Inside Avalanche’s Tokenization Push: Olivia Vande Woude on RWAs, Institutions, & Real Adoption

In this episode of The Smart Economy Podcast, host Dylan Grabowski is joined by Olivia Vande Woude, head of tokenization at Ava Labs, the team behind the Avalanche blockchain, a platform built to support customized blockchain infrastructure for institutions, enterprises, and consumer applications.

Vande Woude discusses her transition from equity research and TradFi into crypto, and how that background informs Avalanche’s approach to tokenization, on-chain finance, and institutional adoption. The conversation explores Avalanche’s multi-chain architecture, why distribution economics matter more than product count, and how RWAs are being deployed in practice today.

They also dig into institutional metrics, regulatory clarity, private credit, stablecoins, and why real-world blockchain adoption often looks quieter than social media narratives.

What you’ll learn:
• Why tokenization is a distribution problem first
• How Avalanche enables purpose-built blockchains
• What institutions look for in blockchain infrastructure
• Why TVL can matter more than users for RWAs
• How private credit is being upgraded on-chain
• How adoption is impacted by regulatory clarity
• Avalanche’s approach to real-world scale

Olivia Vande Woude is head of tokenization at Ava Labs, where she works with global asset managers, fintechs, and institutions to bring financial products and RWAs onto the Avalanche blockchain. She previously worked in equity research at T. Rowe Price, covering banks and financial infrastructure, and brings a capital markets lens to blockchain adoption.

YouTube: https://youtu.be/3lfkv6ltMK4

Previous guests include: Paul Neuner, Founder and CEO of Telcoin; Aryan Sheikhalian, Head of Research at CMT Digital; David Hoffman, co-Founder and host of Bankless; Fabian Gompf, Chief Executive Officer of the Web3 Foundation; Kurt Hemecker, CEO of the Mina Foundation; Sunny Lu, co-Founder and CEO of VeChain Foundation; Joe Doll, general counsel at Magic Eden; Philippe Schommers, the Head of Infrastructure at Gnosis; and many others.

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