# SHIFT co-founder, whose wallet company sold in $100 million Fireblocks deal, builds RWA tokens Stabledash Live, a Stabledash show. Aug 29, 2026. Michael Bar Zeev. https://live.stabledash.com/shows/the-live-show/episodes/why-crypto-traders-fall-asleep-on-tokenized-stocks-and-what-lVQ5xIJ1hJU Michael Bar-Zeev says leveraged and short ETF tokens, not plain stocks, are what bring retail crypto users to real-world assets. Michael Bar Zeev, co-founder of SHIFT, says he was CEO of a wallet company that was later part of a group sold to Fireblocks for $100 million. He has been a founder since about 2004, creating about 12 companies and selling three. His current company is at roughly $41 million in TVL with about a thousand users. ## From stablecoins to RWAs Michael Bar Zeev says he started by asking whether stablecoins were still 99% dominated by a Circle and Tether duopoly, then found Tether USDt profiting a billion dollars a month in 2022. He says a simulated basket of six ETFs over a historical period of 18 years correlated to US CPI at a 95 to 97% rate. ## Leverage without perps SHIFT added 2x and 3x leveraged ETFs and a short side, since a spot asset onchain has only ever been a long. Michael Bar Zeev draws a line at perps: "if you're doing 20 x on something, I don't care what it is," he says, "You're gambling." ## Where the users are Bar-Zeev says SHIFT users buy through Jupiter, and the top countries include Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brazil and Greece. The company is working with an app that gives students in India aged 18 to 23 a savings account, which wants to offer RWA vaults saving between 5 to 30% depending on strategy and risk. The tokens are meant to be used, not parked: he cites partnerships with Camino for earning, IV Markets for options on RWA tokens, and work with Morpho and Pendle on vaults and looping. ## A market run on hype Bar-Zeev argues that both TradFi stocks and top crypto assets are no longer analytically traded. If NASDAQ and others look at prediction markets such as Polymarket as partners, he says, people now consider this trading. He calls Robinhood's onboarding positive but says SHIFT is "outside" the casino. Over the next six months, Bar-Zeev says SHIFT is pushing to at least double partners, volume and assets and to bring out RWA products "that have never been seen before." He points to Chainlink as the infrastructure player with the bigger picture of RWAs. ## Key takeaways 1. Michael Bar Zeev says a wallet company he ran as CEO was later part of a group sold to Fireblocks for $100 million. 2. SHIFT is at roughly $41 million in TVL with about a thousand users, Bar-Zeev says, and aims to at least double partners, volume and assets. 3. SHIFT added 2x and 3x leveraged ETFs and a short side, while Bar-Zeev calls 20x leverage gambling rather than trading. ## Chapters - 0:00 Serial founder moves from wallets and mortgages to stablecoins - 4:46 A legal stack turns securities into permissionless tokens - 6:19 Leveraged ETFs give degens volatility without liquidation risk - 9:44 Retail users worldwide make up SHIFT's $41M TVL - 11:41 DeFi integrations let RWA tokens earn extra yield - 15:07 No-minimum RWA vaults open borrowing and saving to everyone - 18:45 Robinhood onboards newcomers even though its chain is mostly memes - 22:19 Markets have become meme-driven, so speculation now counts as trading - 24:38 SHIFT aims to double its numbers and launch new RWA products ## Transcript **Drew Rogers** (0:00) Alright. We're bringing on Michael, cofounder of Shift. Michael, thanks for joining us, man. How's it going? For me. Great. Great. Thanks for having me. How are you guys doing? StableDash Live. We're doing great. It's great to meet you. I'm Drew. That's Zach. And, yeah, we love we love all things real world assets, and we're we're excited to dive into what you're building. And this is the first time we've covered shifts, so maybe we start with a quick intro on on yourself, and then we'll we'll we'll have some time to nerd out about a bunch of other stuff, but we'll start there. **Michael Bar Zeev** (0:33) Alright. Glad. I'm Michael. I'm 46 from Tel Aviv as you mentioned. I've been a founder in Web two since about 2004. Created about 12 companies, sold three, destroyed others. And I was in the in the gaming industry for many years selling poker products, which was really interesting. Oh. Very very hardcore media and advertisement on, you know, like an e commerce experience. And then in web in web three, I joined in 2017. I was CEO of a wallet company that was later part of a group that was sold to Firebox for a $100,000,000. So that was amazing. Then I did a traceability and transparency on the blockchain company, which was really cool, doing food safety for Nestle and Carlsberg International. Those were two big customers. That was very interesting. **Drew Rogers** (1:33) A logical next step. Right? After you sell your company to Fireblocks, just like, why why not go to