GLAM co-founder Fabio recently joined the Ship Safely podcast to discuss the evolution of onchain asset management, why tokenization is only the beginning, and how GLAM is approaching security, governance, and trust in programmable financial systems.
TL;DR
- Tokenization and stablecoins are only the first step; the real opportunity is fully programmable, onchain asset management.
- Vaults should be transparent trust primitives where rules and constraints are enforced by code, not by intermediaries or manager discretion.
- Onchain systems replace slow, manual fund operations with real-time pricing, automation, and continuous compliance.
- Solana enables this through speed, composability, and a single global ledger that supports complex, multi-protocol strategies.
- Long-term institutional adoption depends not just on technology, but also on security lifecycle maturity, governance, and regulatory clarity.
Watch
Transcript
Sebastian: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Ship Safely podcast. I'm Sebastian, your host, and today we're joined by the one and only Fabio Federici, the co-founder of GLAM, which is a protocol for programmable investment infrastructure built on Solana. Fabio is very cool. He. Previously co-founded Coinalytics in 20 14, one of the first blockchain analytics companies, and he was an early contributor to the data and infrastructure side of Web3 before, way before founding GLAM. And now he's building the future of real time onchain fund operations. Fabio, thanks a lot for being here.
Fabio: Hi everyone. And yes, thanks a lot Sebastian for having me on the podcast.
Sebastian: It's a pleasure to kick things off. The same question I ask everyone is why do you think people should stay and watch the full episode, and what should they take away from this conversation?
Fabio: I think one thing that I would love for people to take away is that. Despite there being like a lot of hype currently around stable coins and tokenization, I think that's just really the first step and kind of a prerequisite to what we think is asset management and onchain asset management. And so yeah, hopefully people are excited to explore this topic further.
Sebastian: Definitely. I think in every cycle or every year even, I see the entire Web3 ecosystem coming together, becoming a bit more mature, and I think this is another step towards that maturity. Before we dive deep into GLAM, please tell us a bit about your story and how you got to this moment where you're building glass.
Fabio: Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot, like my career in the crypto space, as you mentioned earlier, I started in 2014 with Alys, so we were building data and indexing infrastructure for Bitcoin back in the day. There wasn't much else. And so yeah, I got involved in kind of the first technology company there.
Fabio: We had a soft landing of that project in 2016, and then I moved back to Switzerland where I was born and raised originally. And. That's when we started Base 58, which is an investment management company. We ran one of the first onshore regulated crypto funds, which was a bitcoin tracker. You can think of that as like an ETF, but in a private form.
Fabio: As well as a market neutral strategy. And so because we were so early with that, we had to do a lot of education too with and with regulators. Fund administrators essentially get a firsthand education on fund operations, which yeah, if you would run like a traditional VC fund or a traditional hedge fund in inequities or something, you can go to platforms.
Fabio: There's a lot of established service providers. But we had to get them comfortable dealing with crypto. And yeah, once you see how the sausage is made you start seeing like a lot of opportunities to do things better, to improve processes. And that's an idea that, yeah, over the years I, I kept carrying around.
Fabio: And so yeah, last year, at the beginning of this year, we thought it was time now that the infrastructure is a point where we can actually support some of these use cases that we were looking to do. And that's how we started cla. So it's a lot of the experiences coming together and a lot of the problems we faced and trying to solve them using crypto and blockchains.
Sebastian: That's a very cool story. Like you've definitely learned a lot along the way. It's not your first rodeo and that's why I'm super bullish on GLAM. And speaking of GLAM is described as programmable investment infrastructure on Solana. What does that mean? Can you explain it to me like I'm five?
Fabio: I'll try my best. So you can think of it as, the typical word you're gonna hear a lot in the industry is vaults nowadays, but it's like a very abstract term. Meaning what is a vault? And for us, a vault is really like a container. You can think of it like a box, right?
Fabio: And maybe you remember it from back in the day when SPF had this famous Bloomberg interview where he talked about the black magic black box, and you put some money in and you get some more money out. What we are trying to do is to make this box transparent and remove as much thrust into the managers as possible.
Fabio: Meaning you as an investor can essentially invest into a strategy that's managed by a professional manager, and you don't have to trust the manager to run away with the money or do something with your money that he didn't, he's not supposed to do, essentially. So you have a container. We bake in all the rules and policies that, of what the manager can do, and then those rules are enforced by the protocol.
Fabio: And that's really taking what the traditional asset management industry has solved by fragmenting these individual business processes and introducing a lot of intermediaries that kind of oversee each other and to make sure that everybody follows the rules. And we replace these functions through essentially code ultimately.
Fabio: Yeah. In the programs.
Sebastian: Definitely we don't want another Bernie Madoff exactly. Kind of event.
Fabio: And yeah. So today, essentially, if you wanna achieve that every manager needs to go and build up all the integrations, all these rules and everything. And so we are trying to want, our goal is to make it as safe and easy as possible for a manager to, to launch his strategy.
