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DevNTell - Exploring Tokenizing Private Equities with @Tessera_PE feat. Community Lead @DeFiPoet
Recorded: Feb. 20, 2026 Duration: 0:31:56Space Recording
Full Transcription
GM, GM, welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of Devontel.
So if you didn't know, Devontel is a 30-minute podcast allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they built.
And today I'm excited to welcome Hadan Esperadio, who is the community lead at Tessera.
So if you're not familiar, Tessera is the first permissionless platform that lets anybody trade tokenized private equities with real share backing
insta settlement and 24 7 availability so if you stick around for today's episode you'll get to
meet hadan learn about tesra and how you can get started using them today all right let's get
GM, GM, welcome to Shurudan.
It's a pleasure to have you on.
GM, Narp, good to talk to you.
Likewise, likewise.
Yeah, I guess before we get into all the great things, Tessera,
perhaps would you like to give a brief introduction about yourself?
Sure. I guess in a nutshell, my background is, you know, undergrad physics degree at Harvard.
Post Harvard, I was an investment banking on the sales and trading desk and structured products at Goldman Sachs for about a decade.
And then I stepped out of i banking right around when
defy really started to come online it just was you know written on the wall to me that uh this was
really the future direction finance was going in uh initially i was just kind of a community member
trader then beginning like in 2020 um i started joining and worked with different projects
initially in the bitcoin defy space and uh most recently have long been very bullish on rwas
uh and then you know when uh when when to sarah kind of approached me that uh uh private equity
rwas then you know kind of like all all the sevens lined up on the slot machine.
And I was like, I've got to be a part of this. So yeah, that kind of takes me to being here today.
Amazing, amazing. And yeah, I've seen RWAs really start to pop off late last year and into this year.
year and into this year um i i guess do you do you attribute it to any one particular thing that's
kind of help help them bring them back into the spotlight uh yeah you know i think um i mean i
mean as early as 2021 i feel for a long time rwas was kind of a buzzword uh that was you know kind
of like suggesting mass adoption or something that was coming down down the line in the future um to me this this always felt like what the end game of what we
were building in crypto was that you know we were building the rails and the infrastructure
that were beginning with these you know on-chain tokens collectibles nft meme coins, but that we were basically, you know, testing out a system
that would inevitably be able to handle the hundreds of trillions of dollars that trade
daily in bonds, commodities, equities, because it is so much faster. It is more secure. Settlement
is more instantaneous. It's permissionless. It's global.
It's 24-7. And so I thought inevitably we would always get here. I think just in 2025 alone,
we've seen like a 10x growth in RWA market cap. I think right now it's about 20 billion on chain.
Of that 20 billion, a good 19 billion of that is like treasuries, private credit,
so like debt instruments. Equities are kind of new, things like Ando Finance. That's maybe just
like an $800 million segment. And private equities are sort of just like a brand new and fresh.
But that's kind of the one I'm the most excited about, because that's the one that retail doesn't have access to in any other way right now.
Yeah, yeah. And you hit the nail on the head. And I guess that's kind of the obvious,
one of the obvious hurdles of the private equity spaces. Not everybody has access to that.
I guess, can you speak to some of the other challenges
that kind of surround private equities
and why it may be that like regular folks can't access it?
Sure.
And so basically, I guess just to put it in a nutshell,
in the beginning of the sort of 1900s,
anyone could sort of like raise a company, sell shares.
As a result, you know, a whole lot of people were kind of getting scammed.
And so, you know, like kind of following the 1929 crash and Great Depression,
you have all these very heavy regulations that were put into place.
And these kind of definitely vary depending on where you are in the world.
But particularly in the U.S., where a lot of these very hot private equity companies are located,
in order to participate in private equities, so that means shares in private companies,
before they IPO and go public, you have to have
accredited investor status. And typically the requirements for that are things such as a
minimum of 1 million net worth excluding your home, typically a minimum of 200 to 300K income.
Basically you're writing a minimum six-figure check. You're signing up for a lockup period that could be
years long. And so this basically excludes a good 99% of the population from being able to hold and
participate or have private equity exposure. And so that's what's kind of frustrating is that
every day we're reading articles about OpenAI, SpaceX, Kalshi, Polymarket.
And as bullish as you feel about these companies, it's wild how we've been conditioned to be passive
about the fact that you can't just go out and have exposure to these things you feel so bullish on.