Nestle? **Michael Bar Zeev** (1:42) I mean, I just have to ask, what was behind that? Block chain, I wanted to do... I was sick of ICOs. I was sick of the bullshit industry that was selling air, and I wanted to bring value, and I wanted to do something that wasn't... Had anything to do with finance, but on chain. Wanted to bring chain outside of finance, and that was our attempt. IBM were doing it at the time, and a lot of other companies, but it actually did not fall through the experiment for most of them. But that's really for a different day. I later was CTO of a mortgage company, which is a crazy shift towards trash Zach's **Drew Rogers** (2:20) gonna get excited. This is like Zach's favorite conversation as the mortgage This is **Zach Fowler** (2:24) is this is one of my favorite conversations around like the... Again, kinda like what you said around it's finance products, but it's not trading, and how do you bring it on chain. There may be some trading. You know, we see USHP where it... You know, you you bring those indices on chain. There could be trading around it, but inherently, like, it's just an archaic industry that it's like, this is perfect for just a digital ledger, so we just underwrite loans easier. I I agree. About that time. **Michael Bar Zeev** (2:51) A 100%. Well, that involved raising about 200,000,000 for the biggest banks and institutions in Israel, And running from the ground up, I joined almost as founder, was CTO, built the entire system, went through a cycle. And then around 2022, I get a call from a friend, which has, you know, no business relations until that point. And he says, listen. Terra Luna collapsed. And I was like, what is that about? I was a bit out of crypto, really. I was I was disconnected from the industry, and I I just... He he was like, something bad happens. Stablecoins are collapsing. There has to be something better that we can do in the stablecoin industry. And I asked him just the one question before before deciding. I asked him, is it still 99% dominated by Circle and Tether duopoly? And when he answered yes, I said, yes, sir. I'm in. Then I started understanding, like, what actually is going on in the stablecoin market. And they were at the time... That was in 2022. I dug in, and I found Tether earning... Sorry. Profiting a billion dollars a month in 2022. You know that? Isn't it crazy? Now seeing that, I was absolutely, like, convinced that there's a better way to bring a stablecoin. And we started to ponder upon that, and we found that if we created an RWA basket, which we actually simulated with six ETFs with some weights between them over a historical period of 18. We're able to correlate to The US CPI at a 95 to 97% rate. That was the initial idea to bring a preserve your purchasing power CPI conjunctive stablecoin. That was the... Like, the the idea was born there. Now since then, and we started selling that in 2022 and started asking people, do you wanna buy this? They were saying, no. I wanna... I have 9% on Solana staking. I don't need that. I was like, but that's not the same. They didn't get it. Then Andu came in and showed everybody, you know, from the b to b industry how, you know, from that angle, how you come in with a billion dollars of of o USD or USDY, whichever you want to choose, yielding stable. And that was not available to retail yet. We were convinced there must be a way to break that wall because accredited investors and DeFi don't beat. Right? It's not the same conversation. And so we went along and pushed to create a license to create a permissionless version of an RWA. Now that in itself, I think, is most of our work. Right? Because we have the legal infrastructure to take a security on one end and offer a permissionless token on the other end. That is literally the mechanics and the... You know, there's there's a foundation and a licensed company, and then there's a structure between them. There's a bidder agreement. There's a bank and a broker and a custodian. So you have a pretty big stack to create, which is... It's it's actually something that chat can't do. That's good. That's good. Do. That is one of them. And I'm like, what is our value? We do things chat can't do. So... Yeah. **Drew Rogers** (6:15) All the investors are are raising eyebrows. Yeah. How do you typically frame... I mean, as we really just start here from first principles as we think about shift and what you're building, like, how do you typically start the conversation around framing where you... Like, framing the conversation and then where you guys sit within it because **Zach Fowler** (6:34) there's so much to this. So how do you typically approach it? And, Drew, I'll just add, like I said, for... The first liquidation free leverage RWA protocol, Wall Street for crypto. We read that. There's some, like, buzzwords in there. How much of that is, like, a buzzword? How much this is, hey. No. This is this is what we're doing. There's just no better way to describe it right