How Olivier Dang Built KAIO As A Bridge Between Wall Street and DeFi

Zurich, October 2025. Olivier Dang, the COO of KAIO is juggling two calls simultaneously at Laser Digital's European headquarters. One is about expanding his tokenization platform to three new blockchains. The other involves approving a venture deal for Nomura's digital asset arm. Dang has already made two fundamental business decisions that would take most financial institutions weeks to process.

"Crypto moves so fast," Dang tells Sri Misra in his conversation on the alpha un# podcast. "You sit in TradFi and can take a couple of weeks to reach a decision. Investment banking moves fast. Global markets move fast. But still, to reach a decision, you go through various committees. Crypto native organizations reach fundamental decisions in hours."

This is the paradox Dang embodies. On paper, he's the last person you'd expect to be tokenizing Wall Street's most conservative products. French engineer. McKinsey consultant. Nearly a decade at Nomura. CFA charterholder. The resume screams institutional finance, not blockchain disruption.

Yet here we are. KAIO, the platform he incubated and operates as COO, has tokenized over $200 million in institutional assets. Not speculative crypto tokens. Not synthetic derivatives. Real funds from BlackRock, Brevan Howard, and Hamilton Lane - three names that don't take risks on unproven platforms.

Watch Sri's full alpha un# conversation with Olivier Dang where he reveals why global DeFi regulation has "zero chance" of coordination and how the GENIUS Act is weaponizing stablecoins for dollar dominance.

From Paris Startup to Nomura's Digital Strategist

Dang's journey started in an unexpected place. In 2001, fresh out of engineering school in Paris, he founded Apeera, a mobile internet company. This was before the iPhone. Before mobile web browsing was even practical. The company eventually folded, but the experience taught him how to build fast and fail faster.

After an MBA at London Business School, he pivoted to McKinsey in 2006, where he spent four years learning the opposite skill set. "I was a Management Consultant at McKinsey in London," he tells Sri. "You learn how to zoom in quickly to the core issue and then make decisions with sometimes limited information."

In 2010, he joined Nomura. Over twelve years, he climbed to Global Chief Operating Officer for the Wholesale Digital Office. By 2020, he was part of the team convincing Nomura's board to create Laser Digital, a fully-owned digital asset subsidiary with real autonomy.

"About three years ago at Nomura, we convinced the board to set up Laser Digital, a fully-owned subsidiary that will operate in the digital asset space. Credit to them, they leave us with a large degree of autonomy."

Laser Digital launched with three verticals: trading, asset management, and ventures. Dang took the ventures arm, deploying capital into 20 to 25 companies and managing roughly $100 million in monthly deal flow. But the investment that would define his career was still to come.

Building KAIO: When You Can't Find It, Build It

In early 2023, Dang and his team had identified tokenization of real-world assets, particularly alternative investments, as a massive opportunity. The thesis was sound: hedge funds and private credit were largely inaccessible, with prohibitively high minimums and terrible liquidity. Blockchain could solve this with 24/7 trading, fractional ownership, and instant settlement.

They just needed the right platform.

"For almost a year, we were scanning the market and couldn't find anything really that would excite us," Dang explains to Sri. "So instead of staying on the sideline, we thought let's wrap our sleeves and let's move into a builder mode."

In partnership with WebN Group, Laser Digital incubated KAIO (initially Libre Capital, rebranded in July 2025). The mandate was clear: build an institutional-grade tokenization platform that doesn't compromise on compliance.

"We are built as a purpose-built institutional protocol, designed around compliance first. Custody partners, KYC/AML frameworks, and permissioned layers ensure institutions are covered on the regulatory side. Onchain rails provide transparency, instant settlement, and programmability which traditional finance cannot match."

Rather than forking existing DeFi protocols, KAIO built a sovereign AppChain on Polygon CDK with multi-chain gateways for Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, Sui, Aptos, Ton, Hedera, and Sei Network. But technology was only half the equation. The harder part was convincing blue-chip asset managers to put their funds on blockchain.

The Partnership Strategy: Starting at the Top

Most tokenization platforms start small. Dang went the opposite direction.

"We wanted to start with the most trusted, globally recognized names to signal credibility from day one," he tells Sri.

The real validation came in August 2025 when KAIO announced integration with the Hedera network and brought three institutional heavyweights onchain: BlackRock's ICS US Dollar Liquidity Fund, Brevan Howard's Master Fund, and the Laser Digital Carry Fund.

BlackRock's ICS US Dollar Liquidity Fund manages $1.3 trillion in assets. It's one of the largest institutional money market funds in the world. This is where corporations park cash they need tomorrow. Where pension funds keep reserves. And now it's available onchain.

The implications are massive. Institutional treasuries can now hold tokenized money market shares that earn yield, serve as collateral in DeFi protocols, and settle instantly across borders.