Sebastian: Yeah. And what does the shift, from this traditional asset management where you're just using classical tools, I'm assuming, spreadsheets or whatever, to programmable investment systems. What does it look like? What? What's the most shocking thing to you?
Fabio: Most shocking thing.
Fabio: There's a few horror stories that we had back in the day, like from pricing your portfolio, right? So we had to provide, for example, a price source for the Bitcoin price that had to come from an approved pricing provider. That pricing provider, even though it was supposed to be the most.
Fabio: Advanced and modern. The way we would receive data was we had to log into an FTP server, download an Excel spreadsheet, and then read out the price. Once a week or however frequently you want, you wanna price your fund. Compare that to now we plug into Oracles we can. Essentially in real time fetched pricing.
Fabio: And so this is just like one example of many other processes that involve a lot of paperwork, PDFs, sending documents back and forth, and reconciliation. And so that's really our big vision is to say, okay, like how can we automate as much of these operations as possible? And make them more efficient.
Fabio: And so the benefit of that is obviously on one side for the manager, everything becomes more efficient and cheaper and faster for the investor. At the same time, it becomes more transparent. And they have like visibility into what are actually the rules and they don't have to wait for, let's say.
Fabio: I dunno, six months later to figure out, oh, they didn't actually follow the rules. So here these rules are enforced in real time. And then also what this opens up is now these portfolios can be priced in real time and they can in the long term also potentially be used as collateral. So it becomes more composable and it opens up new possibilities.
Fabio: And I think that's really what we are most excited about seeing. Okay. Like not just making. Better what we have today, but also what are the new opportunities in asset management that are enabled through that.
Sebastian: Yeah, that's really cool. I get it feels very insightful to talk to someone who's done it on the traditional side.
Sebastian: And it's not, your first time doing it. So you hear some, yeah. I think like that
Fabio: informed us a lot in terms of also how we think about onchain asset management compared to maybe some other solutions out there. There came more from a crypto native perspective.
Fabio: And so our goal is really to me the best of both worlds.
Sebastian: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And one thing which is on my mind is why are you building on Solana? What makes it a good fit for your system?
Fabio: It started off from the very beginning when we first used Solana, just like the speed and the user experience just felt like an actual step forward, right?
Fabio: For me, starting in the crypto space, it all started with I would say like the first Bitcoin transaction is really what made it click for me, right? When you, the feeling you have, once you actually move value across the internet from A to b. Without an intermediary but it would still yeah, you're waiting for confirmations.
Fabio: And so Ethereum was obviously the next step, and then Solana was really the next Yeah, big step we felt from a user experience perspective. The other thing that's important for us is just composability. Having the vision of one global ledger, I think we believe is very important to have these portfolios and like more complex strategies where you want to land on one side, maybe use that as collateral, borrow against it.
Fabio: Movie two is a perfect exchange. All of these. Different activities need to be in, in one ledger. And so I think we also share the same kind of vision that Toly and the other team members at Solana have.
Sebastian: Yeah, no, that makes total sense. And since you were really early with your first startup in onchain data, do you think that shaped how you approach this product and the risk today?
Fabio: I would say like for us, like obviously with Coinalytics, we were almost too early, I would say. Meaning, yeah we were focusing on the technology side, but the use cases weren't necessarily that obvious when we got started. So we were always fighting an uphill battle. Today we approached it almost the opposite, meaning we were.
Fabio: Already running strategies. And we used those strategies to help build the early versions of GLAM and then started reaching out to managers as early as possible to just get feedback, try to see, okay, what are the strategies that they could potentially be interesting? What are the integrations we need to build out?
Fabio: What are the other factors that are gonna be critical? And so yeah, just orienting yourself. What are the actual use cases? They're gonna find traction in the early days. I think that's something that we have spend a lot of time thinking about and yeah,
Sebastian: I think you guys are doing a great job.
Sebastian: I was also wondering, more related to security topics. What's your thought process and what's your team's thought process about, managing this risk, this security risk in Web3? And, if you have a certain security stack for shipping with confidence,
Fabio: Yeah, for an onchain asset management platform like GLAM security is obviously paramount.
Fabio: We live and breathe by the kind of the brand and the reputation that we have. And so we started from the very early days, so Yuru, one of the co-founders. He was. Pinterest before focusing on product security, one of our advisors Iman, works at jump on the fire dancer team. He is also background in security, so we always had this internal input.
Fabio: We also did a pre-audit relatively early in the life cycle just to get some feedback in terms of how we should design some of the most critical components of the platform. And then, yeah, obviously we did the audit with you guys but we really see that. Audit as kind of the start of our kind of security roadmap if you want.
