Definition at Token 2049 Singapore — powered by Accountable, the verification layer bringing institutional finance on-chain. Joining me is Tarun Gupta, Founder and CEO of Coinshift, which helps organisations manage and grow their on-chain treasuries. Tarun, welcome to Fintech TV.
Thank you for having me.
Coinshift began as a treasury tool for crypto organisations. How has the company evolved since those early days?
I founded the company in 2021 as an on-chain treasury management solution. We were managing roughly $1 billion in AUM from organisations like big DAOs and their registered entities — using us for payroll, crypto payroll, cash flow reporting, and all the treasury functions. We did that for about three years. The industry has changed and evolved a lot — most of these DAOs do not exist right now. So we decided to move the business into asset management. Around 2025 we launched a yield-bearing stablecoin in partnership with Paxos and Steakhouse Financial, one of the top risk managers in the space. We scaled that to $170 million in three to four months. Then the GENIUS Act passed and Paxos decided to shut down the underlying stablecoin we were building on top of — it was a heavily regulated product out of Abu Dhabi — so we had to shut down that entire product. I took eight to ten months to rebuild the entire issuance and compliance infrastructure ourselves from scratch. Today, Coinshift can issue any kind of private credit or loan, put it on the blockchain, and make it available for everyone to use.
What is the main problem you are solving for customers today?
The core problem we see is this: stablecoins are growing at roughly $200 billion and heading to a trillion dollars. When that cash moves on-chain, it looks for yield or an interest rate. That is why you need credit. The question is where that credit generates the interest rate — you need very sophisticated issuers, what we call real world assets. There is one side that wants yield. There is another side that wants to originate the credit. Imagine stablecoins can directly finance infrastructure, robotics infrastructure. The next wave of founders is not only going to be VC-focused equity — founders will be able to raise money directly from stablecoins. That is where Coinshift is focused.
Today at Definition you have a panel on trust in yield-bearing assets. What does trust mean to you when you design a product?
When you start allocating into DeFi or blockchain, there are levels of risk you are taking. You need to trust the platform. You need to trust the curator managing the allocations. And you need to trust the underlying issuer. Transparency around the underlying issuer is very very important. To underwrite someone originating credit, it is very important to see the full loan book and line items in each loan. If you do not have transparency around the loan book, you cannot underwrite and predict losses. In credit, the upside is capped — but the downside sometimes is not. You need to map out and predict your losses. If the issuer is not sharing those things, that is a red flag.
For someone assessing a yield product for the first time — what are the first things they should check?
If you are looking at any vault marketing 10% or 15% APR, ask a few questions. There is a cost of dollar borrowing in the world — a risk-free rate, essentially the Treasury rate. Anything above that is risk. If someone is offering 10% and treasuries are at 4%, those 600 basis points of extra interest rate are coming from some risk. Ask how those points are adding to the yield and what risk you are taking. That does not mean 10% products are bad — but if you do not understand that risk, you are likely to lose money.
Where does yield actually come from in DeFi — and how would you explain it simply?
For the last few years DeFi has been generating yield from only on-chain activities — someone puts Bitcoin as collateral and borrows against it, and the DeFi lender generates money from that leverage. But when the market goes down, nobody borrows. DeFi yields shrink, go below the risk-free rate, and become unattractive. That is why the industry needs real yield sources — financing, reinsurance markets, real economic activities on the ground. If stablecoins and DeFi can fund that, the yield will come from the same sources as traditional finance — but with better capital formation. Think about it this way: Space has taken a loan from Apollo to finance data centres. What if tomorrow they can raise that money from stablecoins instead?