October 2025 brought the next wave. KAIO integrated with Sei Network and launched Hamilton Lane's Senior Credit Opportunities Fund (SCOPE). Hamilton Lane brings $986 billion in assets under management globally with approximately 750 professionals. Their SCOPE fund provides access to senior private credit, one of the fastest-growing segments in alternative investments.

"This launch marks another major milestone in institutional blockchain adoption," Dang explains. "By using the Sei Network, we're bringing composable access to leading fund strategies entirely onchain. It's the foundation for real-time, programmable, financial infrastructure built for the next era of capital markets."

By late October 2025, KAIO had over $200 million in tokenized institutional assets across five major products on multiple blockchain networks.

Beyond Tokenization: The Composability Vision

Tokenization is step one, Dang explains to Sri. The real value comes from what he calls composability. Once institutional assets are tokenized and onchain, they can plug into the entire DeFi ecosystem.

"Your tokens representing your various funds will be available on, for example, Aave Horizon," he says. "You'll be able to get some margin on the back of this and extract some stablecoin."

KAIO is working on something even more ambitious: a retail-accessible product they're calling "CASH."

"We're going to build this index that is going to make the crypto yield through some of the laser digital crypto funds and then the real world yield such as the one from Hamilton Lane private credit funds. So you have diversified yield, accessible onchain through a token that you could fully trade and exchange or get a loan against it. That is really going to democratize the access to some of those funds."

It's the ETF model applied to onchain institutional funds. If it works, it could bring millions of retail investors into alternative assets that were previously off-limits.

The Regulatory Chess Game

On July 18, 2025, President Trump signed the GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins) into law. It was the first major federal crypto legislation in U.S. history. The law requires stablecoin issuers to maintain 100% reserves in liquid assets, establishes a dual federal-state regulatory regime, and mandates monthly public disclosures.

For platforms like KAIO, the GENIUS Act solves a critical problem: institutions need digital dollars onchain to invest in tokenized assets, but won't put billions into unregulated stablecoins.

"Regulation has to start with fixing the main pain point, which is how you make sure you can get people onchain with a local fiat currency," Dang tells Sri. "Once you're onchain, where do you think those digital dollars will go? They want to stay onchain. And here is where we come in with high quality products."

He's blunt about the geopolitical dimension. "Obviously 95, 98% of the stablecoin are US dollar denominated." The GENIUS Act isn't just financial regulation. It's dollar weaponization.

Sri asks him on whether we'll see coordinated global regulation for DeFi and tokenization.

"Zero chance. Believe me, I think even in TradFi, you started to see divergence of a regulatory regime. Can you imagine even at a local level trying to agree on the regulatory framework for DeFi and then coordinating that at a global level? It's going to be close to impossible for the next decade."

The Macro Thesis

In April 2025, Ripple and Boston Consulting Group published a report projecting that tokenized real-world assets would grow from $0.6 trillion in 2025 to $18.9 trillion by 2033, a 53% compound annual growth rate.

The RWA tokenization market (excluding stablecoins) grew 380% in three years to reach $24 billion in mid-2025. Tokenized Treasury and money market fund assets hit $7.4 billion, up 80% year-to-date. Institutional adoption surveys show 86% of investors have or plan digital asset exposure.

Major financial institutions aren't experimenting anymore. Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon launched tokenized money market funds. JPMorgan's Kinexys platform has processed over $1.5 trillion in tokenized transactions. BlackRock's BUIDL fund nears $2.9 billion in AUM.

Five catalysts are converging: regulatory clarity (GENIUS Act, MiCA), technology maturation, economic efficiency (24/7 trading, instant settlement), institutional adoption, and the dollar weaponization play with 95 to 98% of stablecoins being USD-denominated.

The Bridge That Had to Be Built

As Sri wraps up the conversation, he reflects on what Dang represents. Not a crypto bro explaining blockchain to skeptical bankers. Not a banker awkwardly trying to understand DeFi. Something rarer: a genuine bridge between two worlds.

Wall Street has the assets. DeFi has the infrastructure. But Wall Street won't put trillions onchain without institutional-grade custody, compliance, and risk management. And DeFi won't achieve its promise without real capital from real institutions.

Dang spent a decade at Nomura learning how institutions work. Three years at Laser Digital learning how crypto works. Two years building KAIO learning how to synthesize both. The $200 million in tokenized assets, the partnerships with BlackRock and Brevan Howard and Hamilton Lane, the multi-chain infrastructure - these are proof the bridge can be built.

The great migration from analog to digital finance is no longer theoretical. It's happening. And people like Dang, who understand both worlds deeply and can operate at crypto velocity with institutional rigor, are building the rails that trillions of dollars will flow through.

The bridge is built. Now comes the crossing.