Building Internet Capital Markets

Programmable Money Is Rewiring Markets

– Justin Patel, Venture Investor at Decasonic

Capital markets are currently undergoing a large transformation, evolving towards becoming truly internet native. Technologies such as stablecoins and smart contracts are restructuring the core functions of financial services, custody, trading, issuance, and settlement. Crypto in short is turning them into seamless, software driven processes, streamlining the infrastructure with fewer intermediaries. These new “crypto rails” can operate 24/7, are accessible globally, and are easily verifiable on immutable distributed ledgers, or blockchains. What was once a tedious process consisting of batched file transfers, manual reconciliations, and many layers of intermediaries can now be achieved nearly instantly with deterministic finality. This has grown beyond some speculative tech experiment to a fundamental restructuring of global liquidity transfer. 

Defining Internet Capital Markets

At Decasonic, we see this transformation as part of a broader trend, the rise of Internet Capital Markets (ICMs). We define it as an ecosystem where the entire lifecycle of a financial asset (creation -> pricing -> trading -> settlement -> custody) operates on shared and programmable internet infrastructure. This is a next generation internet infrastructure, or Web3, that incorporates both blockchain and AI. This includes permissioned elements for compliance where necessary, ensuring broad accessibility while respecting legal boundaries.

• Cash Layer: Stablecoins are a cash equivalent and can bridge fiat on chain and into compliant wallets. With transaction volumes exceeding $8.9 trillion in the first half of 2025 alone, this layer enables instant value transfer. 

• Market-Structure Layer: Automated Market Makers (AMMs) and order books can now include advanced risk management, cross margining, and derivative trading (perpetuals and options). Platforms like Hyperliquid and Aster are examples of on-chain derivatives trading that offer high performance perps with on-chain settlement. Centralized venues such as OKX and Bybit provide high-leverage perps with real-time risk management. However, even as of now, Bitcoin and Ethereum still dominate this space, comprising about 68% of crypto derivatives volume in 2025.

• Origination Layer: Tokenizes real world assets (RWAs) such as treasuries and bonds, credit instruments, receivables, and real estate. The RWA market has exploded more recently, crossing $30 billion in Q3 2025 (308% growth in three years) with projections reaching up to $16 trillion by 2030. 

• Middleware: Oracles for pricing, secure messaging, and attestations can combine everything together, ensuring data integrity across multiple chains.

• Distribution: Products are delivered through consumer apps and B2B APIs. Audits, live monitoring, circuit breakers, and insurance provide safeguards.

• Examples:

  • Token Generation Event (TGE) or Initial DEX Offering (IDO) instead of a traditional IPO

  • Tokenization of shares, credit and real estate

  • DEXs allowing users to trade 24/7 without authority

  • Lending and borrowing through smart contracts

  • Liquidity pools that allow anyone to provide capital

A Confluence of Factors Drives the Market Timing to Today

Several converging forces make 2025 a pivotal year for Internet Capital Markets adoption. The timing of this shift and widespread adoption is not a coincidence. After years of experimental phases, the infrastructure has finally reached enterprise/institutional levels of adoption maturity, driven by emerging US regulatory clarity, evolving needs for 24/7 speed with cost reductions, and accelerating adoption by both fintech and traditional financial institutions. 

For instance, stablecoins now offer reliable, low volatility settlement layers  The total market capitalization surpassed $300 billion for the first time in early October 2025, marking a nearly 47% growth year to date. This stability is backed by massive amounts of transaction volumes: Stablecoin trading volume hit $10.3 trillion in Q3, marking the most active quarter since Q2 2021. Modern Layer 1 (L1) blockchains such as Ethereum and Solana and Layer 2 (L2) such as Arbitrum and Optimism, deliver fast confirmations (often <1 second) while handling billions in daily volume without congestion.

User friendly advancements are equally critical. Wallets that have account abstraction simplify management. Thus making crypto feel similar to traditional financial applications, easy to manage and understand. Global crypto wallet users have increased to an estimated 590 million in 2025, up 5% from the previous year, reflecting broad amounts of adoption across different verticals. 

Compliance tools, such as on-chain identity verification and programmable permissions, are evolving to meet the set regulatory demands without sacrificing the decentralized aspects. As a result, the "back-office" of finance (coupon payments, margin calculations, and clearing) can become automated through code. This not only reduces enterprise costs, but enhances observability and testability, turning once opaque processes easily auditable and transparent.

Distribution channels are currently evolving as well. Instead of relying heavily on costly paid marketing campaigns, projects can leverage wallets, social platforms, and embedded fintech integrations to reach users organically. For example, DeFi protocols are integrated directly into mobile crypto wallets, increasing adoption even at the base user level.

Thesis

In internet capital markets, speed and transparency go beyond simply being features. They actively enable the creation of innovative products and help to attract and onboard new markets. These composable primitives build on each other, simplifying launching iterations and further innovation. The trust comes with development such as reliable oracles, reasonable position limits, emergency stop features, and intuitive dashboards that can simplify processes.

