Bringing Real World Assets On-Chain with KAIO feat. CTO Dr. Pinku Surana

GM, GM. Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every week, allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they've built. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Dr. Pinku Surana, who is the CTO of KAIO. So if you didn't know, KAIO is a protocol purpose-built for RWAs that enables the distribution of alternative assets through the use of blockchain technology. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Dr. Surana, learn about KAIO and how they're bringing RWAs on chain, and how you can get started using it today. All right, let's get into it.

GM, GM. Welcome to the show, Pinku. I'm ecstatic to have you on today, man. Hey, it's great to be on. Excellent, excellent. Yeah, so we're in store for a great one today, folks. Learning about real-world assets on chain with KAIO, who are one of the market leaders in the space, entertaining some pretty big names in the finance world. But before we kind of get into all of that great stuff, Pinku, would you just like to give a introduction about yourself for folks who aren't familiar?

Yeah, sure. Yeah, so as you said, my name is Pinku Surana and I'm currently the CTO at KAIO. But I've only been there for three months, and so I just want to say that if I get anything wrong, it's my fault, and our marketing person will correct it later. But yeah, you know, yeah, so you said I was a doctor. I do have a doctorate in computer science. And my background was in programming languages. That was my original work. But over time, I've been lucky enough to work on the bleeding edge of all sorts of technology waves that have come over my career. And so I was early in on blockchain, fairly early on blockchain, and but worked on a bunch of other cool and different interesting stuff in the past.

It might be an understatement there. I looked at your resume, and you have quite the tenure. As VP at Goldman Sachs, you had a stint with Facebook, you co-founded Ondo Finance, no small feat. I guess, could you briefly touch on some of those experiences and like how they kind of led one led into the other and kind of how it led to you becoming CTO at KAIO?

Sure, sure. So, so I worked at a company like my introduction to blockchain was at a company called Symbiont. And they were trying to they were trying to bring syndicated loans onto a blockchain, right? And syndicated loans is a basically a group of banks or other investors who want to offer a loan to a company. There's a lead investor, they come up with specialized terms and so on and so forth. Anyway, this is a very clunky process where they use fax machines and they would send around documents to sign and all sorts of stuff. And we were trying to bring that on chain and find some efficiencies by tokenizing these things, right? And we ran into a lot of problems where the technology was ahead of the legal and regulatory aspects of these products, right? But from a technical point of view, it was a really interesting product to work on.

So after that, I went to Goldman Sachs, and it was just more of the same really where I led a small research group looking at different ways that we could apply blockchain technology to what Goldman Sachs does. And that was an amazing experience because I got to wander the halls of one of the world's largest banks and ask people what they do and then try to figure out, you know, well, what would this look like tokenized? You know, and and how do we simplify how things worked? And in one of my presentations, I said that if everything were at Goldman Sachs were tokenized, it would just be the CEO and I wandering the empty halls while blockchains just ran everything autonomously. But there again, the technology was getting better and better to to automate these things, but again the legal and regulatory hurdles were pretty more enormous and that was just not going to work.

So after that, the next step in the blockchain saga was I was a co-founder of Ondo Finance. And so there, you know, the day we started, the goal was real-world assets. And as you can tell, that's really the only thing I've ever worked on is real-world assets. And so with Ondo Finance, yeah, the goal was to try and bring more and more products onto the market and by doing it in a startup instead of at Goldman, we were free of their very cautious lawyers. And so that allowed Ondo to move very, very fast to bring products to market and you can see that they are doing pretty well now.

So in between, I worked at Facebook where I was working on their AI team, and then I was working at Stanford University where I was doing AI work on using government supercomputers to train LLMs. And you know, AI was hot and so, you know, I'm always trying to be on the bleeding edge of whatever is cool at the moment. And so that's where I got into AI and a lot of AI training, I worked with NVIDIA research and some other big universities on projects there. But I got back into RWAs with KAIO. And so I've been here as I said, I've been here for three months and I'm really excited about working on these products.

Yeah, yeah, it's certainly a very hot space now. And yeah, I'm just curious, what kind of what kind of brought you back into the RWA world, being on the bleeding edge of AI and researching LLMs, which are a hot topic on its own?

