularized by Ethena: USN, which is non-yield-bearing but gets lots of governance rewards, and sUSN, which gets all the yield.

As we went further and further down the path, we kept having people say, “Hey, listen, these are great, but what do we do? How do we maximize the value for them?” We realized very quickly that there were a lot of people who just didn’t want to deal with all the complicated steps necessary, monitoring, and risk-assessing everything they needed to do to maximize the value of these tokens on DeFi.

What we started doing then was launching vaults. These vaults are basically one-click deposit vehicles that take USDC and USDT—very widely accessible stablecoins—and deploy them, using Noon’s yield-bearing stablecoins as a foundational layer, into advanced, sophisticated DeFi yield strategies.

The primary one that we use is leverage looping, which everyone understands. You go on a lending platform like Morpho or Euler, use the yield-bearing stablecoin as collateral, borrow a non-yield-bearing stablecoin, and then loop that over and over again. You’re basically collecting the spread between the yield of your yield-bearing stablecoin and the borrowing interest rate of your non-yield-bearing stablecoin.

Given that we’re the highest-yield-bearing, safe stablecoin around, that’s quite a healthy spread, especially right now with interest rates being as low as they are. That’s the second type of product, our leverage-looping vault.

We’re just about to launch a second type of vault, which is a liquidity-provisioning vault. This may be launched by the time this goes live. We have some market makers who provide a bunch of liquidity and, as a result, get a bunch of governance rewards. Now we want to make this open and accessible to everyone.

Our market makers are going to move all of the funds they’re using to provide liquidity into our provisioning vaults, allowing anyone to do the same thing. Everyone can benefit in exactly the same way. So, that’s what’s coming up next in terms of products.

One other thing I should say is that we’ve already launched another product. I talked about our leverage-looping vaults, which have stablecoins that you can deposit. We’ve also just launched, in partnership with tBTC, a BTC-denominated, or tBTC-denominated, vault.

I think that’s going to be really interesting as well because these can give BTC holders market-leading returns by doing very simple leverage looping on their BTC holdings, without reducing any of their exposure to the upside or downside of BTC.

9. How Noon achieves 9%+ yields: Removing gatekeepers and accessing institutional products

Just to call out some of the baseline yields that sUSN has been achieving, I’m looking at your site right now, and the 7-day trailing APY is 9.54%, while the 28-day APY is 8.53%. Can you explain a little bit more about what goes on under the hood to achieve that 9.544% yield on sUSN?

Yeah, perfect. Let me step back and take you through our entire return and allocation philosophy. This goes back to how we built Noon to be different and better than anything else that was in the market.

We wanted Noon—and we still want Noon—to be a place where anyone in the world can come, deploy their assets, and rest assured that they’re earning the highest low-risk yield.

I can't say risk-free because only T-bills are really risk-free, but the low-risk yield that they can get in the market is irrespective of what's going on in the market. So, at any point in the cycle, they know that Noon and sUSN are going to have the highest of those yields.

The way that we wanted to do that is, we basically built a yield engine that could deploy yields across DeFi, CeFi, TradFi—basically any yield source that we could think of that would have that profile: higher yields, lower risks. A lot of times, obviously, it's hard to find that high-yield, low-risk yield, but the way that we're able to do it is by going to products that may be a little bit more behind gates.

Typically, you have minimum ticket sizes that are usually in the millions, which your average retail investor can't get into. By being able to do that, we're able to access these kinds of yields on behalf of every user that we have and suddenly remove that gatekeeping in a really powerful way. So that's kind of the premise behind what we're doing.

Now let's get into the actual specifics. We, with our community, actually agree upon what is permitted as these high-yield, low-risk yield opportunities, and every new opportunity needs to be voted on by our community. So there's a really strong, powerful mechanism making sure that we're not just throwing stuff at the wall. We do detailed risk assessments, have a discussion with our community, vote, and so on.

Right now, on the DeFi side of things, we have lending, PTs, holding PTs, and PT looping. On the CeFi side of things, it's just BTC funding-rate arbitrage. On the TradFi side of things, it's T-bills—the U.S. T-bills—collateralized loan obligations, or CLOs, and private credit. Those are the areas that we're able to allocate into.

On top of that, we have an automated allocator, and that automated allocator basically looks at market conditions and tells us what our optimal allocation is on a real-time basis. That's what we allocate into.

