TurtleLover

An intense 24 hours. I’m thrilled to announce that @hare_xyz is out of stealth. As co-founder and CEO, I can say this is the most exciting chapter of my career so far. We’re backed by @GSR_io and @turtledotxyz , with a $100m multi-year capital commitment from GSR behind us. The response since we announced has been overwhelming, so thank you to everyone who has reached out. Here is what we’re building and why I think it matters. Trillions of dollars of assets are expected to move onchain over the next five years. Bringing them onchain is only half the job. Someone has to understand, price and manage the risk underneath them, and present it in a way institutional capital can trust. Today, curators manage around $7bn onchain. Some run hedge-fund-style strategies chasing performance. Others scale stablecoins across chains chasing incentives. Both are valid models. Neither was built to absorb the wave of real-world assets now arriving, or to serve the buy side that wants exposure to them. That’s the gap Hare steps into. We’re a curator with the ambition and discipline of an investment bank, and there’s no better place to start than credit. DeFi has plenty of attack vectors, and the market has built around the ones it already understands: security, smart contract and oracle risk etc The challenge on the horizon is the offchain component behind many of these assets: where the capital is actually deployed, and what sits under a strong name and an attractive yield. We underwrite every layer, and we’ll publish our reporting openly, including how much liquidity is available instantly and how much takes longer under stress. Ok theory is fun but the questions I’ve been asked most are how we execute, what we offer and how we truly serve the market. The answer starts with building the strongest foundation possible. That’s why we’re launching with two products, both powered by Aave Aave Labs. The first is a dollar vault for any major USD stablecoin, built for scale. The second is a gold vault built on Paxos’s PAX Gold. Giving the world access to yield on gold reminds me of the magic in finance, and why so much of its future will be built onchain. The journey is long, and our ambition is bigger still. I see a future where onchain markets become the venue for global capital formation, and raising capital onchain, whether equity or debt, is simply the default. Thank you to everyone who made this possible. To @SuperChad15 and the Turtle team, who built the infrastructure that turns our products into machines and backed this from the first conversation. To @xinsong86 @Palmstierna @KunzAlain the GSR team, whose belief and market expertise sit behind everything we do. And to our partners at Chainlink Labs and Hypernative. I couldn’t ask for better people to build with. If you know me, you know I love the grind, but I’ve never been more excited to get to work. If you're interested in what we are doing, let’s talk.

A lot of the conversation about bringing real-world assets onchain focuses on the assets themselves. I think the harder question is how we underwrite the risks behind them. As more assets come onchain, the market needs people who can assess those risks, explain them clearly and help investors understand what they’re actually taking on. That’s why we’re building Hare. DeFi has developed strong ways to assess smart-contract and oracle risk. But many real-world assets also depend on offchain credit and counterparties. To understand the risk, you have to look beyond the onchain structure: Where is the capital being deployed? What is the underlying credit? Who are the counterparties? How could problems move through the system? A strong rating or familiar name doesn’t answer those questions. You also have to ask what happens when everyone wants liquidity at once. How much can be returned immediately? What takes longer? Have those scenarios been stress-tested and explained clearly to investors? Calling anything riskless would be a lie. The job is to understand the risks, model how they behave under stress and be honest about the results. We’re launching with dollar- and gold-denominated earn products. Gold is an interesting place to start because people already understand it as a store of value. Bringing it onchain creates the opportunity to build new utility around a familiar asset. Longer term, I want onchain markets to become a serious venue for capital formation in their own right. That will take more than putting assets onchain. It will take underwriting people can understand and trust. I spoke with GSR about why we’re building Hare and what we’re working toward: gsr.io/insights/connor-milne…