Description:
Aya Kantorovich was on the founding team at FalconX from 2019 to 2022 as Head of Institutional Coverage, building the firm's sales and trading business when institutional crypto meant OTC desks and limited access. She co-founded the company behind August and Upshift in 2023 with the thesis of moving the strategies the best asset managers run into non-custodial vaults anyone can access. Lincoln Bartlett runs OTC sales for Kraken Institutional, with a CFA and over a decade across the buy side and sell side, including nearly four years as Head of Trading at Anchorage Digital.
Aya Kantorovich is Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Upshift, the onchain yield storefront built on August, the institutional prime brokerage formerly known as Fractal. August raised a $10 million Series A led by Dragonfly in March 2025 and reports roughly $7 billion in monthly volume across 13-plus chains, 250-plus tokens, and 70-plus protocols. Lincoln Bartlett is Head of OTC Sales at Kraken, where the institutional arm has been assembling a managed-yield framework inside its own qualified custody, execution, and risk stack. Kraken launched its first bespoke managed-yield solution in February 2026 with Bitwise, and Insto Vaults with Upshift is the next manager on that framework.
The proof points: through Insto Vaults, institutions deploy idle treasury into permissioned DeFi vaults directly from Kraken qualified custody, with no new counterparty relationship and no self-custody infrastructure required. Aya says the institutional allocations moving through these vaults run $200 million and above in size, with each vault purpose-built per client strategy, permissioned with no commingling. Aya and Lincoln unpack how custody becomes the starting point for yield rather than the ending point, why the 2022 blowups created the institutional demand for transparency and segregated vaults, what vaultification means as curated yield products replace pooled permissionless structures, and where the institutional yield market goes when custody and yield are the same product.
Aya Kantorovich - Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Upshift
X: @aya_kantor
Lincoln Bartlett - Head of OTC Sales, Kraken
Stabledash is a modern media company covering stablecoins, digital payments, and crypto infrastructure. Follow for weekly conversations on what's actually working in stablecoins and onchain finance.
Stabledash Live is powered by Dfns - the core banking platform for digital assets. Dfns gives institutions the core banking infrastructure to build for the new financial system.
Learn more at dfns.co
Share this link via
Or copy link