RedStone Today: a TokenizeThis interview with Marcin Kazmierczak

Marcin Kazmierczak: From the very beginning, we took a traditional early-stage company-building approach of listening to what the market actually needs. I believe one of the core reasons so many early crypto companies failed was an obsession with delivering the product they thought would disrupt the space, without continuously asking potential clients about what was actually needed.

A practical example: we started with oracles because we couldn't find what we needed from Chainlink in 2020 and 2021. From there, our product roadmap was always driven by client demand. The first product-market fit we hit, in 2022 and 2023, was with Mento on Celo. They needed accurate stablecoin price feeds. Then Pendle needed price feeds across L2s for yield-bearing assets. Then we were the first oracle to support EtherFi and Ethena expansion. We scaled from there to over 200 clients.

Credora followed the same logic. We acquired it because risk curators were dealing with a proliferation of assets and strategies and needed a better way to assess risk. RedStone Settle came from seeing that people wanted to use tokenized RWAs as collateral in lending markets, but on-chain liquidity wasn't there to support liquidations.

Today I'd describe RedStone not just as an oracle, but as the full-suite orchestration layer for tokenized and crypto assets used across DeFi. Price feeds, NAV delivery, risk assessment, on-chain liquidity monitoring, liquidation infrastructure. The goal is that when an institution wants to go onchain with a vault or tokenized asset, they don't need to source a handful of providers. They come to us.

Marcin: I think it's going to be two worlds that occasionally intersect. Retail and mass adoption will happen on public blockchains because they're accessible, and that's what mainstream users expect. Large transactions and B2B interactions will likely happen on both, but predominantly on private chains. Institutions don't want to disclose their strategies, their repo market activity, any of that.

Canton is a good example of this. Financial institutions love it because of its privacy layer. But if you ask at a conference like Tokenize This who's actually using Canton, almost nobody raises their hand. It's a chain built for institutions, not retail. Different product-market fit, different audience.

As an oracle and orchestration layer, we want to support both ecosystems. They have different needs. But the one requirement that's consistent across both is reliability. RedStone is the only oracle provider that has never had a single mispricing or downtime event. Six years of clean data delivery.

Marcin: All three. When we first spoke with the TokenizeThis team, the quality of the team behind the conference and attendees coming to the event were clear, and we wanted all of that in our ecosystem. That’s why we acquired STM and TokenizeThis.

Moreover, our DNA is technical excellence. We've never invested heavily in marketing because we believed you need absolutely solid fundamentals before you scale distribution. We have those fundamentals now. So this is the distribution phase, particularly in the US, where most financial innovation is happening.

I'll also say I'm genuinely proud of this event. The feedback from everyone I've met has been very positive. The quality of attendees, the venue. We can already announce that TokenizeThis 2027 is happening, and we're likely adding a satellite event around Token 2049 in Singapore.

Marcin: Tokenizing an asset is just the first step. The real value comes from actually using that asset within DeFi: lending, borrowing, liquidity provision. The constraint in lending specifically is onchain liquidity.

Imagine you're using ten million dollars of private credit as collateral. If there's a drawdown and the position needs to be liquidated, there's essentially zero onchain liquidity to execute against. You can't just sell into a thin market.

Settle addresses this through whitelisted solvers who are willing to close positions with their own capital. They take custody of the tokenized asset, wait out the redemption period, which might be one to two months, and redeem at maturity with a bonus for providing that service. It runs as an RFQ product. Multiple solvers quote the bonus they require, and the one willing to take the smallest spread wins.

The broader concept here is duration risk, and I think 2026 and 2027 are going to be the years DeFi is forced to actually learn it. Everything in crypto has historically been near-instantaneous. The moment you bring tokenized RWAs into the system, you're dealing with assets that don't settle at T+0. The whole architecture has to account for that lag and that mismatch.

Marcin: Three things. First, reputation and credibility. If an asset is delivered by BitGo or operated by Apollo, that brand transfers to the strategy. That matters a lot to allocators.

Second, rates. When we're talking about tokenized RWAs at scale, we're eventually talking about trillions in AUM. At that size, basis points on spreads are meaningful. Any structure that shaves cost off the final strategy has an edge.

Third, distribution. Tokenized assets are accessible globally, around the clock, which creates opportunities in markets that traditional finance doesn't reach well. Tron and USDT in Africa is the clearest example. It grew not because the technology was superior to Solana or Ethereum, but because it got there first and built real product-market fit in those geographies. First-mover distribution in underserved markets is a durable moat.

Marcin: Very important, especially given the pace of hacks. Credora evaluates a range of risk factors, including operational security: multisig structure, time locks, execution controls on critical transactions.

One element people don't fully appreciate is the feedback loop. When we issue a rating, we also return information about where the entity scored lowest. EtherFi is a good example. They received the rating, understood where to improve their documentation and methodology, and made those changes. The product got better for users. So Credora creates positive pressure to raise the baseline across the ecosystem.

Marcin: Both, but currently more from retail. Institutions often have internal risk departments or existing models. Retail users have nothing, so Credora fills that gap directly.

That said, institutional interest is growing. We've seen large funds, including a16z and Galaxy, interacting with the ratings for use in their internal risk modeling and allocation decisions. Going forward, we want to lean further into the institutional side because six years of onchain data translates into practical recommendations that are hard to replicate.

Marcin: We're actively looking at the market for further expansion and acquisition opportunities as we build out the orchestration suite. Nothing to announce yet, but we're not ruling anything out.

What we are announcing is RedStone Navigate, an advisory program that supports institutions with their onchain rollout. We walk them through vault structures, risk curator selection, security considerations, and what actually happened in recent hacks like Drift and Kelp. It's a step-by-step framework for institutions entering DeFi.