Key takeaways
Olivia Vande Woude says OpenTrade offers peak yields between 3% and 13.5% APR, backed by RWAs and DeFi, and manages over $100M AUM across its stablecoin yield vaults.
OpenTrade has 25+ live fintech partnerships, including embedded deployments at payroll platform Ontop and Colombian neobank Littio.
Olivia Vande Woude says she has a pipeline of 1,500 fintechs she is reaching out to alongside OpenTrade, and she expects expansion into APAC.
Watch the episode
Summary
Ava Labs' head of tokenization says demand for embedded stablecoin yield showed up faster than she expected, and fintechs like Ontop and Littio are already live.
OpenTrade, a yield provider built on Avalanche, offers fintechs peak yields between 3% and 13.5% APR on stablecoin balances, backed by RWAs and DeFi, according to Olivia Vande Woude. She joined Ava Labs from T. Rowe Price about a year and a half ago and now leads tokenization there. She says OpenTrade manages over $100M AUM across its stablecoin yield vaults.
Yield as a service
Olivia Vande Woude says OpenTrade grew AUM by 550% in 2025 and has secured 25 plus live fintech partnerships across exchanges, neobanks, payroll platforms and wallets, particularly in LATAM, APAC, Africa and Europe. Fintechs connect through an API, and the legal structures come from traditional finance, so in her words "there's not as much of an education lag." She says the fastest close took two weeks from first call to first deposit.
“We want to power the products and services behind the scenes the same way that AWS powers Netflix with adoption driven by tangible economics as opposed to brand recognition.”
Olivia Vande WoudeLive at Ontop and Littio
OpenTrade has live embedded deployments at Ontop, a global payroll platform paying 60,000+ workers across 100+ countries, and at Littio, a YC-backed neobank in Colombia that invests customer USDC and EURC balances into tokenized assets. Olivia Vande Woude says Littio has 80,000 plus users who have never had easy access to dollar-denominated savings. These deployments use assets on Avalanche's public permissionless chain, she says.
The case for Avalanche
Olivia Vande Woude points to Avalanche's sub-second, deterministic finality, which she says EU regulators care about a lot, and says it had the lowest average transaction fees of any major chain as of March. She says BlackRock iShares, Franklin Templeton BENJI, Apollo ACRED and Janus Henderson JAAA are live on the chain, and that firms including WisdomTree, Wellington and KKR built there early. She also says private credit infrastructure on the chain is delivering 30% interest savings and 80% lower operational overhead because stablecoins run on the back end.
Demand and regulation
Olivia Vande Woude says issuance is "pretty well solved for" and demand was the hard part, but demand from fintechs "has appeared very quickly." She has a pipeline of 1,500 fintechs she is reaching out to alongside OpenTrade. She expects expansion into APAC, where she argues unmet yield demand could dwarf LATAM. She also expects that as MiCA, the Genius Act and similar frameworks mature, undercollateralized products will be pushed out and AUM may concentrate in structures like OpenTrade's.
Olivia Vande Woude describes Ava Labs's aim as powering products behind the scenes "the same way that AWS powers Netflix," with adoption driven by economics rather than brand recognition. She says the company's strength is acting as a strategic adviser that helps projects new to blockchain move their existing business onchain and find cost efficiencies or new revenue streams.
OpenTrade, Ava Labs, Fidelity, and Apollo come up most.
- People
- Olivia Vande Woude
- Drew Rogers
- Zach Fowler
- Companies
- OpenTrade
- Ava Labs
- Fidelity
- Apollo
- Rain
- T. Rowe Price
- KKR
- VanAck
- Wellington
- WisdomTree
- BlackRock
- Braille
- Citi
- CreditCoop
- Denari
- Ethereum Foundation
- FCA
- FIFA
- Franklin Templeton
- Galaxy
- JPMorgan
- Moto
- Littio
- Ontop
- Axiom
- Dfns
- FDIC
- Janus Henderson
- Linux Foundation
- Y Combinator
