Jim Hiltner and Superstate: The Citibank Veteran Building Wall Street's Onchain Plumbing

In the summer of 2022, every major centralized crypto lender on Earth was going bankrupt. FTX, BlockFi, Genesis, Voyager. One firm doing the same business, lending, was not. It had no employees, no credit committee, no risk manager watching a Bloomberg terminal at 3am. It was a smart contract called Compound. Collateral values cratered 80 to 90 percent. The protocol liquidated cleanly, atomically, on weekends. Bad debt: zero.

Sitting inside Compound Treasury at the time was Jim Hiltner, a former Citibank analyst and CFA who had passed through fintech firms Visible Alpha and Pagaya. Watching the contagion sweep through traditional crypto lenders while the smart contract handled it, he reached a conclusion that became a company.

"Compound was doing borrowing and lending just like a lot of other desks were, but there was zero bad debt on the books. With a smart contract, it happens programmatically. That was the realization that there's real momentum towards applying these technologies towards other assets."

In 2023, Jim co-founded Superstate with Compound's Robert Leshner, Reid Cuming, and Dean Swennumson. The mission was to bring as much of Wall Street onchain as the regulatory perimeter allowed. Three years later, Superstate has raised over $100 million across three rounds, closed an $82.5 million Series B in January 2026 led by Bain Capital Crypto and Distributed Global, and become the infrastructure layer underneath Invesco, Bitwise, Coinbase Asset Management, and three NASDAQ-listed companies.

The Wi-Fi Symbol Problem

Jim's mental model of US capital markets is, in his own words, a Wi-Fi symbol. At the centre sits the Depository Trust Company, holding trillions of dollars of securities in "street name." Around it, concentric rings of broker-dealers, exchanges, and retail apps. Each ring extracts a fee. Each ring imposes a settlement delay. When you buy a stock through Fidelity, Fidelity is technically the shareholder. You hold an entitlement.

"Galaxy never knew I was a shareholder until I told Fidelity to move my shares out of DTC. It's literally the same CUSIP. Same rights. There is no counterparty or SPV or synthetic exposure. It was in my Fidelity app yesterday, and now it's in my Phantom wallet today."

This is Superstate's central architectural bet. Through its Opening Bell platform, the firm acts as an SEC-registered transfer agent that records share ownership directly on Solana or Ethereum. The blockchain token is the legal share. No special purpose vehicle, no synthetic wrapper. That distinguishes Superstate from the much larger Ondo Finance, which holds roughly 60 percent of the tokenized equity market but does so by parking stocks in an SPV and issuing representative tokens against them. Different counterparty stack, different risk profile.

Superstate spent its first two years proving the rails on its own balance sheet. USTB, a tokenized short-duration US Treasury fund, grew to roughly $967 million in assets, placing it among the top five tokenized money market funds globally. A second fund, USCC, captured the crypto basis trade and reached $267 million. Then in Q2 2026, Jim handed both products off. Invesco, the $2.2 trillion asset manager, assumed management of USTB. Bitwise, with $11 billion in crypto assets, took over USCC as its inaugural tokenized fund. Coinbase Asset Management selected Superstate's FundOS platform to power CUSHY, its new stablecoin yield fund. Superstate kept the technology rails. The asset managers got the customers.

"If I'd gone to Invesco in 2023 and said Superstate has this technology, launch a fund with us, it would have been premature. We put ourselves in the shoes of our clients. We showed we can take our own asset and make it better than every other asset on the planet."

The Onchain IPO

The bigger prize is public equities. Galaxy Digital, the NASDAQ-listed merchant bank, now has its Class A common stock natively tokenized on Solana through Superstate. Shareholders can hold GLXY in self-custody wallets and have already voted in a Galaxy proxy round through Broadridge. SharpLink Gaming followed on Ethereum. Forward Industries on Solana. Tokenized GLXY can be posted as collateral on Kamino, a Solana lending market, where borrow rates run materially below traditional prime brokerage.

The headline news is the calendar. Jim has hired a JP Morgan capital markets veteran who worked on the Circle IPO. The target is to run the first onchain IPO in the second half of 2026. His critique of the current IPO process is numerical and direct:

"Circle sold shares at $30 through the IPO. The first trade was $70. The first week close was $150. That's a great outcome regardless, but they probably left a lot of money on the table. Why not have a better clearing system where you can actually see the true bid for a security, when you can ask everybody what their bid is, versus just the top 100 clients?"

The regulatory tailwind is real. In January 2025, the SEC rescinded SAB 121, ending the accounting treatment that had kept banks out of digital asset custody. The GENIUS Act of July 2025 created a federal stablecoin framework requiring 100 percent backing in short-dated Treasuries. SEC Chair Atkins's Project Crypto explicitly directed staff to work with firms tokenizing securities.

When Sri pressed on agentic finance, AI agents moving capital across DeFi, Jim pushed back on the timeline. The bottleneck, in his view, isn't model capability. It's recourse.

"If somebody steals my keys and tries to move my security to their wallet, they're not on the allowlist. The disincentives in TradFi are stronger than the incentives. We can do the same thing in tokenization."

That hybrid, decentralized settlement with centralized legal recourse, is the unspoken trade that makes Invesco, Bitwise, and Coinbase comfortable building on Superstate's rails.

Listen to the full conversation between Sri Misra and Jim Hiltner on Unhashed for the operational mechanics, the IPO timeline, and the full case for why the DTC's monopoly on share registry is ending.