Vertalo CEO Dave Hendricks on stablecoins, RWAs, and how the crypto industry ‘loses its collective mind’

As stablecoins dominate regulatory headlines and tokenization edges closer to institutional reality, the real work of bringing traditional assets on-chain is happening quietly in the background.

Dave Hendricks, founder and CEO of Vertalo, has been building that infrastructure for years. A serial entrepreneur with prior exits including LiveIntent and CheetahMail, and experience at Oracle and Arthur Andersen, Hendricks leads Vertalo’s push to modernize transfer agency and tokenization for real-world assets at scale.

In this Q&A, he cuts through the noise around crypto policy, explains why stablecoins became the on-ramp in 2025, and outlines what it will take for tokenized securities and private assets to reach their next phase.

When we first spoke in 2023, you offered a reaction to PayPal’s launch of a new stablecoin built on the Ethereum blockchain. Fast-forward to this month, and Visa is launching a stablecoin advisory. What’s your take on how far we’ve come when it comes to RWAs, tokenized securities, stablecoins etc.? 

Hendricks: Obviously, we have come a long way since early 2023. Three years ago the commentary about stablecoins was still rooted in the previous cycle’s usage model within DeFi borrowing/lending protocol, whereas now in late Stablecoins have emerged as the most contentious issue in crypto, specifically in the wake of the Genius Act, which prohibit banks from paying interest on Stablecoins.

RWAs have come a long way, but they are still a small fraction of the addressable markets, with vigorous activity in the shoulder categories, which I classify as Institutional (Treasuries and Private Permissioned REPOs and other similar activity) and Marginal (L1s issuing non-recourse tokens with no underlying collateral).

Institutional RWA is in the lead, but most of this is mostly federated and private-permissioned and not accessible or investable by the vast majority of the addressable market for RWAs, meaning RIAs or individual investors.  I would argue that most of the Marginal RWA is accessible to anyone who knows their way around a wallet, but I would not consider these products to be investable for anyone looking to protect principal or lock in stable returns.

While tokenized equities will likely be a much bigger story in 2026 (thanks for the SEC and the upcoming Clarity Act), stablecoins have become the main story in 2025 as the easiest way for large institutions — banks and non-banks — to enter the so-called crypto market due to Genius.  As banks are focused on deposits and payments, their attraction to stablecoins isn’t very surprising, but oddly they now find themselves locked out of issuing yield-bearing stablecoins.  Ironic considering so many believed that the Genius Act was a gift to banks and their lobbyists.

Vertalo maintains a store of ETH for paying fees related to the creation of tokenized share ledgers on Ethereum. What’s changed for the firm over the past year?

Hendricks: As one of if not the only true software company focused on digital transfer agency and integrated tokenization, Vertalo continues to pursue a different approach to the market than the majority of so-called Tokenization firms.  Because Vertalo is not a broker-dealer, and we do not produce investment instruments on our own account — only for our clients — we have seen massive influx of inbound interest that do not want to work with a firm that might trade against them.  Clients come to Vertalo with specific problems that 3rd party websites and consulting firms can’t solve, and when clients work with us they can be confident that — as a software company — we are not eating into their fees by taking BPS on every transaction.

We have not wavered from this approach since we embarked on our Enterprise Software focus in mid-2022.

What current trends interest you heading into 2026?

Hendricks: The most interesting trend is the renewed interest in tokenizing and packaging private equity.  As a firm that primarily focuses on transforming illiquid investments into tradeable and transferable (and fractional) instruments, we are buoyed that the market is finally seeing what we saw almost 10 years ago, namely that Distributed Ledger Technology is a game-changing step function improvement for asset and wealth management, and specifically for the transference and distribution of these novel financial instruments.

This year, the White House’s crypto-related announcements —a federal Bitcoin reserve (that went nowhere), an end to SEC oversight of crypto, digital assets in 401(k)s—have nothing to do with the core mission of Bitcoin or other blockchain networks. Has the sector lost its way?

Hendricks: Every couple of years, the ‘crypto’ industry loses its collective mind over some new thing, everyone drops what they were doing, the ape-in, the space gets crowded, some people get rekt, some names are called, and people complain that things are different than when they started, so they are unhappy. This happens in each cycle, and this one is no different. The administration is helping normalize normal activities, and sketchy players will continue to rise and fall. Nothing new!