By Dan B —
Discover the second episode of Railnet Talks featuring Jérôme Castille, President of CoinShares Asset Management France
CoinShares' Jérôme Castille on regulated onchain asset management and real yield --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"More than 10% APY, liquid daily, without any risk – nobody will believe it." -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
CoinShares is the first fully regulated European asset manager to combine DeFi protocol yields with tokenized real-world assets in a single institutional vehicle. We sat down with Jérôme Castille, President of CoinShares Asset Management France, to talk through how a regulated manager actually builds onchain – why double-digit yield should make allocators suspicious, the hidden correlation problem inside DeFi lending, and what Railnet solved that nothing else could.
CoinShares has been in digital assets since 2013 – well before most institutions took the category seriously. Founded that year, publicly listed on Nasdaq, and holding the rare combination of AIFMD, MiFID, and MiCA authorizations at once, it occupies a position almost no other manager can claim.
In March 2026, CoinShares and Railnet announced a partnership making CoinShares the first regulated European manager to bring DeFi and RWA yield together inside a single onchain strategy.
In this episode of Railnet Talks, host Dan sits down with Jérôme Castille, President of CoinShares Asset Management France and head of compliance and regulatory affairs across the EU, to talk about what it takes to run regulated asset management onchain, why double-digit yield should make allocators suspicious, and where tokenized finance is actually heading. Below are the highlights – for the full conversation, watch the episode on YouTube.
Castille has spent his career inside regulated entities, and he's clear-eyed about the trade-off it imposes.
What does operating as a regulated entity change about how you design products?
Jérôme Castille: Once you are a regulated entity, the product design is very set up upstream. Sometimes you lose the ability to go fast and launch a product just to see how it goes, because your license gives you the obligation to have a very set product design and process. You need to make sure the risk profile of the product is matching your company's risk appetite.
This is formalized at board level – a risk appetite statement where the directors say, this is the type of risk and the type of market we are comfortable being involved in. Then compliance needs to be comfortable, risk management needs to be comfortable, legal needs to be comfortable, and your portfolio managers need to be comfortable running the strategy on top of it.
From the outside it may look very heavy, but all this regulation is here for one fine line: investor protection. Once you launch a product, people will be invested in it. You cannot afford to kill a product or just liquidate it – it's a very complicated process once you have investors in. So everything needs to be framed before the product is actually launched and managed.
Most managers are authorized for one side of the fence. CoinShares sits on both – as an AIFMD management company authorized to manage investment funds, with MiFID authorization for securities and, since July 2025, MiCA authorization for crypto assets.
Jérôme Castille: We were among the first to have this license – at least the first in continental Europe to mix the two worlds at the asset management company level. It means we are able, separately but also combining the two, to invest both in digital assets and in security financial instruments. It can be an ETF, a bond, a stock. We can manage the two separately, but what we want to do is combine them into one single allocation and one single strategy.
That's why we did all this work to get the right authorization – to bring something that isn't on the market at the moment: a product run by an onshore regulated asset management company, backed by a group listed on Nasdaq. Distributors and platforms are now actively looking for this kind of product.
> "We are able, separately but also combining the two, to invest both in digital assets and in security financial instruments – into one single allocation and one single strategy."
Jérôme Castille: We were first thinking about DeFi lending because that's where this market originated. But we identified quite quickly that there's a structural problem – not about the hacks, but from a pure portfolio construction standpoint. DeFi yields are more than 80% correlated between each other, meaning they're all moving in the same direction at the same time. And those yields are highly correlated with the crypto markets and Bitcoin volatility. So from the beginning there's a problem if you want clients exposed long-term to these strategies. That's where we started thinking about new, less-correlated sources of yield.
People are getting very active in tokenizing their funds and providing liquidity onchain. As of today, a tokenized fund yield is bigger than a DeFi lending yield – so it's a real thing now, and there's a real arbitrage between DeFi lending exposure and real-world asset yield exposure. These institutions first disclosed their tokenization efforts back in 2021 and people were kind of laughing. Now they're actually working.
CoinShares' strategies are built as portfolios, not single products. An internal investment and risk committee sets the approved buckets top-down – DeFi lending, tokenized bonds and funds, secured repo, and a measure of delta-neutral for diversification. Within each sleeve, the team optimizes bottom-up, and different risk profiles are a matter of allocation: tilt conservative and liquid, or tilt toward higher yield and lower liquidity, by shifting weight between the same underlying engines. The strategies range from a conservative 2.2% to roughly 7–8% APY.