And so I feel that with tokenization and through tessera we're finding a way to kind
of bridge that gap and being private equity to everyone which is kind of the sort of tessera
tagline excellent excellent and and it's a it's a perfect uh segue again um into uh i guess what
would you say is your pitch of tessera like what what is it what problems does it solve
your pitch of tesra like what what is it what problems does it solve sure and so um so what
tesra does is that you know we go and we buy positions in these massive companies that are
looking to ipo so you know just uh just a week or two ago we had our first alpha vault launch of
AlphaVault launch of a SpaceX exposure, SpaceX tokens.
And so we sort of take these positions.
We tokenize them.
We have them in basically a portfolio segregated companies,
meaning a company that just exists to hold the shares.
We have these independently audited.
That auditing is fed through Chainlink reserves.
And so you have basically online verification
that there is one-to-one backing of your exposure
to shares held.
And then basically, once those tokens are live,
you can trade them 24-7.
On Meteora, for instance.
Right now, SpaceX trading is live.
So you can either trade that if you want to get into or out of the position instantaneously.
Or if you want to hold it through IPO, once there is the IPO, whatever that sort of, wherever Tessera is able to get out of that position at,
is where you can then take your Tessera tokens
and come to the platform.
And during the redemption window,
you can burn them for stablecoins.
So basically, you capture that kind of spread
between the valuation, the implied valuation,
where you purchased that,
to where you purchase that to where you know you have that exit
um if not and you know if if you have a shorter time frame you can of course you know buy and
trade on meteora but that's basically the sort of idea in the in a nutshell how you get exposure to
to private equity companies uh on chain and permissionlessly on Solana at the moment.
Awesome. Yeah, I was going to also ask what chain you guys are starting off with.
Yeah, it seems like a lot of companies that are looking to get or bring RWA's and equities and whatnot on chain,
a lot of them are kind of shifting towards um the solana side of things
whereas like early on you saw like a lot of a lot of people were going on the ethereum side
of things anything evm layer twos but that kind of um sentiment has shifted slightly i guess um
from your uh guys's perspective like um why solana why why go with them first sure um so yeah i would say you know so solana
first i would say that you know we do have a medium long-term multi-chain vision but i think
beginning on solana um you know one is is the is the um infrastructure it's the very low fees
it's the instantaneous settlement um it's the high on-chain volume and activity.
It's the community as well that I think is very kind of active
and apt to prompt and trade,
whether it's kind of like meme coins or RWA tokens.
And also support from the Solana Foundation,
who have been, you know, basically made internet capital markets,
one of their core metas for 2026. 2026 also being what the New York Times describes as the year of
the mega IPO. So, you know, I feel like these matters are really like lining up in a really
strong way towards exactly what we're doing and what we're building and taking to market.
we're doing and what we're building and taking to market 100 yeah i mean there's a lot of big name
companies rumored to be ipoing like spacex you mentioned is one of them yeah yeah open ai maybe
anthropic but like who knows what else and uh i guess and from your uh from tesra's perspective
like um what goes into determining like which equities to kind of bring to the public
first? So you mentioned SpaceX is live now. And is there, I guess, any formula, any strategy kind
of behind which ones to bring up next? Sure. I mean, I would say initially, especially since we're just a few weeks out from launch,
we're basically looking to the community and to bring to market the names that people recognize and the names that people want. And also companies that we know that are one, both massive and also
likely to IPO in like a 12 to 24 month period and so you know
that's that's essentially where we're looking at one is that um this allows the community to get
familiar with how that you know once a company ipos uh how that redemption period burn token
receive stablecoin mechanism works um another is also just the sort of brand recognition and sort of supply
and demand, right? It's like if people recognize these names, these are names that people are
highly bullish on, that they sort of like read about in a news article and they feel this kind
of FOMO of like, man, you know, like I wish it was a holder. I wish I had some Kalshi or, you know,
Polymarket or OpenAI.
That makes them all the more likely to participate and engage with the platform.
So just kind of as sort of like an icebreaker, that's kind of what we're targeting.
Cool.
Yeah, that sounds amazing.
And you mentioned you're a couple of weeks from launch.
you're a couple of weeks from launch.
Is there any way for people who are watching today
to kind of get into like a wait list
or get basically front of the line
to start playing around with Tesla?
Yeah, sure.
So, you know, we took our AlphaVault launch live
on February 12th.
