##### Introduction

Traditional finance has long relied on fixed income markets to provide structure, predictability, and liquidity to capital. Treasury benchmarks form the backbone of global debt issuance, credit default swaps hedge principal risk, and repo markets lubricate liquidity flows. Yet in digital assets, this equivalent infrastructure does not yet exist. Digital asset yield is plentiful, but the tools to access, hedge, and manage it remain absent.

Gyld Finance was founded with a simple but ambitious vision: to transform digital asset yield into standardized, tradable debt instruments that institutions can rely on. By building the first institutional yield tokenization infrastructure, Gyld bridges the gap between on-chain yield and traditional fixed income markets, offering the transparency, regulatory alignment, and liquidity that professional investors demand.

##### Where Are The Tools?

Digital asset yield is there. The tools are not. Asset managers today face several structural challenges when engaging with digital asset yield, specifically, staking markets. There is no standardized term structure, meaning yields cannot be locked in or managed across maturities. Staking entry and exit queues trap capital and result in loss of yield, exacerbated by volatile markets. Principal risk exposures such as validator behavior, slashing events, and the unpredictable effects of MEV remain unhedged.

Just recently, the Ethereum validator exit queue was at an all-time-high, currently over 46 days (as of September 12th), meaning investors experienced 46 days of trapped capital. While the entry queue was substantially less, it was still 13 days without yield. This disconnect in the markets presents an opportunity.

The volatility of staking yields is not trivial. On Solana, staking yields have moved three times more than the five-year Treasury bill, creating opportunities and risks that cannot be expressed in today’s market structure. Unbonding periods force funds and ETFs/ETPS to keep idle buffers, eroding capital efficiency. In short, just staking yield alone presents  a multi-hundred billion dollar asset class that still operates without the basic financial plumbing investors expect.

##### Familiar Tools, Brand New Market!

Gyld addresses this by introducing principal and coupon strips, instruments that separate a staked position into its two fundamental components: the underlying principal and the staking rewards. These strips are designed as bearer-style instruments that can be traded on a regulated exchange, with clear legal structures and integration into qualified custodians.

![](https://lightshift-website.s3.amazonaws.com/1758903359357_Image%2027-09-2025%20at%2000.13.jpeg)

This architecture unlocks yield as a tradable, fixed-term asset. Investors can lock in forward rates, hedge principal exposure, and trade liquidity premiums or discounts across maturities. A staked position that was once locked and illiquid becomes a familiar fixed income instrument, with transparency into validator distribution, performance, and accrual.

Importantly, Gyld has designed its marketplace with institutions in mind. Its trading engine supports both central limit order book and request-for-quote models, allowing for high-frequency trading as well as large block transactions. All of this is delivered with real-time transparency and fixed income analytics, including yield and basis curves, historical term structures, and portfolio duration tools.

![](https://lightshift-website.s3.amazonaws.com/1758903383117_Image%2027-09-2025%20at%2000.14.jpeg)

The result, a brand new market for investors to better access, manage and hedge digital asset yield.

##### What about LSTs or Yield Derivatives Platforms?

Many attempts have been made to bring liquidity to staking, but most fall into one of two categories. On one side are liquid staking tokens, which provide liquidity but do not solve for term structure, risk management, or hedging. On the other side are yield derivative platforms, which often lack regulatory clarity, custodial alignment, or institutional trust.

Gyld is differentiated in that it spans the full institutional stack. It combines regulated custody, debt issuance vehicles, and a trading venue under one architecture. This ensures that assets are segregated, participants are screened under KYC and AML rules, and instruments are issued as structured debt notes with clear legal classification. Where others focus narrowly on liquidity or speculative products, Gyld builds the standardized reference instruments on which an entire market can grow.

##### What Use Cases Does Gyld Unlock?

The applications are broad, here are some examples: 
* **Asset managers** can finally treat staking yield like fixed income, locking in forward rates, managing duration, and optimizing liquidity buffers.
* **Market makers** and arbitrageurs gain instruments to capture spreads, basis trades, and dislocations between strips and spot.
* **ETF and ETP issuers** can design staking products that mirror traditional fixed income vehicles and reduce capital inefficiency by removing the need for idle buffers.
* **Digital asset treasuries** can actively manage yield performance to defend their premium over NAV.