Yeah, yeah, it's, you know, like I said, the technology for doing a lot of this stuff is getting quite mature. You know, people used to worry that blockchains couldn't handle the transaction processing required for these real-world assets. But now many chains have shown that they can go really, really fast. There were concerns about security and all these other things. But the thing that brought me back is I think that the regulatory environment is starting to get a little bit better. You can see that there's movement on stablecoins. And once you have stablecoins, then I think that there will be movement on some of these other higher-level real-world assets. And you can see that the banks are they're very timid, the banks, for good reason, but JP Morgan, for example, has a big unit that's doing a lot of work in this area. And you have a guy like Larry Fink from BlackRock who is all in as far as I can tell. He's super excited about tokenizing everything. And so this is, you know, I was out for four years, I'm back in, hoping that the regulatory environment is going to make it easier to do this stuff.

Yeah, yeah, you hit the nail on the head there. And yeah, I personally have noticed RWAs coming more into the scene. I remember when I first got into the blockchain space around 2021, I remember there were some POCs, very high-level demos of like people, for example, tokenizing fractional shares of like real estate or whatever. But then it was kind of just like, oh, this is like a theoretical thing that could happen, but there was like lots of red tape, yellow tape around it. I guess this time around, late last year and into this year, like you mentioned, it's kind of been relaxed and more and more people are kind of dipping their toes in RWAs. I guess from your perspective working in the space so long, is there anything that's still could be like a hurdle for really letting the floodgates open for RWAs on chain or do you think it's settled enough that meaningful things can be done?

No, I think there is still a long way to go. But, you know, every time the regulatory environment moves a little bit, that gives you space to do something interesting in that in that environment, right? But there's a long, a long way to go. And, you know, there are problems with how regulations are always, you know, centered around some country, but blockchains are global, right? And so this adds this weird layer of complexity where you say, well, I have this product, but I can only offer it to certain people who have certain characteristics, right? You're from this country, you you know, are an accredited investor, you know, you you're not on some on somebody's blacklist and so on and so forth. So, yeah, so I would say that there's a long way to go, but there are some small steps and we can work in that in that space.

Yeah, yeah, it's one small step at a time, at least in this space. Awesome. And I guess using that as a segue, let's get into all things KAIO. So in your words, I guess, what's your elevator pitch of KAIO?

Yeah, sure. The short version is alternative assets for the masses. But there's a longer version, which I think can help explain why I joined KAIO. So, you know, there's this very popular financial writer from Bloomberg that everybody on Wall Street reads, Matt Levine, he's fantastic. Read him immediately. Subscribe to his Bloomberg essays, it's fantastic.

But anyway, he has this line where he says that private markets are the new public markets. And the idea here is that the public markets are shrinking and the private markets are so big now that you have a company like SpaceX that doesn't have to go IPO because they can pull all the money they want from from private markets, right? But if you're if you're a regular investor, you have no way to get into those private markets, right? And so the only way to get into those things is to get a private wealth account at a big bank, right? But there the minimum just for them to talk to you is 10 million in assets, investable assets, right? And that will get you a a cup of coffee really. But if you really want to to get access to the bigger bigger funds, then you you would need well more than 20 million. Oh sorry, 10 million.

But as an example, so I had a private wealth account and or have, and they were willing to offer me shares of SpaceX two years ago, right? And so that was a way that I could get into into an investment that nobody else nobody else could or most most people can't, right? There are also, for example, my broker offered me a a way to buy into a fund that was purchasing shares of sports teams all around the world, right? So football, American football, NBA, hockey, whatever, soccer, no that's right, football. But again, this fund is you can't get into it unless you have a certain you know, a certain level of assets. But then the fund came with all kinds of strange restrictions that you had to have you had to have a minimum investment size, you had you could only withdraw a certain amount at certain times, but only if the fund allows you.

So there were all these weird restrictions and things. And I think this is a long-winded way to say that when KAIO came knocking, I had just I had just looked at all of these funds that I was interested in, but they were you know, very complicated, they were had so many restrictions, the minimum investments were extremely high. And this is certainly something that the larger group of people who are maybe between two and ten million dollars, that they have no access to. And so I think what KAIO's long-term vision is, is to allow people in that group to be able to access these kinds of funds and invest in things that only the professionals can invest in and rich people can invest in, right? And that means lowering the minimum investment size and then making it easier to get in and out of these these funds. And so that's that's sort of the long-term goal of what KAIO's doing and I think that's I think that's a a really important step for a certain class of investors.

100%, 100%. And it looks like you guys are already working with some pretty big names like Laser Digital, Brevan Howard, BlackRock, like you mentioned. I guess for folks watching today, like I guess how does it work? Are these like tokens that each of these big names are kind of managing and under these tokens you have some assets or like I guess how does the underlying infrastructure kind of work there?