So SpaceX tokens are, you know,
T-SpaceX, it would be our trading live on on meteora um i would say for people you know to definitely give our x account a follow
to sarah underscore pe our our website is to sarah.pe you can check out you know our sort of
app there um and to you know follow just also just for for news updates
uh the the next that we have in the pipeline will be will be call sheet which uh we're very
very excited to sort of launch as well and so um yeah i think um especially the way our sort
of like alpha vault you know launches worked with uh with uh with with uh spacex you had to be
whitelisted to participate.
So there was a reason right there to sort of like join and sign up.
I believe it'll be, I'm going to see what the Kulshii mechanism is going to be.
We might kind of tweak that a bit based on community feedback.
But, you know, knowing about it, being the sort of first to participate is definitely an advantage.
And I'd also add in that, you know,
we've kind of structured our token, it's baked into the Tessera tokens with the 2022 standards,
that basically 35% of all of protocol revenue goes to our referral network. So if you go to, you know, to Sarah and you sign up and you
create a referral code, you know, anyone that you provide that referral code to that signs up,
you receive 30% directly of those fees, then it's 3% of whoever they refer, and then 2% of those
friends of friends. And so, you know, we definitely believe
in kind of rewarding our users
and building these kind of like viral mechanisms
into the token itself.
And so that's another reason to kind of get in early
because the earlier you do,
the bigger your potential graph can grow
as the Sarah gets discovered, as people find out,
you know, all of these very hot companies are live and trading and
you can get exposure to them on it so these are all opportunities that you know uh are available
by by being early to sign up and join amazing amazing and yeah we'll have we'll have all those
links um in the description of the podcast below so folks can can get started there and uh just curious um like this this
sounds like a really amazing product like what uh what's the origin story behind it like what was the
um the the motivation behind kind of starting it beyond kind of just like the the private equities
um barriers sure um you know i i think really you, and a lot of the, a lot of the sort of
Tesserit team comes from a finance background. And so there's always been this kind of vision
of kind of democratizing finance. You know, I think so much of what TradFi, you know, like is, is, is sort of
propped up by these, by these, you know, artificial standards and gates that are meant to make what
they do and accessible to the sort of general public. You know, it's almost this kind of like,
like cabal, like, you know, like insular world where they have their own language and you have these expensive buildings with like big marble lobbies.
But really, at the end of the day, that's because they deal with such a concentrated pool of the sort of, you know, wealthiest.
And if you look at what private equity is right now, it's basically one of the biggest wealth creation
engines in existence. It's one of the big reasons why the rich get richer, because they have access
to buying SpaceX really early on, and you don't. There was even a story about how Google wrote
SpaceX a check for $900 million when they were at a 12 billion valuation and if spacex ipos which
you know seems to be the general discussion at around 1.5 1.6 trillion uh that means google will
have an over 100x return and you're going to hear about that 100x. And most people will think like, man, you know, like,
I kind of I was late. But but you weren't late, you were never allowed in. You've been locked out
by design. And so you know, to Sarah is about just like breaking down those gates and breaking
down those barriers. So that right now you can go connect your wallet and get SpaceX exposure,
really like literally within like minutes,
if not seconds, if you're quick of listening to this on this podcast. So, you know, that's really
what we sort of believe. We believe that to close the wealth gap, you have to close the fairness gap.
And so if we, you know, these products that we know well, that we've in the past life delivered
to the wealthy, if we can deliver that universally to everyone,
I think that is more of the kind of world
that we want to live in
and that we want our kids to grow up in,
where just equality of opportunity is universal
rather than kind of segregated by caste.
Yeah, wonderfully said.
And I think it complements kind of the whole ethos of of DeFi and and bringing
kind of payments on chain is um like not not a lot of people outside of like North America realize
like how hard it is to even set up like a bank account for example right it's like yeah like
a lot of this technology kind of brings people from zero to one, and then to get to one to two to three and so on and so forth,
we kind of like build on top of this.
And I think, yeah,
Tessera sounds like certainly part of the solution here.
In terms of like the broader landscape of similar competitors,
like what would you say T Testrad does better than those
or differently than those?
Sure.
I would say one of the big differentiators is one,
we have 100% transparent on train verifiability
as to our proof of reserves through Chainlink.
You know, like all our token minting, burning, creation is handled through fireblocks for security.
And also, you know, having come from a financial and structured products background,
we've really brought a bit of legal innovation to the way that Tessera exposure is set up
so that there's absolutely no KYC upon cash out or at any point in using the sort of Tessera
platform. So keeping just like privacy first, I think is a huge leg up that we offer that others don't.