now. **Michael Bar Zeev** (6:54) 100% that. I I don't I don't think that there are buzzwords because I can explain how this is actual leveraged product with zero liquidation risk. It literally is. Why? Because it's not a perp. It's sitting on an ETF, which is leveraged. So they buy options and recycle every day, and they basically have a leverage position on top of Tesla, S and P, SPY, SOX three. Whichever asset that is, we buy it a 100%. And so... You know what? Wait. Maybe let me start before, because we talked about how we position ourselves. Shift is an RWA issuer. It's a licensed RWA issuer that brings fully backed stocks, ETFs, bonds, leveraged ETFs, and other financial tools as native cryptocurrency. That is the step one. Okay? Now we started out by just bringing regular stocks, bonds, ETFs, but we understood that those were kinda boring for some users, and they wanted something more volatile. And on the other hand, we see hyper liquid with 50 x, 30 x crazy leveraging. And then that for us is dangerous. We don't see that, you know, it's more... From my from my point of view, it's not an RWA, it's a game. So if you're doing 20 x on something, I don't care what it is. You're not you're not trading right now. This is not... You know, you're not... It doesn't matter what your underlying asset. You're gambling. You're letting around. And so, you know, the last extreme case is whatever. I don't wanna even go into it. But what we found was that spots on one hand, kind of boring for d... For degens. Perps are super dangerous, and we had the ability to buy these leveraged ETFs, three x, two x. They don't go to 10 x. They don't go to two x. Okay? Let's be clear about that. Right? There's not... Not everything is perfect, but it's it's three x and two x, long and short. The short part is the most interesting part. Because until today, every spot asset is a long asset. That you're literally saying, believe in that, I'm gonna buy it. You don't have a way to short it on crypto. So these are kind of the ways that we're adapting Wall Street to crypto, because I think that, you know, a regular S and P or a T bill to a degen is about the most boring thing on earth. They fall asleep if I tell them about it, they wouldn't want to listen. But if I say it's three x and it's moved twenty two percent one day, they'll be like, what? Okay, Let's talk about that. Because it's still more substantial than Pepe. Right? Can we agree? I mean, not sure, right? That's a conversation DJs have with me. Like, alright, so I have Apple, I have Pepe too. Right? What's the difference? **Drew Rogers** (9:44) Who who are you mostly building for when you think about... Like, when you wake up and you're designing this product and business, like, who do you imagine being those core users or or folks who you need to get bought in? Are degens one of them, or are they less of a focus? **Michael Bar Zeev** (10:00) So with this specific product, and we have two lines of product and a third one coming up. But this specific product that you're seeing is a very retail oriented product because we... You know, it's a it's not an institutional product. They don't do that kind of... They don't buy these these leveraged assets. So it's really very much aimed for retail between degens and high net worths and everything in the middle. We found that it's really interesting. Now we have about a thousand users on the platform and about 41,000,000 in TDL in total, and they vary. They're... They vary very much, like, between the very retail people and the very high end LPs that, you know, the high net worths, let's call them. So if you're if you're looking at a specific customer, we came in with, you know, the the ability to sell permissionlessly anywhere on the hook. That is, you know, there's certain conditions and, you know, you can't come from this country or that country, whatever. But you're basically looking at a permissionless system. You're working through Jupiter, connecting a lot, buying buying it. It. And so people came in from everywhere. We actually... You know? And and you don't see them all because you can't track exactly, but you can see on your website who's coming, who's connecting, who's doing part of the eardrop. And you can partially see that people have come from all over the world. And there is actually no... I I can mention a few countries like Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brazil, and Greece. Those are like the top. Interesting. **Zach Fowler** (11:41) Michael, I'd I'd like to get in a little bit to to the ecosystem. Right? Because I think, you know, we... We've had some conversations where these assets are only... Like, these assets come on chain, whether it's, you know, no leverage, two, three x leverage, and trading them, you know, is... They could just stop there. Maybe they're just traded, and they're traded by degens and some speculators. But, you know, bring us more into, like, this ecosystem. I see you're live on Solana working