Yeah, so the mechanics are you know, sort of as you would expect, is that the fund is really exists in the real world, right? And whenever you purchase a token, then the real-world assets are held in a custodial account and sort of matched one-to-one with the token, right? We still because because of the way things work, we still have all the complexity of these old funds, you know, the old fund structures about when you can invest and when you can withdraw and all that. And so we've encoded all of these rules into the smart contracts directly, right? So now if you if you want to if you want to buy, you can buy but you you have to you have to go through our web app, you have to you know, get approved and so on and so forth, and then you'll be able to purchase and you'll be able to invest in the fund.

And similarly if you want to withdraw, you have to go to the fund, you have to you know get a certain date on which you can withdraw. Now that's basically replicating what the real-world funds, you know, how they work. The real opportunity that we have here is that once you get a token, you can plug into the world of DeFi on whatever chain you want. So those tokens can be moved to other chains, and if there are if you want to get loans where you use that where you stake that as an asset as collateral, you can do that. And and any other things that you want to do with in the DeFi space you can do with those tokens.

Interesting. And a question from the crowd on this topic. I guess Lucas asks is KAIO similar to pre-stock tokens, Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. available on some Solana DEXes like Jupiter? So I guess to your earlier point of you being able to buy SpaceX a couple years back, do you have some pre-IPO assets available to purchase on KAIO?

Yeah, so right now KAIO is focused on alternative asset funds. So you know, again, if you read Matt Levine, you can read a lot about private credit funds and how private credit is kind of encroaching on the space of what banks normally do. Banks, you know, used to be if you if you were a big company you wanted a loan, you'd go to JP Morgan. But private credit funds have stepped in there and they're they're able to offer yields that you can't really get anywhere else, right? And so yeah, to to the question that's that's being asked there, yeah, KAIO is focused on alternative asset funds and not on these sorts of mirror stocks of private private stocks or pre-IPO shares.

Got it. Awesome. Great question. Thank you, Lucas, and great answer. I guess shifting gears a little bit and catering a little bit more to our developer audience, in terms of available SDKs or tools, APIs, what's available for the developer audience to be able to plug into KAIO and bring these real-world assets to their dApps and apps?

Yeah, so right now there aren't really tools for developers to get involved in this because the you know, the tokens have certain restrictions on them as I said, because of the regulatory space that they exist in. And so we are we are trying to open up and and make those tokens available to in the DeFi space so that if you're building a DeFi product, you'll be able to use these tokens in there. Now we are opening up APIs where in the in the near future at two levels. So right now there's an institutional offering and if you're an institution and you want to offer your funds and and have them tokenized and participate in this sort of DeFi marketplace, you can use our web app to do that. But with the with the APIs that we're going to release, dealers of these funds will be able to plug into the APIs and start integrating the on-chain services that we offer into their own internal service, internal applications, right?

Now so so that is an SDK that's really targeted towards funds, right? dealers of those funds. There's going to be another set of APIs for our retail product. So this is mostly a legal hurdle and not a technical hurdle. But the question is right now if you want to buy one of these funds you have to be an accredited investor. It is possible, however, to create an index fund of these of these alternative assets that we can then allow to be traded by retail investors without being an accredited investor. Now in that aspect then we are going to offer APIs so that people can mint and redeem these tokens. And that is the primarily the primary target of that is to allow distribution of these tokens into different into different different avenues or different areas, right? So that's something that if you are a developer working in the working in the working in this space, then you might be able to use those APIs to get access to our retail products called 'Cash', which we're going to we're going to have a waitlist next week. So if you're interested, you can go to the waitlist next week and sign up for it. And then once we release the 'Cash' token, you'll be able to buy those and and do things with them. But that would be our our two main avenues currently that we're working on to allow developer access to our products.

Amazing. Amazing. And yeah, I guess a bit of alpha for the folks watching today or listening today. Yeah, definitely keep your eyes peeled for that waitlist if you want to get get into it. And I guess would you say like some of that on the retail side, would you say some of that yellow tape, red tape hurdles that we were speaking about earlier are some of the things kind of like prolonging that or making it more difficult to kind of make this successful to the retail side of the spectrum?

Well, you know, we have lawyers who have done a heroic job of getting this stuff cleared. And so yeah, there's a lot of red tape to to making this work. But the offering that we'll have is is going to be you know, the first version is going to be an index fund that contains you know, several of these these products. But I think in the future you'll see a number of these retail products that will offer different levels of sort of risk-return profiles, so you can choose you know what you can choose the sort of product that you're interested in. Right, for sure.

