Chad🎩
@chad
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
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Chad🎩
@chad
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.
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Chad🎩
@chad
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.
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Chad🎩
@chad
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.
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Chad🎩
@chad
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.
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Chad🎩
@chad
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.
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Chad🎩
@chad
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.
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Chad🎩
@chad
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.
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