with teams like Camino and Jupiter. What are some products that you are maybe being built around these assets, products that you want to see built around these assets, and and even just bring us more into the ecosystem to see alpacas custodying these assets. So, you know, they're on chain. Now what? Do people just trade them and it just stops there, or or what what what gets done with them? So, **Michael Bar Zeev** (12:30) actually, you're touching the heart of it because people holding a paper stock are asking themselves the same question. Why should I actually hold it into conversion? And what we're creating is basically an ecosystem where you can have more yield on the same token in different ways. So we have partnerships with Camino, and we're also looking into Voalte right now, bringing in a different form of just earning from that. And we also have partnerships with different bodies, like IV Markets, which are basically taking in RWA and creating an options market on top of it. So you are using your RWA to earn a bit more yield on top of that and also working on loan markets and borrow markets, and that's a different different subject that's that's, you know, basically allows you to earn a bit more on your RWA token. There also talks about how we can use this for staking, restaking, looping, and many other, you know, define native things that you used to do with crypto, and tomorrow, we were trying to do with RWAs. So these things are generally starting to mature. Every day, there's another partner that we're bringing in that wants to bring in RWAs towards their dApp or their whichever layer that they're offering. But, you know, from from things like Morpho and Pendle, which we're looking forward with with the vaults, with looping, and things like that, and, you know, creating a differentiation with the yield and the principal, and all these different things that people do today with their crypto are things that we're actively working on with partners. We don't the token as just something that you're gonna hold in your wallet, or else why not just hold it with broker? What's the point? Right? That's not what we came for. Just hodling, it's nice, but I actually encourage anybody that has RWA tokens to try to make another buck on them with a very low risk, and that is very possible right now. So either borrow or lend it, borrow, have it as collateral. Or right now, we're seeing we're seeing a new thing that you can actually take your RWA and put it in a pull and earn from that. Using that collateral, you're still in position, but you're using that to do another action. So it could be any action, but it's really interesting to see how RWAs actually come towards becoming a real crypto or real composable cryptocurrency. We're very much pushing I have **Zach Fowler** (15:10) question for you, Michael. This was a recent conversation I had with a friend. He's very smart guy. He's like, he's a scientist. Again, very financially savvy, but very much fits the profile of, hey. I'm investing in my entire retirement account. I have a little bit of Bitcoin. And, you know, he recently bought a house. And he was like, yeah. You know, I had to sold sold sold off some of my investment account. And this introduced the the idea of on chain stocks that you could borrow against them and you could sell. And this was something that, in his mind, this is only something that the ultra high net worth individuals do, that you need to have million dollars in in some investment account and that this isn't something that I could go do. And even if I could go do it just for $30,000, I'd rather not borrow against it, and I'd rather just sell it, realize the gains, and move on. There's still very much this notion that this is an exotic idea. What would you say to an individual like that if you were trying to dispel some of these myths? Say, no. This is actually something that, you know, Joe Schmo down the street that makes a $100,000 a year and has been working hard should have the ability to do when they wanna go buy a house or buy a car or remodel their home. They shouldn't have to just sell all their assets. **Michael Bar Zeev** (16:20) I think... And once again, not financial advice that Yeah. Didn't say that. I'll say on this show. This is this is this is a theoretical and philosophical discussion about, you know, your position in life and how much you actually wanna earn and how much you wanna This is all this is all always... It's it's a it's a risk and gain game. Now I would not put my house as stake and, you know, gamble on my house or have in any way like Yeah. I wouldn't. But that's me. Maybe somebody else has 20 houses, that's fine. He can do it. You know? That's that high net worth. But I don't wanna talk about him because he's not the only one that we're actually aiming for. We're working... Let's let's give a great example. We're working with an app that is giving students from India a savings account to start their life. It's an... It's 18 to 23. They're starting their account, and they want to present them with RWA volts that they'll be able to save between five to 30% depending on their strategy and risk. But from a t bill up to, let's say, something that's a bit more risky. Right? Not, you know, not not very, very stable. 