Rialo has stepped up its push to become blockchain infrastructure for financial institutions as the network discusses proof of concept projects with Korean firms and builds applications with other institutional partners.
Summary
- Rialo is discussing proof of concept projects with several Korean financial institutions as they explore expanding financial services onchain.
- Rialo is building institutional infrastructure with external API connectivity, interoperability and privacy tools designed to work with existing financial systems.
- The network sees RWA lending and AI agents as potential use cases, including cross network collateral and programmable controls over AI agent transactions.
- Rialo is working with Cboe and other institutions on applications while holding back its native token until working business models have been established.
According to Bobby Zagotta, chief business officer at Rialo, growing interest from traditional financial institutions in blockchain technology has created an opportunity for networks designed around the way financial firms already operate.
“Traditional finance institutions taking a serious interest in blockchain technology is very positive,” Zagotta said in an Oct. 6 interview with Bloomingbit. “We should design blockchains that institutions can use so we do not miss this period.”
Zagotta argued that existing blockchain infrastructure remains too complicated for many institutions to use in their day to day operations. Rialo is trying to remove some of those hurdles by supporting connections to external systems, interoperability and privacy tools within its infrastructure.
Rialo was introduced by Subzero Labs in August 2025 after the company raised $20 million in funding led by Pantera Capital. Coinbase Ventures, Hashed, Mysten Labs and Variant participated in the round.
As crypto.news previously reported, Subzero Labs designed Rialo around native web connectivity and event driven transactions, seeking to reduce the dependence of blockchain applications on separate bridges, oracles and other middleware.
Rialo wants institutional blockchain use to feel closer to Web2
Rialo’s approach centers on allowing institutions to use blockchain infrastructure without requiring their existing systems to be rebuilt around the technology.
“Blockchain should become a technology that can be used as easily as Web2 services,” Zagotta said. Financial institutions, he added, should not have to understand and adapt to the mechanics of a blockchain before they can use it.
One part of that infrastructure is Rialo Edge, which is designed to bring data from external APIs into blockchain applications. Rialo has paired that capability with IPC, its identity and privacy system, allowing applications to use information without necessarily publishing the underlying data onchain.
Zagotta used lending as one example. A financial company could check information such as a customer’s credit history, sanctions status, jurisdiction or assets held outside a blockchain while keeping sensitive information from being publicly exposed onchain.
Rialo is targeting real world assets and AI agents as areas where those capabilities could be used.
For RWA lending, Zagotta described a borrower who holds tokenized stocks through Robinhood and ETH on Ethereum. Rialo could potentially allow assets held across the two environments to be considered as collateral while external information about the borrower is brought into the application through APIs.
Tokenized assets have become a larger part of Robinhood’s blockchain business since its Layer 2 network went live in July. By early September, RWA related trading volume on Robinhood Chain had reached a record $390 million in a day, including $127 million from tokenized stocks.
Robinhood Chain had initially launched with tokenized equities among its main products, allowing eligible users in more than 120 countries to access stock tokens through Robinhood Wallet and use supported assets in decentralized applications.
AI agents get spending and transaction controls
Subzero Labs is working on a separate system called Latch for AI agents, another area where Rialo sees potential institutional demand.
Latch is designed to control what an AI agent can do when it carries out transactions on a user’s behalf. Permissions can cover the parties an agent is allowed to transact with, the amount it can spend and the period during which its authority remains active.
“With Latch, you can set in advance who an AI agent can transact with, what transactions it can make and how much it can spend,” Zagotta said.
Permissions can be programmed to expire after a specified period, limiting an agent’s ability to continue acting once its approved window has ended.
Such controls fit into Rialo’s effort to build blockchain applications around rules that companies can define before transactions take place, particularly where automated software is given authority over assets.
Institutional interest in similar blockchain infrastructure has been developing across traditional finance. Executives from Robinhood owned Bitstamp, Ondo Finance and Babylon Labs said in May that Wall Street firms were building blockchain based products even as adoption remained fragmented across regulated and permissionless markets.
Zagotta’s own career spans both sides of that market. He began at CME, where he worked in products and services before encountering Bitcoin and blockchain through the exchange operator’s venture arm in 2013.
Initially skeptical of crypto, Zagotta said reading the Bitcoin white paper changed his view of the technology. He later served as chief commercial officer at Kraken and held the same role at Bitstamp, which was subsequently acquired by Robinhood.
Zagotta initially worked with Subzero Labs as an adviser before formally joining roughly 10 months ago.
Rialo is holding back its token while applications are built
Rialo does not plan to make a token launch the starting point for building its network.
Zagotta said the team already has a specific idea for the role a Rialo token could eventually serve, but wants to establish working applications and business activity before announcing its token plans.
Launching a token can cause price and market performance to become measures by which a blockchain is judged, he said. Rialo is instead concentrating on developing a business model that functions before putting the token into the market.
A comparable approach can be seen in parts of the institutional blockchain market where networks do not necessarily require their own token. Robinhood Chain, for example, uses ETH for gas and launched without a native network token while supporting tokenized stocks, lending and other decentralized finance applications.
Rialo, meanwhile, is working with Cboe on use cases that include integrating market data. Zagotta said the project has partnerships with several other institutions and has spent months developing applications with them.
Details of Rialo’s token plans are expected only after the team has evaluated the growth potential of those business models.
Korean institutions are discussing Rialo proof of concepts
South Korea has emerged as another market Rialo is pursuing as financial companies consider moving more services onchain.
Zagotta said Korean financial institutions have a strong willingness to expand into onchain services, and Rialo is already discussing potential proof of concept projects with several institutions in the country.
The discussions are intended to test how Rialo could fit into institutional applications before Korean companies expand further into crypto related businesses.
Rialo wants to build its position and reputation in the country so that financial institutions consider the network as a blockchain partner once the environment allows them to pursue digital asset businesses more actively, Zagotta said.
For Rialo, that institutional push follows the original plan behind Subzero Labs’ $20 million funding round, when the developers laid out a network with native web connectivity, privacy and interoperability built into its architecture instead of requiring applications to assemble those functions from separate external services.
Zagotta said the team will continue developing applications with institutional partners for several months before disclosing its token rollout plans.
