Real World Assets on Blockchain Gain Momentum as Sei Integrates Ondo USDY

Remy: Welcome to FINTECH.TV. I'm Remi Blaire. Real world assets are migrating to the blockchain at a record pace and Sei, is positioning itself as the primary destination wall. Following the recent launch of Ondo Finance's USDY on the network, Sei has integrated a $1.2 billion pool of capital backed by U.S. treasuries into its ecosystem. This move does bring institutional grade yield to Sei's parallelized EVM. So joining me live at Onda Summit here in New York City is Jay Jog, co-founder of Sei Labs. Welcome back to FINTECH.TV.

Jay: Thanks for having me.

Remy: Well, 2026 is well underway and we're here at Ondo Summit. So in terms of the representatives of TradFi, DeFi and even policymakers, what do you make of the conversations that are taking place at the summit?

Jay: Yeah, I mean, one thing that's becoming very clear now is that institutions are starting to see the kind of traction that would justify them starting to come and invest the resources that are necessary to start actually building on-chain. In Sei's case, for example, we went live with our parallelized EVM in 2024. And since then, basically all the traction we're looking at has been up into the right. There's been over 100 million wallets that have interacted with the chain. Over a million daily active users, over 5 billion transactions that have happened on-chain. And when you start to see traction like this, that's when institutions get excited. So in the past year for Sei, we've had five different funds that have launched. There's been BlackRock, Brevan Howard, Hamilton Lane, Apollo, and Lazard. And most recently, as you said as well on the launching USDY. So I think what we're going to start seeing in the next year is even more and more institutions that are launching things on-chain. And one thing that's really special about Ondo USDY is USDY as an asset, is permissionless, so it can be used as a building block to support new types of applications, getting built on top. A lot of the other ways that have come to market so far, they're permissioned. So you give them money, then they give you a token, but you can't really do anything with that token. And that's why I'm really excited about USDY. It becomes a primitive that a lot of people can make use of moving forward as well.

Remy: Yeah. And speaking of moving forward, there are a lot of innovations and trends that we're watching. But what do you expect to unfold as we head into the new year and why?

Jay: Yeah, so I think there's two big trends that we're seeing right now. The first is more institutional adoption, as I was alluding to before. And the second is an uptick in a lot of the crypto xAI use cases. Even in the past week, we're going to have there's been like all this stuff around Moltbot and Moltbook and just a ton of stuff happening from the AI side. And one thing that's really interesting to me is this concept of having these AI agents, like the ones that Moltbook, allows you to set up using stablecoins such as USDY or USDC to be able to actually transact directly on-chain. So if you have these AI native agents, then they should be making use of AI native financial tools to be transacting on chain. And one of the things that that's going to be very helpful for that is this protocol called X402. It's something that Coinbase originally introduced, Sei was one of the first projects set up as facilitator for that. And I think that's going to allow a lot more financial activity to start happening on-chain as well.

Remy: Yeah, and we continue to hear institutional adoption when it comes to digital assets and some of the technologies and innovations that are unfolding. But at an event like Ondo Summit, where we see a lot of institutions represented, it's not about when, but actually how. So what does all of this mean for the retail investor, and what does it mean in terms of time, like.

Jay: I think for the retail investor, it's going to democratize access to things that they didn't have before. So one example with USDY, you can think of it as a stablecoin that gets yield. And if you look at other stablecoins like USDC or USDT, which are backed by said Circle and Tether, you basically have to go to, let's say, Tether. You give them a dollar and then in the back end, they'll invest that themselves and keep all the money for themselves. They're making like $10 billion plus in revenue each year from that. Most recently, they were raising it over a $500 billion valuation last year. And this is all money that maybe, it's your users money that users do not get to keep to themselves. Andcandidly, that's pretty silly. Like, users should be able to get access to whatever yield is earned from their from their cash. Right? So that's why I think our WS are going to help democratize that process. I think USDY will be one of those major building blocks, and I'm excited to see that happen with other types of asset classes as well. You aren't just treasuries having that happen for securities and other types of assets, being able to make them more accessible to people, allowing people to invest in funds they otherwise might not be able to, and then have that be used as building blocks for things such as lending markets.

Remy: Well,Jay, great talking to you and thank you so much for joining us with your insights and your perspective.

Jay: Thank you.

Remy: Thank you.