30% APY, that's that's a that's a lot. Right? And so this this range... And this is where people can come in with $20, $30, whatever. There's no minimum. That's my point. There is no minimum. There's an absolute no minimum. And 30% a year is actually something that even a $100 turning to a 130 is something that you just say, what? That's cool. I like it. It's interesting for me. Not... It doesn't have to be a 100,000. Right? I think if you have idle stablecoins, there's no reason for them to sit and inflate and lose value. Do something with them. Right? So an RWA is a great solution for that. And then having that RWA work, if it's in a vault or as a vault even, because we're creating these RWA vaults, which basically you come in with your stable, and you get you get a receipt that represents your state... Your your position in the vault, and how much you're earning now. So it's really interesting, I think, for any person that has between $1 and a gazillion. **Drew Rogers** (18:45) Michael, I would just pull this up because this is actually something yesterday I experimented with on Robinhood. And as we start thinking about, like... Even the word airdrop is, like, very degen. It's like this idea of, like, I'm go... I'm getting something, and you're, like, you know, you're you're you're dropping me something, and it feels very... Yeah. It feels very crypto native. But it was interesting going through this flow yesterday on Robinhood where this fund too, which seems like a very interesting approach to how... Like, a unique way to get involved with private markets and how they're breaking this fund down. But it actually now is feeling like an airdrop because I'm waiting for allocation, and I'm kind of waiting for them to, yeah, give give me allocation, and I still don't know if I'm if I'm going to get one. How do you how do you think about the differences between maybe what Shift is doing and user experiences like this in terms of, like, packaging some of these up? And any other, like, just general thoughts on Robinhood given your vantage point would be interesting right now. **Michael Bar Zeev** (19:51) Absolutely. First of all, I think this is great. I've not I've not read the little... The small letters to understand what actually is here. But if this is how you market an AirDrop, **Drew Rogers** (20:02) you can actually bring in... What is going on? Yeah. Yeah. It's essentially like you can you can... $25 each. **Michael Bar Zeev** (20:09) Web 2.5 kind of Yeah. Because you're... They're they're aiming for Web two people, but you're actually getting crypto on the other side. Are you participating in blockchain activity or not? **Drew Rogers** (20:25) I don't actually think this is a tokenized version of their fund, but it's an interesting, like, user experience Me too. What an AirDrop would feel like. **Zach Fowler** (20:35) Like, you're buying into this fund. They're gonna go invest in it. Once they invest in these companies, you're gonna get airdropped whoever they end up investing in. That's an interesting model. And I have to, like have balance in my head. **Michael Bar Zeev** (20:49) Take on Web 2.5 from my point of view. I mean, I wish it used crypto as rails at least, but maybe that's not what they're And maybe they will eventually. I I I think... You know? Yeah. I think doing a lot a lot of that stuff. Sorry to disturb. I I think if you ask in general, like, what my take is on Robinhood, they have done an amazing thing. I think that once you take a huge amount of off chain users and introduce them in a very simple way, and onboard them naturally towards web three, and we've seen a lot of non RWA activity on that chain since it's out. Right? Most of the activity is non RWA. We all know that. But it's fine. If it's a way to get new people into the system and acquainted with decentralized finance, I find it a positive thing. Even even though I'm not a big fan of memes, I think it's a gamble, I think it's roulette casino, It's fine. If you wanna go to the casino, go to the casino. But life is not only the casino. There is... You have to go outside sometimes. So that's where you'll meet us. We're not there. We're outside. And Yeah. I I think Robin Hood is great, and and what they're doing is kind of had had, you know, driven new new blood and new liquid into the system. That actually brought in a lot of people back. Of course, it came with a lot of BS, but that is life, my friend. **Zach Fowler** (22:19) I I... Yeah. It was funny when, like, they launched Robinhood Chain. It's like, immediately memes, memes, memes. It's like, you just you just can't help yourself. And, And, you know, I think we think about this question a lot