Benedikt Schuppli, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Obligate, joins Sam Sealey to explain how his team is building the financial infrastructure that makes tokenized securities a real, regulated, institutional-grade alternative to traditional bond markets.
Benedikt walks through why the existing system — built on paper certificates, custodian banks, and centralized clearinghouses — carries far more overhead than it needs to, and how smart contracts and stablecoins like EURC can replace that entire stack, end-to-end.
Key Takeaways:
00:00 Introduction.
01:10 Benedikt is a Swiss-trained lawyer who joined one of Switzerland's first crypto exchanges in 2016.
02:04 His early thesis: all securities — bonds, derivatives, private credit — would eventually be issued and transferred as tokens.
05:49 Obligate started in 2020, survived FTX's collapse and the 2023 bear market, and kept building throughout.
06:33 Circle's investment in late 2022 validated Obligate's vision of regulated onchain finance at its most controversial moment.
07:54 Keyrock recently issued the first fully blockchain-based corporate bond through Obligate, denominated in EuroC — no traditional banks involved.
11:00 Switzerland's progressive regulations eliminated the need for transfer agents, giving Obligate a strong early regulatory foundation.
13:39 High fees and multi-day delays in traditional payments made stablecoins the clearest proof of blockchain's real-world value.
14:49 TradeFlow Capital still physically mails paper coupons to Luxembourg in 2026 — exactly the broken process Obligate replaces.
17:25 Obligate has reached seven-figure revenue and is raising a Series A to expand into the US.
Thanks for listening to the Circle Builder Series. To learn more about Circle, please visit www.circle.com/developer. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a 5-star review on your favorite podcast platform, and be sure to subscribe so you never miss any insightful conversations.
EURC is issued by regulated affiliates of Circle. See Circle’s list of regulatory authorizations. Circle Ventures, an affiliate of Circle Internet Financial, LLC, has invested in Obligate.
Resources Mentioned:
Obligate website:
https://www.obligate.com
Circle Developer Resources:
https://www.circle.com/developer
