When we started Starke Finance in October 2024 we based our idea on the following bullet points:
The problem: Traditional asset managers are conservative by nature. They’re risk-averse, bound by regulation, and built on legacy technology stacks. This makes innovation slow and often results in parallel divisions that live outside the core business, innovation that doesn’t touch the real products investors use. In many firms, technology is still treated as a commodity rather than a driver of transformation.
Our solution: Because Starke Finance is built natively on-chain, we can iterate faster at both the technological and structural levels. We don’t carry the weight of outdated operating models or siloed accountability chains. This lets us move quickly, experiment and embed innovation directly into the products we offer, not as side projects, but as the foundation of the platform.
The problem: Private equity, venture capital and other high-value asset classes remain out of reach for most investors. Access is limited by regulation, large minimum invesments and the lack of incentive from asset managers to reduce friction. This keeps the best opportunities locked away for institutions and a small set of privileged investors.
Our solution: A blockchain-based backend offers undeniable global and instant accessibility to assets. Combined with the programmability of smart contracts, our products can adapt to evolving regulations and embed compliance logic directly on-chain. As legislation continues to embrace blockchain, a trend already underway in multiple jurisdictions, tokenized funds will open access in a way that simply isn’t possible in legacy systems.
The problem: Fund structures in traditional finance are often opaque. Fees, holdings, and investor structures are difficult to track, forcing many investors to make decisions based only on past performance or brand reputation.
Our solution: Blockchain changes this dynamic entirely. By using a permanent, immutable, and auditable ledger, every action taken within a fund can be recorded and exposed to whoever needs visibility, regulators, investors or auditors. This level of transparency is impossible to replicate in the IT stacks that asset managers use today.
The problem: Most crypto platforms are designed for speculation. Exchanges in particular are built to maximize trading volume and capture fees, not to create long-term value. This creates liquidity but doesn’t solve the need for stable, high-quality and long-term investment products.
Our solution: At Starke Finance, our focus is different. We are an asset management platform, not an exchange. Our products are modeled on the principles of traditional finance: pension funds, mutual funds, private funds formed of private equity, public equity, high quality crypto assets and other long-term instruments.
The problem: For years, there were effectively two separate worlds that evolved in parallel with very low interaction: traditional finance, which generally avoided digital assets due to regulatory risk and crypto, which developed without clear rules.
This divide created mistrust among individuals and entities and it is well known that negative branding is a sticky property that requires time to change. Many institutions scared by this negative branding avoided public link to crypto, however in parallel, created parallel organizations as they were attracted by the technology.
In addition, most crypto assets lacked fundamental value without investor protection generating a big spectrum of high quality assets surrounded by long quality assets and even scams, printing a negative branding to legit assets.
Our solution:
Recent changes in the US and its regulators towards a more blockchain friendly, represented an opportunity for everyone in the industry and also giving a green light to institutions to embrace the adoption, generating a set of new products and innovations. This widely openned the door towards adopting the role of tokenization, the capacity of map any asset with potential value, including physical or traditional finance assets over a blockchain and of course inherting all the properties of what that means: transparency, self custody, DeFi protocols integartaion, global availability, instant settlement among others. Having ancitipataced that this shift was going to happen, we saw tokenization as a two-phase journey:
Translation Phase: Traditional assets that exist off-chain are tokenized and represented on blockchain systems, making them accessible in a new, programmable form.
Blockchain Native Phase: Blockchain itself becomes the underlying infrastructure of capital markets. Assets are created and managed natively on-chain being the source of records for any system on top, with no need for translation.
Most firms today are still focused on the translation phase. At Starke Finance, we’ve chosen to build directly for the blockchain native phase. Our funds are managed natively on-chain from the start, positioning us for the long-term evolution of financial markets where blockchain isn’t an add-on, but the foundation.
Our goal is to build an asset management firm centered on U.S.-regulated managed funds, while inheriting the core strengths of blockchain. We aim to deliver the best of both worlds: investor protection, regulated investment channels, and long-term value creation, combined with the flexibility, global accessibility, transparency, and efficiency that only blockchain can provide.
We will build natively on-chain private funds, venture capital, mutual funds and in a later stage potentially ETFs, all of them branded as "rkShares". We will actively manage to improve the quality of holdings as soon as more assets are tokenized. In parallel, these funds will be diverse and tailored to different investor profiles, allocating into private equity, public equity, crypto assets, commodities, and other market opportunities where fundamental value may not always align with purchasing price.