in the context of modern markets. What does it mean to trade? To what degree do we want to be speculators, especially with the rise of prediction markets? When does it cross the threshold of this is informed investing? I'm just... I'm a I'm a healthy speculator versus, like, I'm just going overboard, and I'm just throwing money in any in any opinion that I have about any subject. Like, I personally... This is something that I just struggle with with the prediction markets where it's like, you're right. There are some people where it's like, they follow sports as close as they follow the stock market. They can make some pretty dang informed decisions. But if I go and I start betting on the NFL, which I don't follow at all, I'm gonna get wrecked. Just like I get wrecked if I go, you know, buy some meme coins. So it's like, how how do you, like... I I don't Maybe it's kind of an open ended question, but how how do you see... And maybe this is more of like a reflection on the state of society. Right? Like, to to what degree do you wanna be building in this speculator economy, and how do you build in this space responsibly? **Michael Bar Zeev** (23:28) Look. If you look at both TradFi stocks and the top 30, 50 crypto assets, a lot of them are trading not because they have great reports or not based on those great reports. They're not analytically traded like they used to. So people can buy a meme... A a stock as a meme if you understand. It's it's under the same logic. It's more of a hype movement movement than an analytical calculated risk movement. That's that's that's what I'm seeing. And so if the stock market has become a meme in in a sense, everything else has as well. So you cannot you cannot change reality in that sense. If if Nasdaq and NICEE are looking at Cauchy and Polymarket as partners, the world has changed to the level that you have to accept that this is now what people consider as trading. Even if it's... It looks like gambling from the outside. It is in fact trading. So hyper liquid 50 x, that's trading right now. It's it's billions every day. Michael, you, when you think about success... **Drew Rogers** (24:48) Like, what does success look like if if we talk to you in six months? What what are you hoping to accomplish, and what is the degree of where you're trying to take things, and how you're even trying to measure success right now in in terms of shift. **Michael Bar Zeev** (25:06) So right now, we're in, you know, 41,000,000 TVLs, a thousand users, and we're actually pushing to double those at least in terms of partners and volume and assets. And... Well, users, once again, since this is kind of a between b to c and a b to b play, our KPIs need be be a bit different doing some distribution channels. So... But it is interesting to see bringing out more new RWA products that have never been seen before. That's the the thing that's most exciting to me, to actually be able to innovate here and bring something that's not, you know, one more of. So new types of RWA vaults and new types of, let's say, baskets or different RWA products, we're we're looking at very... Variable different types of things. So it's really exciting for us to roll out these things and see that users actually gain, make money out of these products. That's, like, my my main goal, see people enjoy what we built. **Drew Rogers** (26:17) Yeah. That's awesome. Last question from my end, and then we can we can wrap here. When we think about the the conversation around... Like, we cover a lot of things in... At StableAsh... On StableAsh Live, and RWAs, tokenized equities is becoming more of that conversation. When you think about the, like, the essential track list of companies or, like, if you are covering this conversation, like, you must speak to these people or these teams. Like... Or else you, you know, you're totally missing the ball. Who who who are some of... We had Steakhouse on last week. We've had X stocks on. We've had, gosh, the... You know, like folks like Denari. Who who who comes to your mind when you're thinking about this conversation that, you know, we would be stupid if we didn't, you know, made sure they were a part of the chat? **Michael Bar Zeev** (27:11) Don't miss Chainlink. Chainlink. Yeah. Because in the end, you are... You're you're having a lot of, you know, end players with this or other product. There is a few underlying infrastructure players which have the bigger picture in their head, and they know all of the smaller ones and all of the different angles and different industries. So for RWAs at least, Dome is Chainlink. **Drew Rogers** (27:41) I'll hit you with this... We'll hit you with some links as as we go here. Michael, thanks for the time, man. This was fun. **Michael Bar Zeev** (27:47) Yeah. Thanks for going on. Good good luck. Thank you very much for having me. It was a pleasure. Stay stable. **Zach Fowler** (27:55) Stay stable. **Drew Rogers** (27:56) We need to we need to make that more of a sign off.