Co-founder, CEO @FalconXGlobal 🚀, Leading Digital Asset Prime Brokerage | Ex-@Google | Crypto Top 25 CEO | Helping shape a tokenized world 🌎
San Francisco, CA
Joined January 2013
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Crypto was the starting point for 21shares. The team's ambitions now extend well beyond it.
Congratulations to @21shares on CLAU's launch. The company continues to lead in product innovation, bringing its experience to a broader range of ETPs.
Europe’s first pre-IPO Anthropic ETP is here.
Meet CLAU: the first European product that gives investors access to @AnthropicAI's implied valuation.
Key Details:
🔹 Name: 21shares Anthropic Synthetic ETP (CLAU)
🔹 Exchange: Vienna MTF operated by Wiener Börse
🔹 Management Fee: 1%
🔹 Issuer: 21shares x FalconX Limited
Created in collaboration with @FalconXGlobal, CLAU bridges the gap between private tech equity and traditional investing infrastructure.
Onchain capital is growing and starting to drive institutional activity. These capital pools were traditionally deployed on retail crypto venues, but with maturation of the industry and growth of assets, managers are seeking more diversified sources of yield beyond crypto trading venues. Institutional lending offers this diversification while giving corporates and asset managers access to a new pool of financing.
@FalconXGlobal connects the two. Our $1 billion facility with @ethena allows assets backing USDe to fund overcollateralized institutional loans that we originate and manage. Ethena diversifies its revenue, and we expand our capacity to meet client demand for credit. We expect that relationship to extend across asset classes.
The CLARITY Act fell short in the Senate this month but SEC and CFTC’s swift actions last week strongly signal that market structure clarity in the US is arriving through rulemaking, not statute.
Two days after the Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act, the SEC granted five years of conditional relief for permissioned venues to trade tokenized U.S. stocks through automated market makers. In tandem, the CFTC submitted a preliminary crypto-market rulemaking for White House review, an early step toward a potential CFTC-supervised framework.
These are limited, early moves. But the direction matters. The SEC and CFTC are moving in parallel, using their existing authority to modernize market structure. As securities, commodities and digital assets converge, regulators need to move in concert.
For institutions, this convergence makes access to regulated counterparties increasingly important. Our CFTC-registered swap dealer gives FalconX an established foundation to provide liquidity and help institutions manage risk as these markets evolve.
Legislation remains the more durable answer. But we should not underestimate how much the @SECGov and @CFTC can accomplish under their existing authority. We’re excited to continue working with both agencies to build on that progress.
At last week’s CFTC Innovation Advisory Committee meeting, I shared a builder’s perspective on what greater regulatory harmonization could unlock. Thank you @ChairmanSelig and the @CFTC for hosting an excellent discussion.
My main points:
- Markets are converging rapidly. Customers increasingly want crypto, commodities, equities and prediction markets on one infrastructure.
- Regulatory coordination can help foster this innovation. As builders expand across asset classes, greater alignment between agencies could streamline the process to bring new products to market responsibly.
- At FalconX, we have spent the last three years building and operating our CFTC-registered swap dealer. We have seen firsthand the value of rigorous regulation and believe there is an opportunity to preserve those high standards without rebuilding the entire process across agencies.
Greater SEC-CFTC reciprocity could make it materially more efficient to build the next generation of multi-asset markets in the U.S.
Institutions increasingly want to trade every asset 24/7 and settle instantly - RWA trading volumes have grown ~100x over the last year. Supporting that market at scale needs institutional-grade credit.
Our $1B secured lending facility with @ethena is an important step toward building that capacity.
Thank you @scarletfu and Dushyant Shahrawat for having me on @BloombergTV.
"We haven't confidentially filed for an S1 yet. The market got excited because we're having very good, interesting conversations with the SEC... We're shooting to be IPO ready by 2027," says FalconX CEO Raghu Yarlagadda bloom.bg/3U87KET
Thank you to the administration, the @SECGov, and the @CFTC for bringing industry leaders together at the @WhiteHouse today to focus on passing the CLARITY Act. That is how we ensure this innovation is built and stays in the United States.