Fabio: Like where we wanna move towards is on one side having a more continuous life cycle of security, right? Meaning it's not, we do an audit now and we're all set. It's about how we think about ongoing threats? How do we model them? What are the invariants we need to continuously monitor? So a lot of like thought is going right now into like real time monitoring and kind of emergency functions and pausing capabilities, things like that.
Fabio: The other big thing that we're currently tackling is the governance of the protocol. Meaning how do we remove GLAM and the GLAM team as the single point of failure when it comes to program upgrades, things like that. So that's where we are currently evaluating different models, potentially with a security council or multiple independent parties that need to help us sign off, program upgrade, things like that.
Fabio: And yeah, it's really the combination of. Continuous like point in time audits, but then also continuous, like real time monitoring and governance functions.
Sebastian: Yeah. I love to hear that, when someone says, the audit is just the first step in our security program, you really, okay, this person is mature.
Sebastian: They know what it means to have a security lifecycle in place. Because I,
Fabio: I think especially in Solana because even the underlying platform is constantly changing. We are very connected to the different protocols that we interact with. So it's very hard for us to say, okay this is just gonna be like a static protocol and never gonna change.
Fabio: Yeah. Yeah. It's very clear for us that security is just gonna be something that's going to be with us for the rest of the life cycle.
Sebastian: Definitely. Switching gears to a different type of question. As you see more managers come onchain, what do you think is going to be the biggest challenge to scaling GLAM?
Sebastian: Is it going to be, tech or maybe legal or something else?
Fabio: Yeah, so I think like the way we currently focus. On cha or risks or, yeah. Challenges. It's on one side technology meaning there's ideas and there's concepts that we want to explore that might be limited today by either CPI or transaction size limits on Solana today.
Fabio: But that being said, we feel very confident in the IBRL roadmap of Solana. Then these are problems that are gonna be solved. And so in the short term, we need to make compromises and trade offs to make sure, okay, we can. Serve enough use cases while staying in, in those limits longer term, I think for GLAM really to reach the next level it's mainly gonna be about regulation and yeah, as you said, legal and compliance.
Fabio: And so if you want to have actual institutional adoption of, we call them vaults in crypto. But I think really what vault, this is ultimately a fund. And so what does the fund of the future look like? Not just from a technical perspective, but also from a regulatory perspective. What are the questions around liability and responsibility?
Fabio: And so I think once we can answer those questions, we'll see more institutional adoption as well of these types of products.
Sebastian: Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. All right. We've clumped to the, towards the end where we have our rapid fire closeout set of questions. And the first one is, if you can name one thing about programmable finance that still gets overlooked.
Fabio: Yeah, I would say I will come back to the point that I made at the very beginning. I. We, we hear a lot of talk about tokenization and tokenized funds. And so what I think is overlooked is that's just the beginning. And the real benefits is once you actually have the native assets onchain, then we can really start to unlock the new generation of financial products and financial processes.
Fabio: So I think what's overlooked is essentially what's what comes after tokenization. It's come that way. Yeah.
Sebastian: Yeah. Second question, what's your favorite product feature or design decision in GLAM so far?
Fabio: I think the feature is definitely the ability to run cross chain or cross protocol strategies.
Fabio: Meaning as a one example would be you deposit money to Camino, you borrow against it, you move it to drift, you run a strategy on drift. I think that's like something that's very unique in the ecosystem and that we are very proud of.
Sebastian: Yeah, that is pretty cool. The next question comes from our previous guests and they asked what role do you think privacy will play in the next era of blockchain?
Fabio: I think it's gonna play a very critical role, meaning we hear it today from certain managers. Say, okay. We don't want our positions to be public. We don't want our strategies and those trades to be public. Same for all the other traditional institutional players, right? Like I think privacy is one of the key concerns and one of the reasons why we say see adoption once again or more, call it like corporate chains or consortium chains, however we want to call them.
Fabio: I think we have these kinds of trends every couple of years. But I really believe that eventually we'll be able to support these kinds of privacy features on public blockchains. And so yeah, I think it's gonna be very important, but I don't think that's necessarily going to lead to a shift away from public chains.
Fabio: Yeah. Makes sense.
Sebastian: And would you have a question that you would like to leave for our next guest?
Fabio: Yeah, actually managed to come up with something, and yeah, the question would be if you could wave a magic wand and change one thing in the crypto industry what would you change?
Sebastian: Very cool. That's a good question. Thanks a lot Fabio, for answering all the questions and being with us today. Can you please tell our viewers where they can find you and where they can learn more about GLAM and yourself?
Fabio: First of all, thanks a lot for having me. It was a great time and yeah, for everyone interested in onchain asset management on Solana, you can visit glam.systems and yeah, my dms are open, you can just reach out @fabfedericci Twitter.
Sebastian: Thanks again and stay safe out there, ship safely.
Fabio: Thanks a lot, Seb.
Sebastian: Bye. Bye everyone.
.png)
.png)
.png)