RealFi Wants to Put Your Idle Stablecoins to Work

**John O'Connor** (0:00)
From a treasurer perspective, what do you really care about? You really care about safety and liquidity, probably as your number one and your number two. And then of course, yield and returns are number three, right? But you really care about the first two, because the first two are how you get fired if you do things wrong, right?
The third might affect your bonus, but the first two are kind of existential.

**Sam Ewen** (0:30)
Introducing RealFi, a smarter stable coin that's backed by real world assets. Launching August 2026, join the testnet now at realfi.co. All right, welcome. We are here with John O'Connor from RealFi. John, I'm excited to talk to you, learn all about RealFi and what you guys are doing. I want to just start at the beginning.
I know what USDC is, I know what stable coins are, but what is RealFi? How is it different from what I already have?

**John O'Connor** (0:56)
Absolutely. And thank you for having me, Sam. So RealFi is about putting idle stable coin balances to work. So most stable coins, USDT, USDC, they sit idle whilst the issuer keeps the return from the reserves.
The reserves in these examples being UST bills. With RealFi, we issue USDR, which is your normal dollar stable coin. But then once you stake it, there comes SUSDR and that is backed by a portfolio of real-world assets, fixed income assets. And we pass back the benefit from those assets back to the holders of SUSDR. So SUSDR will accrue in value based on the net asset value of those fixed income assets underneath it. And that represents pretty different economic model from what your OG stable coins do.

**Sam Ewen** (1:51)
Can you tell me where the inspiration came from? What were you seeing was an opportunity in the market for you to introduce maybe a more proactive product that really focuses on productivity?

**John O'Connor** (2:01)
Yeah, I mean, we've come up with many good ideas in crypto, many very bad ideas as well. And particularly when markets are frothy, you start seeing, I would say, a lot of the bad ideas really start to come out. And a lot of that is really based on reflective yield.
So products where the value of them is really from being played out and the speculators have taken, which is often inflationary. So that kind of works when everyone's really excited and everything is going up. And it kind of creates a death spiral when you're on the other side of that thing. So yeah, incentives which are inflationary or reflexive, being used as the quote unquote yield, I think have been very problematic. And as the markets matured, more institutional adoption, I basically started to believe that there was an opportunity to start looking at maybe something a little bit less exciting, a little bit more traditional, put together, basically substitute out the traditional assets you might have seen across DeFi, et cetera, for something in the fixed income family. And that's what we did with RealFi. So at RealFi, we're trying to create a product that can be around for not the six month life cycle of many crypto projects, but really provide something useful across the market that can stand the test of time.

**Sam Ewen** (3:29)
What is the reception been so far when you talk to people, especially in the institutional world, who probably get excited about a product like this?

**John O'Connor** (3:36)
I would say positive. I would also say that as you start creating traditional products or more traditional looking products, it's definitely easier for people to go and understand. And that also means that you run traditional diligence processes on things, which is great because this is what we're comfortable with doing. So from that perspective, a lot of crypto treasurers, I also would say, came from more traditional backgrounds and then got involved in crypto. So at least when they look at something like this, they're like, I know exactly what this is.
I don't need to watch great podcasts like this to be able to necessarily understand the product. I can look through the data room, look at the assets, understand what's happening and potentially see the benefit for the treasurer's portfolio compositions. So I will say positive. That being said, we are in TASnet, so a lot of work needs to be done now across the next few weeks as we shift towards mainnet.

**Sam Ewen** (4:32)
You guys are built on Cardano. What's your relationship with the chain? How has that experience been?

**John O'Connor** (4:37)
We're built in multiple places, so Cardano is definitely one of them, as is EVMainnet.
I have a very long relationship with the chain. I was actually the first hire at the Cardano Foundation way back when. So I was there during the L1 golden years as we were all building out the technology in its quite nascent form. So obviously I have a lot of fondness for Cardano based on that history. From our perspective or from my perspective, we're trying to build products that are useful to people, which means you're going to meet them where they are. And as a result, we'll be doing native contracts on EVMainnet, which we'll be launching shortly with. So everyone should be able to get the best experience of the product that they can where they are.