Awesome. Awesome.
And I mean, this year in particular,
we've really seen kind of like the rise of like AI, like AI has become much more mainstream, much more capable.
And a lot of people have started messing around with,
at least people in the crypto scene have been kind of messing around with agents that can trade, agents that can trade with each other.
I guess, are there any plans to integrate AI in any form on the platform or does it already exist there?
No, I would say, yeah, I would say already, you know, just like in building out our sort of our workflows and building out sort of like our FAQs and our TG chat supports, that's definitely implemented, you know, like our devs and that's, you know, kind of including myself.
including myself we're all you know just kind of like like like ai like fanatics across the board
uh so you know i would say at the moment um our kind of key points are kind of like rolling out
those first few uh private equities to to you know build that that sort of tessera portfolio
uh but uh without a doubt that's that's that's that's the direction I think everything is going in.
I think, you know, like the vast majority of online trading is going to be, you know, agents trading, trading with agents.
And so, yeah, I think actually just on last week's call, just maybe a little bit of alpha,
but we are building an MCP version of our website that is, you know,
specifically geared for bots to be able to browse and
scrape and get the info they need so that they can respond most accurately and also just let
users who ask know right away how they can right away get plugged into Tessera or even have their
bots interact with Tessera. So yeah, absolutely. We, we, we, we, we,
we love it in all the ways. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. It's, uh, yeah, it's crazy. A lot of the,
the different kinds of ideas people are having around, around this. And yeah, I think, uh,
definitely it's going to be like agents trading with agents. Like we'll all, we'll all have our
own like investment agents that kind of build up our portfolios, trade with agents. We'll all have our own investment agents that kind of
build up our portfolios, trade with each other and whatnot. Yeah, yeah. Because it's almost like anything that you can do behind the screen that involves
just pointing and clicking and watching, it's like, wouldn't you rather be outside lying on
some grass, baking in the sun, and have your agent just doing that for you? And that just sends you
in the sun and have your agent just doing that for you. And that just sends you, you know,
a TG message that your order was filled or it was hit, what your PNL is. And then you,
you sort of like get back and you talk to it and you're like, you know, I think we got to tweak
this a bit because I think you could have made like 5% more or, you know, so yeah, I think,
I think that's without a doubt, that's where it's going.
And that's where, at the end, it should be.
And people will be glad that it is.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
I mean, time is one of the most valuable things people have in their lives, right?
If you can get more of it back with agents kind of doing the boring work for us, like, why not?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like watching screens and clicking on buttons, right? Yeah. Exactly like, why not? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like watching screens and clicking on buttons, right?
Yeah, exactly.
And you can do it, yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah, so certainly a very exciting and interesting time
we live in, to say the least.
And I guess the best of times.
That's right, that's right.
And you mentioned it with the alpha there. But I guess, is there anything else that you might want to share with the audience in terms of the roadmap for it to start? I know you guys are just about to launch. But is there anything that you might want to touch on in terms of the roadmap for the rest of the year?
terms of the roadmap for the rest of the year? Well, I think it's going to be this kind of like
consistent rollout of these big, of these sort of big name private equity companies. So, you know,
SpaceX, you know, like, like launched, that launch was, you know, oversubscribed, it went ultra smooth.
You know, a call sheet is coming up next, launch date to be determined.
And as what comes after that, I can't yet, I can't yet reveal, it's still inactive discussions.
But yeah, you know, we're certainly pinging community members and, you know, discussing
behind the scenes.
If anyone wants to leave in comments or anything else, what's the sort of one private company you really will, you wouldn't even hesitate to hold right now.
If you could let us know and we're going to look towards bringing that out, you know.
Yeah, awesome.
I mean, and I mean, so for places that people can do that, you guys have a Telegram community, Discord community.
What's the best place for people to kind of get involved?
So I would say definitely our main portal would be our X account, at Tessera underscore PE.
Our Telegram is great too with just you know announcements and uh separate
channels for discussing the sort of uh separate equities that are that have kind of gone live
uh we aren't on on discord uh at the moment uh but yeah i would say i would say uh x for sure
is where the kind of like latest uh you know news kind of kind of comes out it does yeah it's very interesting like a lot of a lot of things a lot of news um tech related or
not kind of breaks on x now um which is yeah yeah you can get you can get lost lost in the scroll
yeah yeah yeah right. That's right. 100%. Yeah.