Growth continues when teams focus on user friendly/conscious integrations instead of  short-term market based features. For example, partnerships across ecosystems and wallet embeddings have propelled DeFi's total value locked (TVL) to a record $237 billion in Q3 2025, even as daily active wallets declined by 22%. This is a sign of stronger capital efficiency. Ethereum remains dominant with $88.3 billion in TVL, while emerging chains like Solana ($11.3 billion) and Base ($5 billion) are gaining traction through rapid adoption.

Key Areas of Focus

We're actively exploring several core elements of this ecosystem, prioritizing projects that combine cutting edge tech with real world applicability.

• Stablecoin "OS": treasury-level accounts that have programmable payouts and user-friendly interfaces that appeal to finance professionals. Stablecoin activity metrics reflect ongoing expansion. 

• On-Chain Market Structure: perpetuals (perps) and options equipped with strong risk management, ample liquidity, and proven cross-margining under stress. Prediction and insurance markets, especially those with liquidity pools that withstand market swings. Centralized platforms like Bybit and Binance dominate trading volumes, while decentralized protocols like Hyperliquid and Aster support high performance perps with fully on-chain settlements.

• Tokenized Capital Markets: short-term credit and revenue-sharing assets that use crypto infrastructure for settlements while connecting smoothly to traditional lending and payment systems. 

• Fintech on Crypto Rails: This includes advancements in cross-border B2B payments, real-time merchant settlements, and underwriting that merges on-chain history with off-chain data. For context, RippleNet processes over $15 billion monthly in cross-border transactions in 2025.

• Compliance Primitives: These are tools that balance openness with regulatory needs, like wallets with built-in KYC and controlled access layers.

Benchmarks for Sustainable Growth

At Decasonic, we evaluate progress by long-term product-market fit and measurable user adoption. Here's what stands out for us:

• Clear Customers and Durable Use Cases: Protocols that address specific use needs (instant remittances or automated yield farming) and show strong user retention.

• Growing Lifetime Value of Customers: Customers deepen usage over time. Larger balances/flows, leads to more modules turned on, and higher revenue per account. Resilient Unit Economics: Fee structures that can withstand market downturns. Take rates should rely on genuine activity (growing development, fees, users)

• Native Distribution: Achieved via integrations (API connections to established fintech apps)

• Risk Literacy: Openly shared stress testing and honest post major event analyses can foster trust.

• Compounding Roadmaps: Product updates that open doors to related features or collaborations, generating network effects.

Tracking Signals

To differentiate real progress from hype, we are tracking these key metrics:

• Stablecoin users & velocity: Verified funded wallets, daily/weekly/monthly paying users, share of total payments done in stablecoins, time from signup until first payment.

• Execution quality & cost: Slippage at median order sizes, price spread vs cards/ACH, settlement time.

• Partner integrations: Production partners live, partner-sourced payment volume, average SDK setup time.

• Go-live speed: Days from contract sign until first production transaction, engineering hours required, percentage of partners live within two weeks.

• Risk transparency: Percentage of users who view the risk dashboard, incident updates within 72 hours, audit/attestation cadence.

• On/Off-ramps: Supported countries and payment methods, KYC pass rate, conversion from verification to payment, payment success rate.

• Real-world volume & recurrence: Stablecoin payment volume by use case, share of recurring payments, recovery rate on failed/late payments.

• Merchant acceptance: Active transacting merchants, volume per merchant, checkout conversion uplift when a stablecoin option is shown.

• Operator basics: Activation rate (users making a first payment within 7 days), feature adoption (programmable settlement/escrow/recurring within 1-3 months), reliability (success rate), cost to serve vs legacy rails.

Risks

Every major shift comes with risks and challenges. Technical issues such as smart contract bugs and oracle issues won't vanish with time. Systems must include fail-safes to limit damages. Liquidity is scattered across many different blockchains. Placing emphasis on standard settlement points, safe bridges, and smart routing is key. Regulations may shift unpredictably. User experiences still need refinement. Tools like intents (User-defined goals in blockchain transactions) and account abstraction (treats user accounts as smart contracts) can hide crypto's complexities, but adoption varies by user group.  There are still opportunities to mitigate many of these risks, solve these challenges and unleash the full potential for Internet Capital Markets.  

Conclusion

Through my work at Decasonic, I concentrate on noticeable overlaps: using data to make quantitative decisions, tying tokens to actual revenue streams, and setting up flexible workflows. The goal being to help create internet-native capital markets that are dependable for regular users and large institutions.

If you’re building programmable finance infrastructure (or interested in chatting about adoption, risk management, or growth strategies) we’d love to connect. We'll keep posting in-depth analyses, practical examples, and updates on the market's direction.

The content of these blog posts is strictly for informational and educational purposes and is not intended as investment advice, or as a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any asset. Nothing herein should be considered legal or tax advice. You should consult your own professional advisor before making any financial decision. Decasonic makes no warranties regarding the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of the content in these blog posts. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Decasonic. Decasonic disclaims liability for any errors or omissions in these blog posts and for any actions taken based on the information provided.