If you’re still building funds the old way, you might want to read this.

The @Hedgeweek Digital Assets Summit last week brought together a fascinating cross-section of finance from hedge funds to onchain-native teams, and it was a rare chance to speak with people on both sides of the fund infrastructure conversation. One theme kept surfacing: tokenized funds are becoming a serious alternative.

Here’s my take on this subject 👇

Legacy fund structures are under pressure, and it’s starting to show.

The cracks have been visible for a while: rising costs, painfully slow operations, poor transparency, and a level of rigidity that makes innovation feel impossible. Investors are stuck with one-size-fits-all templates that can’t adapt to modern capital needs. When it comes to interoperability or composability, they fall short, siloed systems aren’t built for modern financial infrastructure.

💡 What we’re seeing now is a shift in expectations. Asset managers, DAOs, treasuries, and institutions are no longer willing to accept that setting up a fund should take months, or that tailoring a strategy should be prohibitively complex and resource-heavy. As the limitations of legacy structures become more apparent, tokenized funds are stepping into the spotlight.

According to recent reports, the market for tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) reached $17.88 billion as of March 2025, up from $10 billion in 2024. This growth is driven by the appeal of enhanced transparency, reduced costs, and improved operational efficiency.

In this context, two clear paths are emerging:

→ Launch an off tokenized share-class of an off-chain fund, purpose-built for modern finance with vault technology

→ Bring everything on-chain and unlock programmable capabilities to run on-chain strategies with DeFi technology.

Both paths lead to more transparency, faster execution, lower costs, and more flexible strategy design. In the case of the latter, you also eliminate counterparty risk.

Both are possible with @enzymefinance