Author: Alex Liu, Foresight News
On the evening of July 10, Yzi Labs announced a strategic investment in Aspecta. This article aims to briefly interpret Aspecta — which attempts to build on-chain standards and trust mechanisms for 'illiquid assets' in traditional capital markets, including the project's design logic, product system, application progress, and industry potential.
Team background
In terms of team background, Aspecta did not start from scratch. The project was incubated in 2022 at Yale University's Tsai CITY (Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale). Core team members come from top universities and research institutions including Yale, Tsinghua, Berkeley, and McGill, with multiple patents and publications in AI and graph learning. The co-founding team includes former Tinder Chief Scientist Steve Liu (Academician of the Canadian Academy of Engineering) serving as Chief Scientist, Jack He as co-founder, and the team also gathers several senior engineers and growth leaders such as Jane Yang.
Co-founder Jack He speaking at TreeHacks
Why does it exist? What pain points does it solve?
In traditional markets, many assets such as early-stage equity, locked tokens, private equity, and real-world assets (RWA) cannot be traded on public markets, lacking transparent pricing, which severely restricts liquidity and pricing efficiency. Aspecta proposes to give these 'closed assets' an on-chain 'life', enabling pricing and trading capabilities, thereby reducing information asymmetry and improving asset utilization.
When analyzing this logic, it is helpful to imagine: a project locks a portion of tokens in round A, and upon expiration, is hesitant to exit immediately due to a lack of liquidity and pricing mechanisms in the market. Aspecta enables these assets to be priced, traded, and tracked through a standardized 'packaging + credibility mechanism' — unlocking new value for them.
Two core products: BuildKey and Aspecta ID
The design context of Aspecta is clear, with the core divided into two mutually supportive paths:
BuildKey: Asset standardization and lifecycle pricing
BuildKey presents illiquid assets in a tradable ERC‑20-like certificate form. For example, pre-TGE equity, locked tokens, and private placement rights can all be issued and traded on-chain through BuildKey. This mechanism supports various pricing methods such as AMM, order books, and auctions, and allows assets to switch between different lifecycle stages, such as the 'on-chain relay' between venture capital and public trading markets.
Notably, since its launch, BuildKey has supported over 25 types of digital assets for pricing and completed over 50 million transactions, demonstrating a strong demand for on-chain liquidity mechanisms from closed capital. It is not merely a token minting process, but a system of 'lifecycle asset variants': users can freely enter and exit at various stages like TGE, lock-up, and secondary markets, making asset prices more continuous.
Aspecta ID: AI-driven trusted identity protocol
If BuildKey is an asset certificate tool, Aspecta ID is a trust mechanism that provides endorsement for the issuer. It integrates data from GitHub submissions, on-chain behavior, project contributions, etc., and uses AI algorithms to create credit profiles for developers, projects, and even asset issuers, issuing credibility scores.
This mechanism allows asset packaging to avoid a 'trust vacuum'. During the early stages of a project or when it is in a closed phase, the trust output of Aspecta ID can reduce concerns for investors and traders. Currently, over 54,000 GitHub developers have been verified, and the system is transitioning from a trust protocol to a community governance level.
Product linkage: How to form a closed loop?
In Aspecta's architecture, BuildKey and Aspecta ID are not isolated but work together, constructing a complete closed-loop ecosystem from asset generation to trust establishment to trading circulation. For example, when developers submit code on GitHub and link it to a project, their technical contributions and on-chain activities are recognized, evaluated, and form a credibility profile by the Aspecta ID system. Based on this identity verification mechanism, projects have clear trust support when issuing non-liquid assets such as pre-TGE equity in subsequent releases. These assets are then tokenized through BuildKey's mechanisms, publicly sold, and complete initial price discovery while establishing trading records.
With deeper community participation, the AMM, order book, and auction mechanisms supported by BuildKey gradually enhance the price transparency and trading depth of assets. Throughout the process, users flexibly decide whether to participate in subscriptions or exit investments based on the issuer's credibility rating and market pricing, allowing assets to form a complete lifecycle trajectory, accumulating verifiable trading history and value feedback. This mechanism not only promotes price transparency for early-stage assets but also enables a positive cycle between trust mechanisms and liquidity: on one hand, Aspecta ID provides underlying credit anchoring for assets; on the other hand, the on-chain trading data continuously feeds back into the trust evaluation system, making subsequent asset issuances more efficient and credible.
Community, users, and ecosystem
By mid-2025, Aspecta had attracted over 650,000 users to participate in platform usage, including over 54,000 verified developers through GitHub, who play an important role in ecosystem building, further enhancing the practicality and attractiveness of the identity system. At the same time, BuildKey has supported the on-chain issuance and trading of over 25 types of illiquid assets, demonstrating the broad adaptability of this mechanism to the market. The active participation of the community has also promoted the rapid implementation of mechanisms such as multi-chain compatibility, hybrid AMM, and order book models, with the overall ecosystem expanding towards a more open and flexible direction.
From a practical perspective, Aspecta is building a triangular structure of 'AI + assets + community', attempting to connect the entire process from identity recognition, asset packaging to on-chain governance and incentives, initially forming infrastructure-level network effects.
Conclusion
Aspecta is trying to bridge the gap between traditional capital and Web3 with its own set of methods, using 'trusted identity + lifecycle asset packaging + on-chain liquidity mechanisms'. From GitHub submissions to token certificates, from closed issuance to secondary market transactions, its product system is continuously self-consistent and upgraded. Although still in its early stages, the over $50 million trading volume of BuildKey and a user base of over 650,000 provide a solid foundation.