This group's coordinated efforts to modernize regulation in a way that fosters growth are a meaningful signal for US capital markets. Looking forward to the inaugural IAC meeting at the CFTC tomorrow.
Crypto price action is no longer the best measure of progress in digital assets.
Historically, Bitcoin was a reasonable proxy. Today, the better measure is how much financial activity is moving onto digital asset infrastructure:
- Digital asset venues are becoming multi-asset markets. RWA Perpetuals traded $525 billion in Q1'26 - 68% more than in all of 2025. Average open interest was more than 5X last year’s level.
- Tokenization is creating active markets, not just digital representations. Active on-chain RWA value more than quadrupled from the start of 2025 through Q1'26. Tokenized gold alone traded $91 billion in Q1, more than in all of 2025.
- Institutional credit is moving on-chain. Borrowing across major on-chain private credit protocols reached $2.3 billion in Q1'26, up nearly 6X from the start of 2025.
At FalconX, our overcollateralized credit vault has more than doubled this year to over $170 million. The key shift is that we have moved past simple on-chain asset representation. Now, the core markets surrounding these assets - trading, financing, and risk management - are beginning to operate on digital infrastructure. This is why FalconX is expanding beyond crypto.
Bitcoin remains foundational. But by this broader measure, 2026 is a pivotal year.
The next two years of policy will define the next decade of finance.
AI agents will be responsible for 50–80% of all transactions. Stablecoins will be the rails, and blockchain will become invisible infrastructure - most people won't even know they're touching it. At @FalconXGlobal, we’re building the infrastructure for that future.
Thank you @DigitalChamber for having me.
Since day one, our core belief has been that tokenization and blockchain technology would expand into all asset classes. Today, traditional finance and digital assets are rapidly converging.
Over the last few months, we've supported our clients with trading oil, gold, silver, compute, and select securities powered by on-chain capital markets. Our clients are asking us to solve a very different set of problems than they were just a few years ago, and those changes are only accelerating. To lead this shift, and the growing demand that comes with it, we're realigning our capital, talent, and technology.
First, we've acquired bloxroute to strengthen our on-chain businesses and accelerate our expansion beyond crypto. BloXroute's technology will enable us to develop new trading and lending applications needed for institutions to efficiently source liquidity across on-chain commodities, securities, and digital assets markets.
Second, building FalconX for that future requires tradeoffs. That means choosing to build where we can lead and exiting parts of our business where we can partner. With this shift, we have made the difficult decision to eliminate roles across parts of FalconX, affecting 11% of our workforce. Decisions like these are never easy because they affect talented people who have helped build this company. I'm grateful for everything they've contributed, and we'll do everything we can to support them through this transition.
We've always believed that blockchain and tokenization will fundamentally reshape capital markets. That belief continues to guide where we invest, and I'm confident we're building FalconX for what's ahead.
Press release here: prnewswire.com/news-releases…
The size and caliber of the room at Goldman Sachs’ Digital Assets Conference said a lot about institutional conviction in the long-term outlook of the market. In fact, this year's conference was 2x bigger than last year.
A few reflections from the event:
- Convergence of traditional and digital assets was front and center in conversations.
- AI is an on-chain catalyst and will create a new class of demand, but only if the infrastructure can support secure and compliant capital movement.
- The industry is consolidating around platforms with verified scale, trusted execution, and a true breadth of product.
This shift is exactly why we are building beyond the traditional boundaries of this space. In direct response to our clients’ demand, we’ve made major strides this past year expanding the @FalconXGlobal platform into commodities, equities, and compute markets. Frankly, I’d be disappointed if we're just a crypto company in two years.
Thank you to @GoldmanSachs for having me.
