Brian Huang, co-founder and CEO of Glider, explains why he believes permissionless financial systems are the future of investing, especially as tokenized real-world assets like stocks, bonds, and credit move on-chain. He highlights how direct asset custody can empower investors to lend, margin, and manage holdings without intermediaries, while noting that institutional adoption is accelerating interest in tokenization. However, he cautions that challenges remain, particularly around liquidity gaps and pricing inefficiencies pointing out that executing a large trade in a stock like Nvidia on some on-chain platforms could still produce unacceptable spreads. Huang also stresses the need for stronger investor protections comparable to traditional markets. Looking ahead, he argues that customizable on-chain portfolios could replace traditional ETFs, giving investors both ownership and yield opportunities, and predicts a future where using crypto rails feels as seamless as trading through platforms like Fidelity or Robinhood with powerful new financial capabilities built in.
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And joining us live here at the New York Stock Exchange this afternoon is Brian Hahn, who is co-founder and CEO of Glider.
Great to have you here.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
Well, first and foremost, when it comes to permissionless utility, why are you in favor of open permissionless systems?
Look, when it comes to tokenized equities in this day and age, forget about Bitcoin, Ethan Soul.
We're actually seeing real stuff come unchained, so stocks, bonds, credit, mortgages.
All of this stuff is much more interesting to investors because.
It's already investable, right?
The power with permissionless systems means that you can actually do things with your assets that traditionally is taken away from you.
If you get direct custody, you can lend your assets.
You can cross margin across different products more easily and without middlemen taking fees all along the way.
Yeah, and you and I are here on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and exchanges are getting into the tokenization space and institutional adoption has been the theme of 2026.
So give us your.
Take when it comes to risks for investors.
Yeah, we're really excited about this, right?
Like it's finally the time where traditional finance is coming in and tokenizing things that actual people want.
The problem with this is how do you get access to these assets, right?
All of us know that when you try to buy crypto these days, you have to deal with things like gas, signing, bridging, wallets, like some of this is vernacular that most of you just don't understand or most people don't understand.
And so part of what we do at Glider as well is make that.
Easy for people to invest.
And so as long as we see permissionless rails in the future, users will be able to invest without having to think about these complexities that currently plague crypto user experience.
Yes, and we know that there's a lot of jargon there and a lot of vocab there that you have to learn.
So what about liquidity and the discrepancies when it comes to liquidity?
Yes, so not all on chain stocks are created equal.
One of our investors, Ono, for example.
From traditional finance liquidity, if you wanted to rip, for example, a million dollars of Nvidia today on some of these on-chain wrappers, you would see spreads incredibly blowouts, and that's unacceptable, right?
If we want to actually reinvent Wall Street on chain, we need liquidity to be there and accessible.
Not only that, we need protections for consumers, right?
In traditional finance, we have ReaganMS that allows you to ensure that you get best bid execution.
We don't have that in crypto, and so lots of users these days are getting ripped off when it comes to.
Very normal consumer productions and Brian, you mentioned wrappers, so one of the other things that I do want to ask you about is custom ETFs.
So the question is how.
So Glider is the easiest way to make a custom ETF.
Look, in this day and age, when you have an ETF, you're giving up utility to somebody else.
For example, like there's BitWise, there's all these ETF issuers that are charging exorbitant fees on these ETFs, and not only that, they give up the utility of those things that I mentioned before, so staking, lending, governance.
We're in an era now where you can actually own your underlying assets and earn yield on top of them.
And that's what's so cool about being on chain and something that we see.
Growing in the future.
So in our perspective, the wrapper is really dead.
Same with stocks, right?
Wouldn't you rather hold a direct index MAG 7 ETF than the actual stock itself?
Because now you can lend those stocks, you can get the dividends, you can tax optimize.
So direct indexing specifically on chain is really the future.
And Brian, finally, before I let you go, speaking of the future, there are a lot of innovations that we're watching, especially when it comes to the space.
So what do you think this will look like for retail investors out there?
I mean, we're hoping to make this as simple as possible.
You really shouldn't be able to tell the difference between investing in an on-chain asset compared to a traditional stock, right?
When you think about interacting with Fidelity or Vanguard or any of your traditional brokerages, Robinhood.
You don't think about the custodian.
You don't think about the rails of how money gets there, right?
That's the same experience we need to provide in crypto without you even having to know it's on crypto, right?
And then we want to give you those superpowers, so those ability to lend, stake, govern, things that you can't do when you don't own your assets directly.
Well, Brian, it was great having you live here at the New York Stock Exchange.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks for having me.