How do you make a defensible argument against the double-digit yields elsewhere in DeFi?
Jérôme Castille: More than 10% APY, liquid on a daily liquidity, in the traditional world and without any risk – nobody will believe it. In traditional finance these strategies bear a certain level of risk, some less, some more. But you need to be aware that a double-digit strategy does have risk in it. The problem we have in this industry is also the undisclosed leverage, the looping. That's why we designed something very pure. Of course we want to be competitive, but we want something that goes through the years without any issue about leverage or recursive lending. Liquid double-digit strategies are hedge fund strategies, and hedge fund strategies are very high risk – it's a risk-reward balance you need to find. For us, we accept that maybe we don't have the highest risk profile. We want something balanced, between risk and reward, not hiding any kind of leverage.
For a firm of CoinShares' size, building proprietary vault infrastructure was an option. Castille dismissed it on principle.
Jérôme Castille: It goes back to one of the principles of asset management: segregation of duties. As a portfolio manager, I'm here to manage a portfolio – I'm not here to manage the infrastructure. We want to focus on portfolio management, investor protection, and the right risk-reward, but at the same time we needed the right technological partner to build the infrastructure we had in mind. At no point did we consider building the infrastructure ourselves. We also believe Railnet can become an industry standard, and to become a standard a protocol needs to be independent – used by other parties. That's why we want to launch diversified strategies, not only on DeFi but also on real-world assets, mixing the two: because we want the traditional asset managers who have been waiting for this kind of protocol for years to witness it, and to try it.
You have all these queues and queue management that you're designing, which I think will change the industry once people witness it – because it solves a massive problem. DeFi as it's constructed now cannot manage what is instant and what is not instant, with notice periods. It will also disrupt the asset management or fund services industry, because now you have a smart contract actually doing everything the accountant and the back office are doing, at the same time. There was no question for us that you were the right partner.
> "DeFi as it's constructed now cannot manage what is instant and what is not instant."
On regulation, Castille thinks the market underrates MiCA. The reflex was that it would slow everything down. His view is the opposite.
Has regulatory clarity sped things up, or is there still friction?
Jérôme Castille: People tend to minimize the impact of MiCA. Two or three years ago, the first question before launching any product was whether it was even allowed – and nobody knew. A lot of things were very fragmented. Now MiCA provides clarity on, I'd say, 90% of the scope for a platform, a broker, a distributor. You register in one country and you have access to the whole European Union, which is massive in terms of reach. We're still in the implementation phase – there's still level-three guidance, we're still waiting for a lot of stuff – but it's building, and now people have the answer: this product goes into this bucket, this regulation, we need to disclose this to our clients.
What does onchain asset management look like by 2028?
Jérôme Castille: By 2028, everything will be tokenized – someone telling you that is selling you something. I'm not sure everything will be onchain, mainly because some things don't need to be yet. But I'm sure some very specific products or needs will be fully onchain. I'm talking about short-term cash, treasuries, and stable yield strategies. The demand is already here. With 24/7 creation and redemption, and the programmability you can have on cash movement and subscriptions, there's no reason for a CFO by 2028 not to fully adopt an onchain yield strategy, an onchain credit strategy, because it solves a massive amount of issues they have. The rest – equities, more active and alternative strategies – will come later. There's enough to keep us occupied with cash treasury and short-term money market funds for the long term.
He's already looking past today's yield products to what he calls investment fund 2.0 – a single actively managed vault holding tokenized ETFs, digital assets, and equity shares together, where an allocator buys one LP token and gets exposure to both worlds. "It's not for tomorrow," he said, "but in two years' time I think it will be the main standard for a lot of platforms."
And his pick for a future Railnet Talks guest? He aimed high: someone like Larry Fink, coming on to announce a new ETF launching fully onchain using the protocol. "That would be the all-time high of the podcast." We'll take it.
This is the second episode of Railnet Talks, a podcast series spotlighting the asset managers, builders, and partners shaping onchain finance through the Railnet ecosystem.
Watch the full conversation with Jérôme Castille on YouTube →