Use-case decision board
This board sets the decisions that sit downstream of it: what we offer, how we go to market, and where liquidity comes from. Every use case is a pair, the compliance of the collateral by the compliance of the liquidity. Pick the pair we lead with and the rest follows. The plan that flows from it is on Roadmap & plan.
01
The board
Rows are collateral, or supply, compliance. Columns are liquidity, or demand, compliance. Read a partner's place by asking both questions, not one.
Collateral · supply compliance
Liquidity →
Collateral ↓
Collateral ↓
LOW · permissionlessMorpho, open pools
MID · light ONCHAINIDAave Horizon screen
HIGH · full KYCBroker-dealer cash, Circle
HIGHonchain-native, onshore, exempt security · licensed issuer
What we built
Tri-party RWA credit, DeFi-funded
Apex / PSG collateral + Morpho
Offshore only. A licence does not make onshore-permissionless compliant; it moves you up to HIGH demand.
Cash cow
Permissioned credit, partnered liquidity
Apex / PSG collateral + Aave Horizon
Lead
Onchain finance
Both sides KYC, settled DvP. South Street · TradePro · PSG · Apex + BitGo.
What South Street and DTCC unlock.
MIDwrapped public securities · Denari ~300
Denari + permissionless
Locked onshore
Denari + Horizon
The wrapper seam sits on the collateral side, whatever the demand gate.
Haircut
Denari + KYC’d liquidity
Live, at a wrapper haircut. It is an onchain ADR; KYC’d capital lends against wrapped securities routinely. Open: whether broker-dealer suitability accepts wrapper title.
LOWoffshore / non-security / economic representations · Tezos, Acacia
Park
Pure DeFi clone
A knife-fight with Morpho and Aave for liquidity.
No taker
No US-takeable security on the collateral side. A gated lender has nothing compliant to lend against, so you would just run pure permissionless instead.
No taker
Fully-KYC’d capital exists to take securities risk under a US exemption. Offshore economic representations of non-securities give it no qualifying asset.
Lead, invest
Cash cow, harvest
Watch, locked onshore
Park
Incoherence rule. A gated lender needs a US-takeable security to lend against. No security on the collateral side (LOW) means no taker, so those cells are dead. A wrapped security (MID) is live, at a haircut. The cut is security versus non-security, not gate-versus-grade. What we built sits in the one cell locked onshore; South Street and DTCC open the top-right, the only cell where Ascend solves the risk and stays the venue.
02
How to read the two axes
Collateral / supply, how real is it onchain
HIGHThe token is the security of record, issued onchain-native by a licensed issuer under a named US pathway (Reg D, Reg A+, or registered). Clean title.
MIDGenuine public securities, but the token is a wrapper, an economic claim on a share held offchain (Denari). You trust the custodian for title, not the chain. Effectively an onchain ADR.
LOWOffshore (Reg S), permissionless RWA, economic representations, or non-securities such as uranium and commodities. Risk we cannot fully abstract.
Liquidity / demand, who may bring cash and borrow
HIGHBoth sides fully KYC’d, accredited, broker-dealer-intermediated, onshore-legal. Full ONCHAINID / ERC-3643.
MIDLight ONCHAINID: a sanctions and jurisdiction screen at the door, not accreditation (Aave Horizon).
LOWPermissionless. Sanctions and geoblock floor only (Morpho).
Litmus test: if I move this token onchain, does legal title move with it, or does someone still update a book offchain? Title moves, native. Book offchain, wrapper.
Licence legend. Products are the securities. Businesses are the licensed entities that can transact (South Street, TradePro; PSG’s ADGM and HK licences). Software is Ascend, which sits on top of a business. The licensed business is the key that unlocks the onshore cells, and that business can be us: Ascend is securing its own onshore broker-dealer licence via TradePro, turning the HIGH band from a licence we rent into one we own.
03
Where to play
Build for HIGH–HIGH, then walk the demand axis left as the market allows. The collateral side stays HIGH because it is securities.
Low moat, feeds another venue
High moat, Ascend is the venue
Higher upside
Question marks, decide
HIGH–LOW (what we built; keep as offshore optionality) and the Denari row.
Stars, invest
HIGH–HIGH onchain finance (South Street + DTCC). Lead here.
Steadier
Dogs, park
LOW–LOW pure DeFi clone. A knife-fight with Morpho and Aave.
Cash cows, harvest
HIGH–MID permissioned credit + Horizon. Near-term, once live.
Supply-side compliance is where Ascend solves the risk, the real edge. The demand side is about control: own the gated pool and Ascend is the venue, with the credit facility able to intercede; leave demand permissionless and Ascend is one integration into someone else’s venue. The case for gating demand is control and moat, set apart from any single revenue line.
04
The squeeze: supply vs the right liquidity
The deep liquidity is real, but it is in the wrong tier for our lead. Plenty of stablecoin liquidity exists; almost none of it is fully KYC’d, which is what HIGH–HIGH needs. That gap is why the answer is fiat cash onchain through the broker-dealer, settled DvP with BitGo.
Same scale, baseline US$100B. Total stablecoin market ~US$320B exists but is mostly committed (off-scale here). Every accessible venue is LOW-tier; the HIGH tier our lead needs is the one we build, not the one we find.
05
Guardrails
Read before slotting anything as buildable.
Onshore plus permissionless is not a compliant cell. It opens only offshore or on a licensed business. A licence unlocks onshore HIGH demand, not onshore-permissionless.
“Exempt” is not one thing. A HIGH cell names its pathway: Reg D, Reg A+, Reg S, or 144A. The wrong one re-restricts the asset downstream.
Offshore (Reg S) is a door, not a delete. It drops US registration, not the distribution and resale conditions that come with it.
“The token is the security” holds only if a registered transfer agent treats the chain as the record. Verify per issuer.
Some figures are internal or simulated; market figures are independently verified. Not production.
06
Recommendation
Lead · HIGH–HIGHBuild for high, walk it back
DecisionCommit the HIGH–HIGH band now and build the beta against it. Anchor on South Street, with TradePro + BitGo and our own onshore broker-dealer licence (via TradePro) as the structural unlock.
Why highNot because we cannot run the lower tiers in parallel; the modular build makes that cheap. For focus and positioning: one engineering target, one go-to-market story, and a deliberate posture as the institutional rail behind the retail-forward DeFi projects, not in a retail knife-fight with them. The boring, high-compliance lane is the defensible one.
BuildModular: the HIGH permissioned pool subsumes the lower-tier compliance logic, so MID and LOW reuse it via adapters rather than a re-architecture. The HIGH pool is the most complex build and is still to be designed; once it exists, stepping down is cheap.
Open callThe medium tier’s onshore-versus-offshore question stays open by design: run it onshore with KYC’d liquidity (Circle), or offshore against the incumbents. Hold the Circle conversation, then decide on that answer rather than by drift.
NextSee Roadmap & plan for what ships at each milestone, who unlocks which cell, and what holds if the pipeline slips.
Manny E. Reimi
CPO, Ascend · [email protected]
First-pass strategy framing to structure the decision, not legal advice. Confirm the exemption, licensed entity, and transfer-agent structure per cell with counsel before building any cell.