But yeah, I guess as we're kind of coming to time here,
just kind of wanted to have you have an opportunity to maybe give some advice to some of the people watching today
who might be kind of on the fence of wanting to get involved in DeFi
or maybe they want to kind of take the leap of faith
and start their career in the blockchain space.
Was sentiment kind of low now, maybe because of the market or whatnot?
What words of encouragement would you give for a person
kind of like, should I step into the space now or not?
Sure.
Well, I would say, you know, it's funny because when everything is kind of like booming and nearing all time highs, that's when, you know, everyone catches FOMO fever and decides to jump in.
catches FOMO fever and decides to jump in. And then when that kind of wave kind of like pulls
back, everyone's like, oh, like, like crypto is dead. Crypto is a scam. I want nothing to do with
it. And so, you know, I guess consistently just speaking as from like a career as a trader,
most traders do well because they sort of play that contrarian position, you know, like when,
when, when, when the trade gets crowded one way, you kind of go the
other. And so I think right now, in that kind of like a bear market, it's a great time for building.
It's a great time to sort of take a step back, analyze the sort of fundamentals of what's on
offer, and understand that, you know, these may be, you know, discount levels to kind of get in.
Understand also that the world is changing faster than it ever has. And what we've known
as blockchain and crypto is going to be evolving as quickly as the AI space is. And I think already with RWAs, like you are seeing that, you know,
where crypto isn't necessarily so much going to be defined by kind of, you know, the meme coin
casino, though, of course, that will always be there. But these are, you know, again, real world
assets, like real companies, you know, thousands of employees, real cash revenue and income flows
that we're sort of taking on chain. And again, you're going to have an access through it,
through the blockchain, just through your crypto wallet in a way that you cannot get in the real
world. You know, you can't go, you know, to your broker. You can't go to Robinhood.
You know, I mean, just try it.
Go out and try to see if you can get, you know, shares of SpaceX and all the flaming hoops you're going to have to jump through versus taking, you know, literally like 30
seconds, two minutes with it, with an on-chain wallet, and you can have that real one-to-one
backed exposure.
So yeah, I mean, you know, look at those fundamentals.
Are you bullish space? Because SpaceX, to me, it's more than just like rocket launches and,
you know, and it's the fact that kind of as Elon says, if you think the AI boom is going to continue,
without a doubt, the best place for sort of data centers
and in the future, you know, quantum computing centers
is an orbit where you have near zero temperatures
and you have unfiltered, you know, sunlight 24 seven.
And so, you know, so, so yeah, I'm just very,
I'm very bullish on these thesis,
very bullish on these companies.
You know, I'm really excited that
you know through to sarah you know um i can have exposure we can bring that exposure uh you know to
to anyone else who's willing to sort of participate and that and that the time to get familiar with
things is again when you're early you know and now you have that chance to sort of be early
before everyone knows about it before it becomes you know crowded before you know, and now you have that chance to sort of be early before everyone knows about it,
before it becomes, you know, crowded, before, you know, those potential pricing opportunities
are arbitraged away. So, you know, it's, it's real, it's alive now, more are coming, you know,
always do your own research, you know, not financial advice, but hey guys, you know,
check it out because this is you
know very very kind of like like frontier both finance and very frontier for you know rwa crypto
excellent and uh yeah the perfect way to to end things off here uh adan uh thank you so much uh
for taking the time out of your day uh to come chat with us today
uh i i know i i'm i share the same sentiment with you i'm very bullish um on basically all the
things that you just said uh yeah yeah and uh um yeah i mean test testra like breaking down those
barriers having uh giving people the opportunity to invest in in these amazing companies before they go public.
I think that's an awesome thing and really shows the power of bringing all finance kind of on chain here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Arby, thank you so much for having me on the show today.
Awesome questions, great vibes, especially for someone who's currently in mortar.
That's right.
All right.
Yeah, I tried the fumes.
I'm immune to the fumes now.
Nice, nice.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thanks again.
And yeah, anytime, you know,
happy for any follow-up questions.
I hope we have a chance to sort of talk again and maybe meet in person at some of these conferences
one way or another in the coming months, years.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
All right, and thanks everyone for watching.
Appreciate you guys.
100%.
And yeah, with that,
just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday,
happy weekend, wherever you may be.
And we'll catch you back here for another episode of Devontail next week.
Until then, have a good one, folks.
Cheers.
Take care, guys.
Private equity for everyone.
Indeed.