In each case, Gyld’s strips behave like instruments that are instantly recognizable to finance professionals. Principal strips resemble zero-coupon bonds, offering fixed redemption at maturity. Coupon strips resemble interest rate swaps, giving traders leveraged exposure to income streams without principal risk. By mapping staking into familiar structures, Gyld reduces adoption friction and accelerates institutional participation.

##### And There is Much More Beyond Staked Assets…

While Gyld is launching with Ethereum and Solana staking, its infrastructure is modular by design. The same framework can be extended to dividend-paying equities, tokenized credit funds, or real estate yielding rental income. Over time, Gyld aims to provide the benchmarks and indices that anchor staking markets, much like Treasury yields anchor fixed income today.

Gyld’s roadmap includes yield intelligence products, structured instruments, and financing markets. Standardized staking benchmarks can underpin futures and options markets, while clean, transparent risk profiles allow strips to be used as collateral in repo-style transactions. Just as interest rate swaps and bond futures created trillions in liquidity in TradFi, Gyld’s standardized yield instruments open the door to a similar ecosystem in digital assets.

##### Immediate Market Opportunity

The opportunity is immense. The near-term addressable market is roughly $700 billion, the market cap of the top 4 PoS (proof-of-stake) protocols. Of this, $200 billion is held across digital asset treasuries and ETF markets that already stake proof-of-stake assets, forming Gyld’s direct entry point. Even a modest penetration of 5 percent translates to $10 billion in issuance and trading, generating $30 million in annual revenues.

The long-term potential is far greater. As tokenized equities, credit, and real estate converge with proof-of-stake assets, the addressable market grows to well over a trillion dollars. The parallels to fixed income are instructive: what began as basic government bond issuance evolved into a global market of benchmarks, derivatives, and financing layers worth tens of trillions. Gyld is positioning itself as the platform to catalyze a similar transformation in digital assets.

##### Building Institutional-grade Infra Requires a Top-tier Team

Both co-founders, [Abbas Ali ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/askabbas/)(CEO) and [Ruchir Gupta](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruchirgupta1/) (CPO) were raised in the TradFi trenches before graduating to DeFi back in 2016 and 2022, respectively. Abbas previously led product development for JPMorgan’s blockchain initiatives, and prior to that he built the world’s largest bank-led blockchain consortium at R3. Ruchir most recently managed GSR’s $1B+ crypto balance sheet as Head of Treasury & Options trading. Before that Ruchir was at Nomura for seven years trading a cross-asset exotics book and a $2B fixed-income basis portfolio. Their CTO, Dr. Chuan Bai brings experience from CoinShares and Société Générale, where he built trading and pricing platforms for multi-billion-dollar portfolios.

In addition to a highly experienced founding team, whom we believe are perfectly positioned to build the infrastructure for this TradFi and DeFi convergence, Gyld has already rallied support from an all-star set of Design Partners & Advisors.
For phase 1 of Gyld’s go-to-market, they are supported by two of the largest institutional staking providers (Figment and BlockDaemon) and two of the largest institutional digital asset custodians (Zodia and Copper). In addition, they have a team of industry experts forming their advisory committee from the likes of GSR, Figment, Anchorage Digital, Tesseract and Archax.

##### Another High Conviction Bet for Lightshift

The trajectory of digital asset yields mirrors early stages of fixed income markets: experimentation first, followed by the need for benchmarks, standardized instruments, and liquid trading venues. Gyld is positioning itself to provide that next layer.

Our investment is based on conviction in both the need and the team. The market is large, the gaps are clear, and Gyld is approaching the problem with the right mix of regulatory alignment, institutional credibility, and technical execution.

At Lightshift, we invest in foundational technology that reshapes trillion-dollar markets.
We are actively looking for ambitious founders developing solutions around finance, value exchange, and digital assets. If you are building infrastructure or applications that advance the future of institutional finance, we invite you to connect with us.
   
   
   
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Gyld Finance: Building the Fixed Income Markets for Digital Asset Yield