🎙️ What if institutions adopt crypto not because they believe in decentralization, but because the technology simply works better?At Proof of Talk 2026 in Paris, Bitcoin.com&#x27;s Alex Richardson sits down with Ben Nadareski, CEO and co-founder of Solstice, to explore how tokenized yield, stablecoins, and real-world assets are shaping the next generation of on-chain finance.Ben shares why institutions are increasingly viewing blockchain as financial infrastructure, how tokenized yield products are evolving, and why DeFi&#x27;s core principles—permissionless access, transparency, low fees, and democratized finance—remain as relevant today as ever.Topics include:- Why institutions may adopt crypto as infrastructure rather than ideology- The rise of tokenized yield and yield-bearing assets- How stablecoins and RWAs accelerated institutional adoption- Solana&#x27;s role in institutional DeFi- Token design, regulation, and market growth- Expanding access to advanced financial products through on-chain finance- Opportunities in emerging markets and global adoptionA thoughtful conversation on the future of DeFi, institutional crypto adoption, and how blockchain technology could transform global financial access.🎧 Listen now and follow Bitcoin.com News on Spotify for more conversations with founders, investors, and innovators building the future of finance, crypto, and decentralized technology.

Ben Nadareski on Tokenized Yield, DeFi Principles & Institutional Crypto Adoption

Bitcoin.com News Interviews

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Bitcoin.com News Interviews

## Participants

- **Alex Richardson** (Bitcoin.com)
- **Ben Nadareski** (Solstice)
- **Ben Nadareski** (Solstice)

## Transcript

Stablecoin has just killed the payment processing business for a lot of the TradFi institutions. That revenue line and their balance sheet has now been compressed dramatically. The next one that DeFi is coming after is going to be the yield bank solutions, the high yield savings account. Why would you put your money in a high yield savings account earning 0.00001%, as we've seen in the banks, for the long term, when you can earn a baseline yield of 4% upwards of what's been historically up to 15 to 20% in the delta neutral strat?

Welcome back to Proof of Talk 2026. I am sitting here with Ben Nadareski. He is the co-founder and CEO of Solstice. Ben, thanks a lot for being here. Thanks so much for having me. All right. So I was just reading about your history. It's a pretty amazing personal career story. You started as a published nuclear physics researcher. You moved to derivatives trading at Societe Generale.

You helped introduce blockchain to central banks across Asia at R3. And you led the first crypto derivatives trades with global banks at Galaxy Digital. And then you co-founded Solstice. So, yeah, like I said, a pretty amazing personal history. Is there like a common theme there? Is there a connective thread that made it all happen?

Absolutely. I think right off the bat, right, physics was just a quantitative output that got applied to Wall Street very quickly. But through the course of my career across places like R3, Consensus, Six Digital Exchange, and Galaxy, it was the institutionalization narrative that was really coming about. But during that whole period, I had a problem with a lot of the protocols being developed. We're really developing. Think of it like glorified back office for TradFi. They weren't preserving why we're in this industry in the first place of those core DeFi principles.

So we found at Solstice right off the bat with this very core thesis that the DeFi principles should be preserved, even if it's targeting institutions as an application. So Solstice has participated by both institutions and retail on a completely equitable basis. And preserving those DeFi principles, I've been involved in hundreds of DeFi projects since about 2013.

And it's one of those things that is most core to me as a founder to make sure that you know that the why we're doing this as an industry of the permissionless principles, democratization of access, low fees. That centralization aspect is so core to our thesis. And that's why we went after Solstice. So he published a piece a few days ago. We're just reading it. It came out late last week. And you're arguing that institutions are not going to buy into crypto as a belief system or as an ideological thing.

They're going to use it simply as infrastructure. And the thing that the banks can't copy, l...

Ben Nadareski on Tokenized Yield, DeFi Principles & Institutional Crypto Adoption

Transcript

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Ben Nadareski on Tokenized Yield, DeFi Principles & Institutional Crypto Adoption

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.