And I guess in terms of the competitive landscape of of of this space, what would you say is KAIO's edge over the competition? What's the secret sauce, so to speak?

Yeah, so KAIO is is going to be a protocol that exists on chain that or it is, that is going to be relatively open, right? And I think this is one distinction with some of our competitors where a lot of what they do the rules that are required in order to control where the tokens go and who's allowed to buy them and trade them and so on and so forth, a lot of those rules are kept off chain, right? So if you want to do something, then you know you have to trigger this off-chain process that says, okay, that goes on chain and says, yes, this person is allowed to do this action, right? By putting a lot of that stuff on chain, then when we participate in DeFi products, there isn't this this weird delay about you know whether or not you know how our DeFi protocol interact with these tokens. Because the smart contracts know the rules and they will immediately act on act on those things. So I think that the way that the way that our smart contracts work on these products will allow for more DeFi composability than some of our competitors.

Excellent, excellent. And yeah, I mean I've taken a look at the docs and some of the the product features of KAIO and it certainly looks like that's going to be the case. And I guess I know I know you mentioned you just joined recently, but being in this space for as long as you have, I guess what is your long-term vision for KAIO between where it is today and perhaps like five years down the line?

Five years is a long time. So let's let's hope that KAIO is still around in five years. But you know, in the next year, I think KAIO already has a pipeline of lots of really interesting interesting funds and high-quality funds that we want to offer for institutional traders to be able to deal to be able to use them on chain, but then to package them up for retail investors to get access to them, right, through this similar sort of fund structure. And so you know, I think retail customers should keep an eye on KAIO to see the the sort of products that we're going to offer in the next in the next year.

Five years is is tough, right? because every time the regulatory landscape gives us a little bit more breathing room, it means that we can offer a bunch of really interesting products that that would appeal to not just retail investors but can also simplify the process for institutional investors who are on chain, right? so that they're not encumbered by all these weird rules that I keep talking about. So I think five years from now I'm hoping that that that the regulatory that there's more breathing room there with regulations and and that will allow us to do more interesting things.

Yeah, I 100% agree. It's just yeah, it's just you gotta wait gotta wait a little bit more. And as we're coming to time here, for our aspiring founders in the audience today, coming from someone like yourself who's has quite the tenure and as a former founder himself, what would you give as like a key piece of advice for somebody who's looking to perhaps start their own company today or get them off that fence of like just starting starting their passion project?

Yeah, it's it's actually pretty easy. You build something people want. And that's about it. There's a whole lot of good advice at like for example if you go to Y Combinator and you look at the library of of essays and material and videos that they have, that's pretty good. And it's really simple advice: build something that people want. But people don't do that. You can see that in the AI space right now where people say, well, I have this AI thing, what would be a cool thing to build? But they don't have a they don't have a customer in mind, they don't have somebody who's excited about the thing that you're there you're building. And so I think, you know, if we if we loop that back into into KAIO, you know, I think obviously marketing's a big big part of that to get the word out, but I think that this is a product where you have a shrinking public market of investable investable things, and most of the the smart money is going into all of this private markets, private assets, you know, there's a long list of acronyms for all of these products. And and I think that you know KAIO is well positioned to build something that people will want once they find out about how markets are really moving in the future.

Excellent answer. Couldn't agree more. And I guess as we conclude here, what's the best way for people watching, listening today to keep up to date with all things KAIO? Is there a Discord, X channel or X account they should be following?

Yes, all of those things exist somewhere. And so the easiest way to get access to those things is to go to our website, kaio.xyz, and over there you'll find links to our Twitter where our amazing marketing person keeps everybody informed about what's going on at KAIO. There's also a Telegram group that's been set up and you can get access to that from the website also. And I think the big thing to keep an eye out for is the the waitlist for our retail product. And so if you sign up for that, we can let you know when things are open and and give you early access or give you access to the product as soon as we're as soon as we release that.

Amazing. Yeah, amazing. And folks, all that information will be in the description of the podcast below. So definitely you'll want to check that out. And with that, Pinku, just thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come chat with us today. I really enjoyed our convo and I'm really glad people watching today, listening today had an opportunity to learn a bit a little bit more about yourself as well as that little deep dive around KAIO as well.

Yeah, thanks for thanks for having me on and it was it was a real pleasure. Oh, thank you so much.

All right, all right, folks. With that, I want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend wherever you may be, and we will catch you back here next week for another great episode of DevNTell. Until then, have a good one folks. Cheers.