Last week, @FalconXGlobal reached a new milestone. We expanded beyond crypto markets by offering clients security-based swaps tied to perpetual futures referencing traditional financial assets, including SpaceX - the largest IPO in history.
Perpetual futures started as a crypto native product. They are now becoming a useful tool for 24/7 price discovery and hedging across a wider set of assets. By eliminating fixed expiries, perps concentrate depth and liquidity into a single contract while removing the constant transaction costs of rolling over termed positions. Even better, their embedded funding mechanisms swap out opaque, legacy overnight funding markets for real-time funding flexibility. This gives institutional allocators structural precision needed for dynamic hedging in a 24/7 global economy.
In the case of SpaceX, the perpetual futures markets indicated SpaceX would trade in the open market at a significant premium to the IPO price, providing traders both an efficient access vehicle and valuable price discovery information ahead of the June 12th listing.
This milestone builds on the cross asset work we have executed over the last two quarters across oil, tokenized gold, compute, and now equities. By spending years building the pieces that are difficult to replicate - regulatory licensure, 24/7 operational infrastructure, and agile credit systems - we have built FalconX to be a plug and play infrastructure layer.
As new markets emerge, we can provide clients liquidity and the ability to manage complex risk quickly, often within 24 hours.
Good day in DC.
Having a regulator ask me about GPU compute hedging tells you something about this moment we are in.
It's clear the SEC and CFTC are being deliberate; operating two agencies but with coordination, respect for regulatory lanes and asking the right questions. These conversations are especially relevant because demand is accelerating fast. We have been working with institutions on initiatives ranging from hedging compute buildouts to tokenized assets to rails for agentic payments. The infrastructure being built in Washington right now will determine whether that demand has a safe, well-regulated home.
Speed is a necessity in crypto and a core value at @FalconXGlobal.
But as companies scale, that speed muscle gets harder to preserve. Growth naturally brings more processes that can slow things down, which is exactly why AI excites me.
At FalconX, we are seeing a massive efficiency gain by building tailored internal AI systems. What once required a long backlog and vendor implementation is now built instantly by the team closest to the problem. We are seeing nearly a 90% reduction in development time for these custom tools.
AI collapses the distance between idea and execution so scaled companies can keep the entrepreneurial speed and ownership that built them. But there is a vital learning here: even though our teams are becoming radically more agile, the need for a human in the loop is more critical than ever. It takes human judgment to ask the right questions, validate outputs, and steer the ship.
As AI companies spend hundreds of billions on infrastructure, compute price risk is becoming too large to leave unhedged.
This week, @FalconXGlobal executed the first OTC swap referencing the forward price of compute, using the @OrnnExchange Price Index for Nvidia H100s, with @rleshner as counterparty.
Proud of the team for building the pricing, hedging, trading, financing, and settlement rails for a new market, inside a regulated construct, in less than 30 days.
This is how new institutional markets form. First the asset becomes measurable. Then it becomes tradeable. Then it becomes hedgeable.
FalconX has executed the first OTC compute forward trade referencing Nvidia H100 pricing.
The transaction, executed with @rleshner as counterparty, references the @OrnnExchange Compute Price Index (OCPI H100) and marks an early step toward bringing price discovery and risk transfer to AI infrastructure markets.
As compute becomes a critical economic input, markets for pricing and hedging compute are emerging as a new financial layer of the AI economy.
falconx.io/newsroom/falconx-…
In the AI era, focus and clarity may be the real edge.
I started meditating in 2014 with an engineer’s mindset. No book, no YouTube video, just experimenting. Over time, I realized it was one of the most transformative practices for how I think and lead.
Meditation gives you focus. The more you practice, the more you realize you don’t need to do 200 things. You need to do the two things that matter and do them incredibly well. It also reduces ego. And when you reduce ego, you learn faster. In the next few years, the people who learn fastest will have the biggest advantage.
Thank you @Columbia_Biz for hosting me on the recent panel and sparking such a great conversation!