For example, for the past few months, CeFi and funding-rate arbitrage have really been underperforming, so we've had zero allocated to that for a while. TradFi assets like CLOs and private credit are overperforming, so we've frankly had most of our deployments shift into that over the last few months. That's how we can ensure that, no matter what the market conditions are, we'll always be able to provide our users with the highest yield. They can set it and forget it. They don't need to worry about cycling assets.

10. Private credit exposure and why the risk is acceptable for Noon

One of the major sources of yield that's underpinning this substantial, competitive Noon yield is private credit. I believe that within that private credit, you have exposure to Fasanara. We just learned recently that they had some exposure to First Brands Group, which I believe has gone bankrupt. Long story short, they had some exposure. Our understanding is that it's very limited, and because of that, there are lots of protections in place to protect the capital that Fasanara manages.

As a Noon depositor, how do we know that the risk being taken within that private-credit sector is acceptable? What does Noon do to report on that or to assure us, as lenders and depositors, that the risk being taken is acceptable?

It's a really good question. Currently, we have quite a bit of our AUM, or TVL, in private credit, and that's fundamentally just because of where the market is. It's very easily outperforming most, if not all, other low-risk yield sources.

In order to get comfortable with private credit in general, and the Fasanara Tech Fund in particular, we did probably months of due diligence. We went really deep into the Fasanara product, looked at all their different funds, and looked at all the qualitative and quantitative metrics. We were even introduced to their auditors to make sure that we understood exactly where some of these numbers were coming from.

Fundamentally, I think the reason we got as comfortable as we did was because of the structure of the Fasanara Tech Fund product that we're in, which is effectively a private credit line to a lot of really small borrowers, so it's extremely well diversified. It's geographically diverse, across, I think, 40-plus countries. You literally have thousands upon thousands of actual individual positions.

In terms of individual concentration risk, it's very well protected. On top of that, all these loans are asset-backed. These are all invoice asset-backed, which is to say that you have 2 levels of redundancy.

First of all, obviously, the borrower who is taking the loan is on the hook for repaying it. If they're somehow unable to repay the loan, then you have the invoice, which is from a third-party company. Usually, the third-party company is a very well-known company. If the borrower is unable to repay, you basically seize that invoice, and you can then claim the funds that would have been paid to the borrower but are now paid to you because they missed a payment or something like that. That makes it really powerful.

There are very small edge cases where that entire chain falls apart. Unfortunately, the First Brands Group bankruptcy was one of those edge cases. The edge case there was fraud, which is what happened in the First Brands Group case. It's a very small edge case, but unfortunately, that is what happened.

Fortunately, as you say, we can't disclose too many specifics, but so far, from everything that we've seen and heard—and we've had a lot of conversations with the Fasanara risk team about this—it sounds like they're in a really good position.

11. New Noon tBTC yields and strategies

Arpan, I want to circle back to the tBTC yield. Bitcoin yields are hard to come by. They're normally not that competitive. We're talking about sometimes less than 10 basis points to lend WBTC or one of the other forms of Bitcoin on Ethereum or any other chain. What are the baseline yields that the tBTC vaults are earning? I think there's one on Ethereum and Starknet. Anything else you can tell us about where that yield comes from?

First of all, shout-out to the tBTC team. Great team, fantastic product. We've launched a vault with Yield App by Accountable on mainnet for tBTC, and with Vesu on Starknet, both taking in tBTC and generating yield. On mainnet, it's about 3%; that should normalize between 3% and 5%. On Starknet and Vesu, that yield is 9%.

I think that's a little inflated because of the way that Vesu calculates these yields. They're looking at basically a change in the price per share, which means that the yield is going to be magnified in markets like this when the price of BTC is going down, and it's going to be really shrunk when the price of BTC goes up.

In terms of where we're getting the yield, it's generally from the same source. We take the tBTC, deposit it into a lending protocol like Morpho on mainnet, and borrow against it at really conservative LTVs. We're talking about 45% to 50% LTV. We borrow USDC or USDT against it, drop it into our stablecoin, sUSN, and then leverage-loop that a few times.

That's a super-simple, super-safe way to take an asset that really doesn't give you that much yield, like BTC, and suddenly increase that yield by 2, 3, 4, 5, or even more times. The most important thing for us, frankly, is to make sure that this continues to be a safe-yield product. That includes advanced automations in terms of deleveraging when necessary.

