QETH and ETHQ are North America’s first ETPs with staking—now powered by Alluvial SMS 🧵

QETH and ETHQ are North America’s first ETPs with staking—now powered by Alluvial SMS 🧵 

https://markets.ft.com/data/announce/detail?dockey=600-202502270830CANADANWCANADAPR_C5610-1

chad.degen.eth // Current: Alluvial,
Prev: 6th Man Ventures, Blockworks /observations FID: 399

Flashback to a year ago - I was working in TradFi as an analyst (aka PowerPoint maker / Excel monkey), managing pension funds, foundations and endowments for some of the largest institutions in the world. While strategic allocations varied across clients, they all had one thing in common: zero crypto exposure.

I had been in crypto for years and couldn’t fathom why there was zero crypto exposure - or even plans to include even the smallest of allocations. 

Yes, IC governance, reputation, and technical risks existed - but liquid crypto had arguably been the top-performing asset class of the past decade, consistently outperforming median VC returns on a 3-5yr IRR basis, but without the illiquidity of drawdown vehicles.

With the rise of PoS networks, token holders who stake their assets could now earn protocol rewards. The framework I applied to this development was staked assets were now somewhat akin to fixed income, as there was now a coupon attached to your position. No need for institutions to spin up heavy hardware to participate in network security, and orchestration-layer projects made it seamless for institutions to stake through a clean UI. 

While fixed-income is by no means a perfect analogy, given the increased principal risk, dynamic staking rewards, and one-beta nature of the staking yields to the principal price, it was close enough for me to have one of those aha moments.

Coupling this idea with the broader adoption of LSTs, this market opportunity just made sense. LSTs essentially function as warehouse receipts for staked positions in the form of ERC-20 or SPL tokens, allowing movement in and out of positions where liquidity permits - which further unlocked the liquidity needed to satisfy institutional investors who had stringent allocations and associated liabilities. 

From my perspective, LSTs were liquid venture with a coupon - a novel and compelling asset class for pension funds, endowments, etc.

I used to joke: why not just stake Ethereum or Solana and use the staking rewards to help supplement benefit payments and operating liabilities? A radical idea at the time (though less so in 2025), but one I couldn’t stop thinking about. It felt completely backward that institutions weren’t even considering it. I genuinely believed network rewards of leading L1s could help address the unfunded corporate pension crisis in the U.S.

So I left. I joined the team building software that would make this possible - staking for institutions.

Fast forward almost a year - Alluvial will be powering North America’s first Ethereum Staking ETPs.

A lot of questions from peers and friends. Why are you leaving such a clean path? A lot of skepticism for jumping back into crypto. But what I’ve found is when you have an inclining and the opportunity to bet on yourself, you should. 

Plus, I was 23 - the worst-case scenario? I’d just try it all over again.

Institutions will stake crypto, and Alluvial's SMS in the best product in the market to enable broad participation.

Sure, volatility was a major concern, and unlike venture capital, there was no quarterly reporting to smooth things out (and it’s a lot easier to sell the bottom when you can sell the bottom). But the complete lack of inclusion in the strategic asset allocation still didn’t make sense to me - especially when we were overweight communist regimes in the name of diversification.