In this episode of Exponential, Laszlo Szabo, co-founder and CEO of Kiln, joins to talk about one of the most important developments quietly happening in crypto today: the evolution of yield in digital assets.
As Laszlo explains, yield is becoming the bridge between traditional finance and the onchain economy, opening the door to new financial products and new participants.
Kiln operates what Laszlo describes as an "onchain yield platform," providing the infrastructure that exchanges, custodians, wallets, and asset managers use to offer staking and other yield strategies to their users.
"We provide them the technology, we provide them the infrastructure so that they can offer digital asset yields to their customers," he explains. What began with staking has expanded into lending, stablecoin strategies, and more advanced onchain asset management.
Understanding yield also requires understanding how the market evolved. In crypto’s early years, most yield came from centralized lending between companies.
That model collapsed during the 2022 crises, forcing the industry to rethink how yield should work. "The yield in digital assets started with what we call off-chain or centralized lending," Laszlo says. "And then what really emerged… is onchain lending."
The difference is transparency. Onchain systems allow anyone to see collateral, risk, and activity in real time, which dramatically changes how capital moves through the system.
That shift is now accelerating as real-world assets move onchain. Kiln’s newest product, RailNet, is designed to connect decentralized finance with off-chain financial services like money market funds, private credit, and equities.
The goal is to standardize how asset managers combine traditional financial instruments with DeFi strategies in the same portfolio. "It’s essentially standardizing the way an asset manager can interact with DeFi and real-world assets on blockchains," Laszlo explains.
The result is a new class of hybrid financial products that can mix tokenized real-world assets with native DeFi liquidity.
For everyday users, this trend could have a major impact. As more financial infrastructure moves onchain, yield-bearing assets may become the default. "I don’t see why when I have the stablecoin on my wallet I’m not bearing yield," Laszlo says. In the future, simply holding digital dollars could automatically generate returns.
Looking ahead, Laszlo believes this transformation will reshape global capital markets. "In five years you’ll have a large portion of capital markets moving onchain," he predicts.
"In ten years, I think a majority of capital markets will be moving onchain." And in an even more radical scenario, asset management itself may become autonomous, with AI-driven agents allocating capital across these new onchain financial systems.
For anyone watching the convergence of DeFi and traditional finance, the takeaway is clear: yield is becoming the economic engine of the onchain world, and the infrastructure being built today may define how global finance operates tomorrow.
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