It's obviously taking into account the initial LTV, then setting automated deleveraging or releveraging whenever the price movements warrant it, making sure all of that is automated and stress-tested. So there's no risk of it whatsoever. Obviously, the reason we've chosen such a conservative LTV right now is because the market is a little bit choppy.

We've never seen a move this big that would auto-liquidate us, and I think we're going to keep being really conservative with this. But that still allows us to get some really juicy returns.

12. NOON token launch: transferability, staking, and LP vault

Arpan, as we come to a close here, I'm curious to know what you're excited about that's coming next, maybe with Noon. Anything you're building, any new products you want to share with us?

Honestly, our team is building so many different things. It's really hard to narrow it down because I think 2026 is going to be such an interesting year for us. Let me narrow it down to just 3 things.

First and foremost, we're going to be listing our governance token. That, I think, is going to be really compelling when we can take some of the rewards that we've been giving some of our users. So far, we've avoided putting any numbers to it at all because I hate it when you look at your return and it's like 15%, and you're like, “All right, 90% of it is in governance tokens,” right?

Once we do that, obviously, we'll still segregate it, but we can at least show people indicatively what that yield may be—what additional incremental yield that might have.

There are also so many other cool things coming out with our governance token. We already have active staking, which is the normal staking that users do in order to get a lot more governance tokens from their use of USN and sUSN across all of our partner protocols.

We're opening up a new version of staking just for people who are invested in Noon, the governance token, and I think that'll be really compelling and different in terms of having a couple of different ways of doing this. That's one piece that I'm really excited about: growing and exploring the governance token as a separate, but obviously related, product.

The second piece is LP vaults, which I mentioned before. I think we're really, really excited about LP vaults because we really are all about—I hate using the word “democratized”—but we love trying to make everything we're doing, and every way that anyone is earning yield on Noon, open to as many people as possible. We hate that gatekeeping. We hate that somehow we ended up in the space that's supposed to be the most transparent in all of financial-services history, and the insiders keep getting richer.

This LP vault is supposed to open that back up, almost like a backstage pass. Usually, you have your market makers and people like that who really benefit from things like this, but we want to let anyone do it. Obviously, they have to be along for the ride, like our market makers are, but this will give our users another way to get really deeply involved and embedded into Noon, which we're really excited about.

The third thing, which I think is probably the longest-term version of this, truthfully, is that we probably won't get really meaningful impact and traction for at least 6 months or so. Long term, though, I think this is going to be the thing that moves the needle the most: our really deep integrations with some of the largest distribution partners around the world, especially in emerging markets, for our vault products and sUSN.

This is distribution to the mass market. These are distribution channels with millions upon millions, tens of millions, of users. That's going to be really exciting, because the reason we're doing this is to try to put a yield-bearing asset in every single person's pocket. That's not just the people who understand DeFi right now. It's literally everyone. So, yeah, that's probably what I'm most excited about right now.

We've had this theme around vaults lately on the podcast, and it's because it's such an enormous sector for growth. It's funny, because vaults seemed like a specific type of DeFi protocol when you think about 2020 and 2021. We all would talk about Yearn, Beefy, and folks like that.

I think now we're seeing that vaults are going to be a way to package and productize every DeFi yield out there. They're very important to the future of mainstream adoption, and I just love the way that you guys are leading in terms of providing the kind of verification and assurances that the underlying yield is real. Where does it come from? What are the reserves, and so forth?

It is helping to answer the question of what's going on behind the scenes for new folks and new investors who want to deposit. To put a cap on it, that's the hardest thing to overcome when you're a new protocol: how do you give investors confidence, assurance, and a track record without existing for 5 to 10 years?

I think you're showing us a blueprint for other teams that are building in the space.

First and foremost, I think you guys are obviously crushing it. I really enjoyed this conversation, so thank you so much for having me. It's been really fun.

At the stage that we're at right now, we'd love to get real, sophisticated user feedback. We'd love to hear: tell us what we're doing right, and tell us what we're doing wrong. We love it when our community members do this. We've literally built features because our community members have said, “Hey, listen, we'd prefer this; we prefer that.”

At the end of the day, we want to build something that's really valuable to our users. We'd love it if you gave us some feedback and told us what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong. Overall, I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you both for having me.