TL;DR: Alvara is a decentralized asset management protocol enabling anyone to create and manage their own investment baskets onchain.
Remember what you learned in school about investing?
Probably nothing, so there’s not much to remember. Anyhow, if you ever decide to fix that gap and learn about managing finances yourself, you’ll quickly come across the advice of diversifying one’s assets and spreading risk.
Unsurprisingly, this applies not only to the individual but also to a much broader context, meaning institutions too prefer allocating other people’s funds across assets to maximize returns.
Consequently, asset management accounts for a large share of TradFi: up to 11–30% of total trading volume is attributed to it, while the overall value is upwards of $100 trillion. Traditional asset managers hold $145 million under management, with a growing tendency.
Yet despite the success of asset management in the traditional system, onchain there’s little mirroring this high-demand service. The $700 Million in TVL locked across various asset-management-like protocols is laughable compared to what TradFi pulls off.
Nevertheless, the lower the starting point, the bigger the possible growth. Since 2025, the market for Real-World-Assets (RWAs) has steadily grown.
Real-World Assets = traditional assets such as commodities, bonds, and derivatives, which are tokenized and thereby made accessible onchain.
Only recently has the market cap of RWAs on Ethereum surpassed the $15 billion mark, largely driven by the popularity of gold and its soaring price amid global uncertainty. The growth of RWAs persisted throughout market downturns, which makes sense considering how humans like to exercise caution during times of distress.
As institutions like BlackRock enter the crypto market, and the NYSE announces tokenized securities, crypto and TradFi seem to be converging. Still, there are things that one can do without blockchain that TradFi cannot pull off.
One of them is transparency.
Looking at traditional fund management, the value proposition is usually: check out how we did over the last few years, and then trust us that we’re reporting truthfully.
That’s despite all of us knowing that past performance is no guarantor of future success.
In his 2011 book that barely anyone ever reads to the end, psychologist Daniel Kahneman found that when studying hedge fund managers, a majority of them failed the most basic test of skill: that of persistent achievement (p. 209)
Needless to say, he was uninvited from giving further talks at hedge fund manager events. This isn’t to imply any conscious wrongdoing on their side; it’s simply the way the system is set up.
Which leads us to wonder:
What if asset allocation were fully meritocratic?
Meritocracy, a term popularized by a British author’s political satire, has quickly become a tech industry’s favorite. Applied to the realm of managing investments, this would mean that only managers who are actually delivering merit could accumulate liquidity, while the occasional lucky fund managers would be dropped.
We thought that people deserve better financial tools, not guarded by the old elite, but with full transparency into how assets are managed and how successful they are.
To accomplish that, we built Alvara.
Alvara is a decentralized asset management protocol that empowers anyone to become their own asset manager.
Bringing asset management onchain isn’t a new idea. However, the second you dig deeper into other projects in that realm, you’ll notice that most of them are in the business of curating a pool of assets for users, in which they can lock liquidity.
What was missing was a standard that doesn’t just use vaults (smart contracts that lock funds and then execute pre-defined strategies), but also expands the design space for combining assets.
Enter the ERC-7621 standard.
ERC-7621 is a custom token standard we developed that turns anyone into an asset manager by enabling them to build, mint, and manage a basket of assets with just a few clicks.
With this standard, BSKTs are:
- Fully composable: rebalance, change weights, and assets at any time
- 100% backed: guaranteeing redemption
- Transferable: if you feel like letting others take the reins, you can.
With Alvara, you have access to thousands of assets, infinite BSKTs.
We envision a financial system where anyone with ambition can build, run and grow an investment strategy unbothered by the usual gatekeepers.
Alvara isn’t just for those building their own strategies. It’s also for anyone looking to diversify their investments but unwilling to spend countless hours comparing and researching various funds.
On the leaderboard, the best BSKT managers rise to the top, offering a transparent overview of who’s consistently outperforming the market or delivering stable returns.
As more of the world’s assets come onchain, the possibilities of asset management have never been more exciting. The next innovations in asset management won’t happen behind closed doors.
It’ll be transparent, composable, and fully onchain.
With Alvara, we’re building to expand who has access to the financial tools that used to be reserved for the few.
Anyone can be a BSKTer. All it takes is a wallet and conviction.