The Norio View
The onchain rails are live. The bridge is unfinished.
Stablecoins, tokenized assets and settlement rails work. What is missing is the layer that gets the rest of finance onto them. Norio invests in the founders building that layer.
This is a working document. It changes as the conversations on the show change it. Last updated November 2026.
01 · The bridge
Everyone else needs a bridge.
The rails are proven. Stablecoins move value around the clock, tokenized funds and securities settle onchain, and issuance and custody are in production at real scale. That layer is built.
BlackRock, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, JPMorgan and BNY are integrating those rails into the businesses they already run. They build for their own balance sheets and their own clients. The reason is commercial. Onchain, a firm can sell around the clock, reach investors in markets it couldn't serve before, and get more out of the same collateral.
The next few thousand banks, asset managers, fund administrators and payment companies want the same gains and cannot get there alone, and most crypto-native vendors are too small or don't operate the way TradFi expects. The bridge connects TradFi to onchain finance so these firms can operate the way their investors, regulators and other stakeholders expect. Founders who know both sides are building it now, at pre-seed, and many of the best outcomes will be acquisitions by the incumbents who need it.
Tier 1 institutions
Integrating the rails directly, building for themselves
Everyone else
Banks, asset managers, fund admins, payment firms, fintechs, and increasingly AI agents
Direct integration
The bridge · unfinished
Connects TradFi to onchain finance. Where Norio invests.
Onchain rails · proven
Stablecoins, tokenized assets, settlement
02 · Three lanes
Where the bridge gets built.
Lane 01
Programmable Infrastructure
Issuance, custody, compliance and settlement built for regulated capital.
Lane 02
Capital Mobility
Moving value across borders, rails and asset types without friction.
Lane 03
Universal UX
Interfaces that make onchain finance usable, by people and by agents.
03 · The AI accelerant
AI sends more traffic to the bridge, sooner.
Stablecoins settle tokenized securities. As AI agents become dominant users of stablecoins (a point David Birch has been making), for treasury, trading and payments, they become dominant users of tokenized securities by default. Agents will need the bridge before most financial firms are ready for it, and the orchestration that lets them use it safely is a pre-seed opportunity in its own right.
04 · Unstoppable founders
The other half: who builds the bridge.
The lanes above are what Norio backs. The founder is the other half of every decision, and at pre-seed it's usually the bigger half.
Unstoppable founders point an unreasonable amount of drive at a real problem and keep building long after a sensible person would have stopped. There's no checklist for it here. It shows up over months of conversations and updates, mostly in what a founder does between calls.
The phrase is Allard Luchsinger's, from episode 296 of MoneyNeverSleeps, used with his permission.
05 · What we're watching
Open questions we think founders should be building for.
These are the gaps the thesis keeps pointing at. They are working positions and they will move. If you are building into one, I want to hear from you.
Below Tier 1 financial firms
The bridge for everyone below Tier 1 financial firms
Tier 1 financial firms will build their own path onchain. The defensible opportunity is the coordination layer for everyone below them, built to be acquired.
Enterprise UX
Consumer-grade UX for enterprise onchain finance
Consumers will adapt fast. Businesses face multi-party authorization and controls. The interface layer that makes onchain finance usable for enterprises is largely unbuilt.
Agentic commerce
Agent authorization
As agents handle discovery and execution, card networks stay on as authentication and stablecoins settle underneath. Someone has to build the orchestration that lets agents act safely.
Fund operations
Funds that run on a shared record
Most of a fund's back office exists to reconcile records kept by parties who can't rely on each other's. Put the fund onchain and agents can do the routine work, leaving people to handle the exceptions.
Fund launch
Launching and running a fund for less
A new fund still needs a stack of service providers and a lot of paid people before it takes its first subscription. Onchain funds run by agents could make that cheap enough for mid-market managers to compete.
Independent oversight
Checking the work of agent-run finance
The more work agents do, the more it matters who checks it from outside. Attestation of the data agents act on, and of what they actually did, is still under-built, and investors and regulators will want it before agents act at scale.
06 · The Norio View on the show
Where the Norio View shows up on the show.
Pete writes on the MoneyNeverSleeps Substack about recent episodes and the patterns across them. When a conversation strengthens a lane, complicates it, or points at a gap worth building into, that is where it gets written down.