Brian Huang on Tokenized Equities, Automated Portfolios, and the 80% Locked Out of Fidelity

What Glider builds

Brian Huang describes Glider as a portfolio layer for assets moving onchain: RWAs, stocks, bonds and pre-IPO companies. It runs a direct-to-consumer app and a B2B line that lets other apps embed its portfolios, and it operates on Base, Ethereum Mainnet, Solana and Arbitrum. He says portfolios are non-commingled and direct indexed, so users own the underlying assets instead of a wrapped version.

Huang says the team is about 10 people. He spent ten months as a trader at Morgan Stanley, which he says he hated, and about a year and a half building trading infrastructure at Anchorage.

Skipping the incumbents

"You are not going to be able to convert somebody from Fidelity to onchain stocks," Brian Huang says. He plans to reach younger people who never signed up with Fidelity or Vanguard through TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, X and YouTube, while avoiding what he calls AI slop videos.

He calls Coinbase and Robinhood great but says they are geographically constrained, with Europe and the US as their two biggest markets. He predicts permissionless systems will win by cutting out middleman fees.

Stablecoins as the entry point

Brian Huang calls stablecoins the gateway drug to onchain assets and expects USDC to stay the dominant trading pair: users will go from Netflix into USDC into Tesla. He says parked USDC on Glider earns four to five, sometimes 6%, through Morpho, Aave and Fluid.

He points to Ondo, which he says crossed $1 billion in onchain stocks two weeks ago and reached $1.5 billion two days ago. That $1 billion, he notes, is only 0.002% of the US equity market.

Products on the way

Glider is running an ETF campaign on a basket of Bitcoin, ETH, XRP, MEGA and SOL earning about 15% APR, and will soon launch a MAG7 ETF that also accrues yield. With stocks live, it plans tracker portfolios for Nancy Pelosi, Berkshire Hathaway and Thrive Capital for a global audience.