Understand Yzi Labs' investment in Aspecta in 3 minutes

Aspecta aims to establish on-chain standards and trust mechanisms for "non-liquid assets".

Written by: Alex Liu, Foresight News

On the evening of July 10, Yzi Labs announced a strategic investment in Aspecta. This article aims to briefly interpret Aspecta — which attempts to build on-chain standards and trust mechanisms for "illiquid assets" in traditional capital markets, including the project's design logic, product system, application progress, and industry potential.

Team Background

In terms of team background, Aspecta did not start from scratch. The project was incubated in 2022 at Yale University's Tsai CITY (Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale), with core team members coming from top universities and research institutions including Yale, Tsinghua, Berkeley, and McGill, possessing multiple patents and research achievements in the fields of AI and graph learning. The co-founding team includes former Tinder Chief Scientist Steve Liu (Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering) as the Chief Scientist, Jack He as a co-founder, and the team also brings together several senior engineers and growth leaders, such as Jane Yang.

Co-founder Jack He speaks at TreeHacks

Why does ### appear? What pain points does it solve?

In traditional markets, a large number of assets such as early equity, locked tokens, private equity, and real-world assets (RWA) cannot be traded on public markets, lacking transparent pricing, which severely restricts liquidity and pricing efficiency. Aspecta proposes: to give these "closed assets" an "on-chain" "life", enabling pricing and providing trading capabilities, thereby reducing information asymmetry and enhancing asset utilization.

When analyzing this logic, one might imagine: a project locks a portion of its tokens in Round A and, after the expiration, is reluctant to exit immediately due to the lack of liquidity and pricing mechanisms in the market. Aspecta enables these assets to be priced, traded, and tracked through a standardized "packaging + reputation mechanism"—unlocking new value for them.

Two core products: BuildKey and Aspecta ID

The design context of Aspecta is clear, with the core divided into two mutually supportive paths:

BuildKey: Asset Standardization and Lifecycle Pricing

BuildKey presents non-liquid assets in a tradable ERC-20 class certificate form. For example, pre-TGE equity, locked tokens, private placement rights, etc., can all be issued and traded on-chain through BuildKey. This mechanism not only supports various pricing methods such as AMM, order books, and auctions, but also allows assets to switch between different lifecycle stages, such as "on-chain relay" from venture capital to public trading markets.

It is worth noting that since its launch, BuildKey has supported over 25 digital assets for pricing participation, completing more than 50 million transactions, proving a strong demand for closed capital in on-chain liquidity mechanisms. It is not a simple token minting, but a system of "lifecycle asset variants": users can freely enter and exit at multiple stages such as TGE, lock-up, and secondary market, making asset prices more continuous.

Aspecta ID: AI-driven Trusted Identity Protocol

If BuildKey is an asset certificate tool, Aspecta ID is a trust mechanism that grants endorsement to the issuer. It integrates data such as GitHub commits, on-chain behavior, and project contributions, using AI algorithms to create credit profiles for developers, projects, and even asset issuers, and assigns credit scores.

This mechanism eliminates the "trust vacuum" in asset packaging. During the early stages of a project or when it is in a closed phase, the trust output of Aspecta ID can alleviate the concerns of investors and traders. Currently, over 54,000 GitHub developers have completed verification, and the system is transitioning from a trust protocol to a community governance level.

Product linkage: How to form a closed loop?

In the architecture of Aspecta, BuildKey and Aspecta ID do not exist in isolation; rather, they work together seamlessly to build a complete closed-loop ecosystem from asset generation to trust establishment and transaction circulation. For example, when developers submit code on GitHub and associate it with a certain project, their technical contributions and on-chain activities will be recognized, evaluated, and form a credibility profile by the Aspecta ID system. Based on this identity verification mechanism, projects have clear trust support when subsequently issuing non-liquid assets such as pre-TGE equity. These assets are then tokenized on-chain through the BuildKey mechanism, publicly sold, and initial price discovery is completed, while establishing transaction records.

With the deepening of community participation, the AMM, order book, and auction mechanisms supported by BuildKey gradually enhance the price transparency and trading depth of assets. Throughout the process, users flexibly decide whether to participate in subscriptions or withdraw investments based on the issuer's credit rating and market pricing, allowing assets to form a complete life cycle trajectory and accumulate verifiable trading history and value feedback. This mechanism not only promotes the pricing transparency of early-stage assets but also creates a positive cycle between the trust mechanism and liquidity: on one hand, Aspecta ID provides underlying credit anchoring for assets; on the other hand, on-chain trading data continuously feeds back into the trust evaluation system, making subsequent asset issuance more efficient and credible.

Community, Users and Ecosystem

By mid-2025, Aspecta has attracted over 650,000 users to participate in platform usage, including more than 54,000 developers verified through GitHub, who play a crucial role in the ecological construction, further enhancing the practicality and attractiveness of the identity system. At the same time, BuildKey has supported the on-chain issuance and trading of over 25 types of non-Liquidity assets, demonstrating the mechanism's broad adaptability to the market. The active participation of the community has also accelerated the rapid implementation of mechanisms such as multi-chain compatibility, hybrid AMM, and order book models, with the overall ecology expanding towards a more open and flexible direction.

From a practical perspective, Aspecta is building a triangular structure of "AI + assets + community," aiming to create a complete closed-loop process from identity recognition, asset packaging to on-chain governance and incentives, initially forming an infrastructure-level network effect.

Conclusion

Aspecta is attempting to bridge the gap between traditional capital and Web3 with its own approach of "trusted identity + lifecycle asset packaging + on-chain liquidity mechanism." From GitHub submissions to token certificates, and from closed issuance to secondary market trading, its product system is continuously self-consistent and upgraded. Although still in its early stages, the over $50 million BuildKey trading volume and more than 650,000 user base provide a solid foundation.