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Financial markets were not designed for openness and efficiency. They evolved through layers of abstractions and intermediaries, accumulating slow, manual processes that ultimately reinforced the advantages of incumbents.
Today, interacting directly with markets remains a privilege reserved for a few elite participants who capture inefficiencies and extract disproportionate value. Even with a promising strategy, emerging managers face months of preparation and up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in setup costs. They must coordinate service providers, complete legal and regulatory work, and establish operational infrastructure before managing a single dollar.
This system is now undergoing fundamental change. Assets of all kinds are migrating onchain, opening new possibilities for how capital can be managed, governed, and composed into new financial products. But tokenization alone is not enough. To fully realize the potential, onchain asset management requires sophisticated infrastructure that combines institutional-grade security with the programmability, transparency, and efficiency that blockchains enable.
This is where GLAM comes in.
From DeFi Beginnings to Tokenization
Sparked by the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008, we have seen an ever-growing stream of pioneers enter the industry and reimagine the foundational building blocks of financial markets. To understand the significance of what is happening today, we must acknowledge the ones who laid the groundwork. Ethereum's early DeFi innovators proved that complex financial systems could operate on public blockchains, despite significant technological constraints. The creation of automated market makers and lending protocols demonstrated that key financial primitives could be rebuilt natively onchain.
These early experiments proved the concept but exposed practical limitations. The next phase of financial infrastructure demands greater speed, lower costs, and better developer tooling. Solana delivers the foundation needed for institutional-grade systems, enabling asset management applications that were not feasible on earlier blockchain architectures.
While the onchain building blocks enabling the improvements of traditional finance continue to grow more sophisticated, reliable, and efficient, something important has changed. Until recently, these systems primarily handled native cryptoassets and stablecoins. Today, we are witnessing the tokenization of offchain assets at an accelerating pace. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries ballooned from approximately US $2 billion to over US $6 billion, a 3x increase in eight months. Money market funds, private equity, and other financial instruments are all finding their way onto public blockchains. The internet collapsed the cost of distributing information to near zero, and thanks to blockchains, the same is now happening to the transfer of value.
Tokenization Is Not Enough
Tokenization is not an end state. It is a prerequisite. Top-down, we are seeing the rise of stablecoins and tokenization of real-world assets, which, while exciting, often merely mask underlying structural limitations. Once assets are onchain, the real question becomes: how do we manage them effectively, securely, and at scale?
Running sophisticated investment strategies onchain today presents significant challenges. Organizations typically face a difficult choice: either manage assets with basic security measures, such as hot keys on a server, and accept substantial operational risk, or invest heavily in custom infrastructure and specialized security solutions.
Neither option is optimal for institutions.
The current solutions for onchain asset management are fragmented, requiring multiple specialized tools and services. They are inefficient, with high operational overhead, and not suited to scale as more institutional capital enters the space.
These challenges are more than inconvenient - they actively hinder adoption by legitimate financial institutions that require institutional-grade controls and security without sacrificing operational efficiency.
Vaults: The Next Big Thing After Tokenization
In a world where every asset, from company equity and government bonds to non-fungible assets and social tokens, moves onchain, the essential question is how portfolios should be structured and managed.
At GLAM, we believe programmable vaults will become the standard container for managing assets in internet capital markets. Just as tokenization provides the framework for representing assets onchain, vaults provide the framework for securely managing those assets by embedding strategies, policies, and permissions into the system.
We are building the infrastructure that makes onchain asset management possible by creating a secure and flexible architecture that separates key management from access controls, policy enforcement, and execution logic. It collapses traditional functions, eliminating the need for reconciliation and augmenting compliance and auditing through onchain programs.
This separation of concerns ensures that the remaining layers are handled by specialists:
- Security companies can focus on private key management
- Compliance teams can define transparent policies
- Managers can implement strategies and optimize investment logic
Together, these specialists oversee the layers that require discretion and governance, while all other operations are automated and enforced onchain.
The result is an efficient system with clear boundaries and embedded controls, one that respects the complexity of asset management while making it more accessible, transparent, and programmable.
What GLAM Is and What It Is Not
To be precise about our role in this ecosystem:
GLAM provides infrastructure for onchain asset management. We enable institutions to deploy, operate, and scale tokenized investment products with built-in safeguards and full transparency.
GLAM is not:
- A fund
- An asset manager
- A tokenized asset issuer
- A custody or key management solution
Our focus is delivering secure and flexible infrastructure for institutional onchain asset management. We eliminate unnecessary intermediaries between investors and managers while preserving the safeguards they provide.
Why Now Is the Time
Several key trends make this infrastructure essential:
- Accelerating tokenization across asset classes
- Emerging regulatory clarity around digital asset management
- Growing institutional adoption of public blockchains
- Maturing infrastructure and DeFi protocols
Together, these trends create both the demand and the technological foundation for institutional-grade onchain asset management. The missing piece, until now, has been the specialized infrastructure that bridges traditional finance's institutional requirements with the unique capabilities of blockchain technology.
Recalibrating Trust in Asset Management
At its core, the relationship between asset managers and clients is built on trust. Today, that trust is formed through personal relationships, historical performance, brand recognition, and extensive legal documentation. But why does asset management operate this way?
The fundamental issue is that investors cannot inherently trust managers to act in their best interest. This leads to a complex web of intermediaries. Fund administrators reconcile and verify the manager’s reported activity, auditors independently review and validate the administrator’s records, and custodians safeguard the fund’s assets on behalf of all parties. Each intermediary adds cost, time, and friction.
Once assets move onchain, this no longer needs to be the case. Guardrails can be encoded directly into accounts, defining precisely what a manager is able and allowed to do. Fine-grained access controls and programmable policies recalibrate conventional power dynamics in asset management.
This shift removes the need for blind trust in intermediaries, lowers barriers to entry, and allows anyone to compete in a more equitable financial system.
The Future We Are Building
When GLAM succeeds, the impact will extend far beyond immediate users. We envision:
- Vaults as the standard container for managing capital
- Fund infrastructure that is programmable, transparent, and efficient
- A leaner asset management stack with fewer intermediaries
- Asset management that is more secure, automated, and accessible
- A system where sophisticated strategies are available to everyone
The result will be a financial system that operates at internet speed, preserves the integrity of modern capital markets, and unlocks broader access and new strategies.
The Global Layer for Asset Management
GLAM is designed to support the full spectrum of asset management, from simple personal strategies to complex institutional operations. Our infrastructure seamlessly integrates with the broader Solana ecosystem, including staking solutions, lending markets, and derivative exchanges, enabling efficient capital deployment.
GLAM is more than a product. It represents a new paradigm for managing assets in internet capital markets, with programmability, transparency, and security embedded directly into the infrastructure.
This technological shift will expand what is possible in asset management, making sophisticated strategies more accessible, operations more efficient, and investment products more innovative.
The tokenization wave has begun.
The infrastructure to put these assets to work comes next.
That infrastructure is GLAM.
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