Tria – Every Company With An Audience Is Becoming A Financial Company

Why you should listen

Most neobanks ask users to hand over their assets. Tria’s pitch is that you can have the one-tap convenience of a fintech app without doing so. Lilic explains how the product routes assets across chains while leaving the user in custody at all times, so money can move from an Earn vault to a card top-up to a trading position on Hyperliquid or Decibel without Tria ever holding it. He argues this is more than a philosophical distinction. Self-custody has let Tria grow in Korea and Japan, markets where offering custodial products has become increasingly difficult, and where supporting many chains matters because communities such as XRP holders are so large. He also makes the case that when users move funds to themselves rather than deposit into a custodian, they keep control over when a taxable disposal occurs.

The larger idea, and the one Tria is taking to institutions, is that any company with a large audience can now become a financial company. Composable on-chain infrastructure means a streaming service, a marketplace or a community app can offer its users wallets, cards and tailored rewards without building a bank from scratch. Lilic walks through the music platform Lissen, which is launching on Tria’s infrastructure, and a more ambitious use: tracking the real-world spending that follows an artist into a venue. That attribution data, he argues, could let a venue plan for a show, measure its value afterwards, and eventually support credit products that advance artists money against future bookings rather than making them wait months for royalties.

In the hot take round, Lilic moves to the subject he is best known for outside Tria: quantum computing. He argues that cryptographically relevant quantum machines could threaten the elliptic curve cryptography that secures the entire industry sooner than most expect, and that the long-term future of money may rest on physics rather than protocols. It leads him to a pointed view on Ethereum’s reversal of The DAO hack, which he calls a mistake, and a thesis that quantum-based systems would remove the option of reversing finality altogether. He also explains why he now calls himself a pragmatist rather than a Bitcoin maximalist, and why a lifelong Star Trek fan has switched his allegiance to Dune.

Supporting links

• Stabull Finance
• Tria
• Tria on X
• Andy on X
• Brave New Coin on X
• Brave New Coin

Enjoyed the episode? Please give us a five-star review. It helps other people find the show.