President of Coinbase Asset Management on CUSHY, Tokenized Credit, and Onchain Yield

Team and Bitcoin yield

Anthony Bassili names Doug Wilson as chief investment officer of credit and Sarah Schroeder as chief investment officer of systematic and AI driven strategies. For Bitcoin yield, the firm has used funding rate arbitrage, options overlays and cash and carry, in which a customer's Bitcoin is posted as collateral with a desk like Coinbase Credit to borrow dollars for higher margin credit.

He says funding rate arbitrage has become more challenging and saturated as leverage left the system in a bear market.

CUSHY and tokenized credit

The Coinbase USD Stablecoin Yield fund, CUSHY (Coinbase USD Stablecoin Yield fund), is a private market product for institutional investors only, issued out of the United States and the Cayman Islands. Coinbase Asset Management partnered with Superstate, a US licensed transfer agent, which Bassili says lets it scale quickly into multiple protocols and networks. Northern Trust serves as fund administrator.

Rather than buying off the shelf products, the firm is launching its own separate accounts with credit originators and asset managers inside the tokenized fund. It is also looking for credit instruments tokenized over the next six to 12 months to play differentials between traditional and onchain portfolios.

Not a wrapper

Anthony Bassili draws on his time at BlackRock, which acquired the Barclays iShares business in 2009. ETFs never wrapped mutual funds, he says, and the same holds for tokenization. He also says instant liquidity for tokenized funds is not right.

Market view

With Bitcoin touching $58,000 on the morning of the interview, Anthony Bassili says staunch investors are buying and the data shows it. He points to DeFi yields of 2 to 5 percent, below treasury rates, as a sign of two parallel economies. He expects vaults, neobanks and crypto card providers to be key distributors, and stablecoin rails to carry traditional securities and funds.