Onchain Finance · Pre-Seed
Ground Wants Onchain Yield to Disappear Into Your Banking App
Fresh off a $3.6 million raise, Ground co-founder Reid Cuming makes the case that the next phase of crypto adoption depends on making blockchain invisible, not louder.
Trillions of dollars sit inside neobanks, exchanges, and traditional financial institutions every day, mostly earning little to nothing for the people who own it. Ground, a startup co-founded by Reid Cuming, believes the reason that money hasn’t moved onchain isn’t a lack of yield-generating opportunity. It’s an access problem. Speaking on a recent episode of the Crypto Coin Show, the Ground co-founder laid out the company’s pitch: an API layer that lets banks, neobanks, and exchanges plug onchain financial functions directly into the products their customers already use, without ever mentioning the word “blockchain.”
The Problem: Onchain Finance Was Built for Insiders
He argues that most blockchain development to date has been geared toward a narrow, technically fluent audience, people already comfortable managing private keys, navigating multiple protocols, and understanding concepts like collateralization or bonding curves. That’s a far cry from the average user of a savings account or a neobank app, who has no interest in learning any of it.
He compares the current moment to the early days of personal computing, when products were sold on raw technical specs before better interfaces made that complexity disappear for the end user. Ground’s bet is that onchain finance needs the same shift: instead of asking consumers to download a new app, manage a wallet, or pick between competing protocols, the financial functions should simply show up inside the banking app they already trust.
The Stripe Comparison
To explain Ground’s role, he reaches for an e-commerce analogy. Before Stripe, businesses that wanted to accept payments online had to separately negotiate with card networks, gateways, and payment processors, a fragmented, technical slog. Stripe abstracted all of that into a single API call. Ground is aiming to do the same thing for onchain finance: instead of a bank integrating individually with a lending vault, a liquid staking token, and a tokenized treasury fund, it plugs into Ground once and gets access to all of it through one normalized interface.
Why the GENIUS and Clarity Acts Matter
Much of the conversation centered on how recent U.S. stablecoin legislation is reshaping institutional appetite. Companies that were already comfortable with stablecoins have felt relief from regulatory clarity, he says, but the bigger shift is what it unlocks for larger, more conservative institutions that have historically avoided anything resembling “pioneering.” With clearer rules in place, those institutions finally have a defined path to engage with onchain assets rather than having to build on uncertain ground.
He’s blunt about why this debate matters beyond the legal technicalities: it’s forcing banks to reckon with the gap between what they earn on deposits and the meager 25 to 50 basis points many currently pass back to customers. Whether that pressure plays out through issuer-side restrictions or activity-based distributor rewards, Ground stands to benefit either way. Stablecoins need to be put to work somewhere, and the company wants to be the infrastructure that makes that possible.
Real-World Assets: Climbing the Risk Curve
Beyond stablecoins, the company sees strong institutional demand for tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), but in a deliberate order. Cuming describes a “risk curve” that starts with simple, highly liquid, easily understood instruments, namely U.S. government debt and reputable commercial paper, before extending toward munis, private credit, and eventually equities and real estate. Clients want the ability to move along that curve as their liquidity and risk preferences shift, rather than being locked into a single product.
- Today: Tokenized cash and short-term government debt dominate interest.
- Next: Commercial paper and other investment-grade instruments.
- Later: Private credit, equities, and real estate as comfort grows.
Security Concerns Are Pushing Institutions Toward RWAs
The conversation also touched on a string of high-profile DeFi exploits in the first half of 2026. Institutional clients, he explains, draw a sharp line between ordinary financial risk (like constrained liquidity) and technological risk, such as a smart contract exploit draining assets. The latter is viewed as simply unacceptable by larger players, and it’s part of what’s driving demand toward tokenized real-world assets, which don’t carry the same kind of smart-contract risk profile as purely onchain-native products.
He points to a wave of institutional engagement, from exchanges like Nasdaq and ICE to asset managers including Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, and JPMorgan, as evidence that tokenization and stablecoin infrastructure are moving from experimental to mainstream, even as the industry continues to work through security growing pains.
What the $3.6 Million Raise Funds
Ground’s newly closed funding round arrives alongside the company’s public launch after a period of quiet product development and early team growth. The capital, Cuming says, will go toward building more secure, compliant infrastructure tailored specifically to mainstream banking and financial institutions, not just the crypto-native audience the industry has served until now. That work is the company’s stated priority for the next six to twelve months.
Looking Ahead
Asked to predict where the industry stands a year from now, he pointed to a few likely developments: passage of the Clarity Act, more robust security monitoring at the protocol level, continued growth in stablecoins and tokenized deposits, and a widening menu of onchain options, from crypto-native yield sources to tokenized RWAs, for institutions to choose from as adoption climbs the risk curve.
His broader thesis is that the next phase of crypto adoption won’t look like crypto at all. If Ground succeeds, using onchain yield will feel as unremarkable as a bank relying on cloud infrastructure, a detail most customers will never think to ask about.
