Monaco Research, the team building Monaco, an institutional-grade decentralized trading protocol, has appointed Simran Singh as its new Chief Executive Officer. The move signals a bold new phase for the Sei Labs–incubated project, which aims to bring Wall Street-level liquidity and execution speed to decentralized finance (DeFi).

A DeFi Strategist with Institutional Chops

Singh, previously Head of DeFi Trading at GSR, one of crypto’s leading market makers, has spent years navigating the intersection of traditional and decentralized markets. At GSR, he helped design institutional trading frameworks that bridged the gap between algorithmic market-making and emerging DeFi protocols.

Now, Singh’s mission at Monaco Research is to fuse the precision and reliability of traditional financial infrastructure with the composability and transparency of blockchain. His background gives him a rare perspective — not just understanding how to build DeFi systems, but how to make them usable and compliant enough for the world’s largest financial players.

Trading Speed That Rivals Nasdaq

One of Monaco’s most striking claims is performance: microsecond-level execution speed, rivaling Nasdaq and the NYSE. Combined with Sei Network’s 400-millisecond settlement times, Monaco is positioning itself as a serious contender for institutional-grade decentralized trading — a space where most DeFi protocols still lag due to technical bottlenecks and latency.

Singh himself describes this as the natural next step in crypto’s evolution:

“The initial promise of crypto was about owning your own value,” he said. “Now, it’s about using that value efficiently and accessibly — by both users and institutions.”

This vision underscores a larger trend across finance: the gradual merging of DeFi and TradFi. As tokenized assets continue to gain traction, the infrastructure to support them must handle both scale and compliance.

The Big Picture: Tokenization and the Future of Capital Markets

According to Standard Chartered, tokenized assets could reach $30 trillion by 2034. For Monaco, that’s not just a projection — it’s the addressable market. By building the “connective tissue” between on-chain and off-chain liquidity, Monaco wants to become the engine that powers tokenized securities, gaming economies, prediction markets, and decentralized exchanges alike.

Jay Jog, Co-Founder of Sei Labs, praised Singh’s appointment, calling him a “rare combination of institutional market expertise and native DeFi fluency.”

It’s a move that positions Monaco not just as another protocol, but as an infrastructure company betting on the next evolution of global capital markets — one that’s faster, more open, and less dependent on centralized intermediaries.

Why It Matters

While other DeFi platforms — like dYdX, Synthetix, or GMX — focus on decentralized trading with varying levels of institutional adoption, Monaco’s approach is distinctly hybrid. By leveraging Sei’s high-performance architecture and targeting institutional-grade reliability, it’s attempting to do what others haven’t: make DeFi truly Wall Street-compatible.

If Monaco can deliver on that promise, it could redefine what “institutional DeFi” means — transforming crypto from a speculative playground into a backbone for the next generation of financial infrastructure.