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Noble: Solving Crypto's Liquidity Problem, One Chain at a Time - Jelena Djuric

Oct 12, 2025

Jelena Djuric, co-founder and CEO of Noble, shares her inspiring journey from political science to the heart of crypto innovation. She dives into Noble’s mission to streamline asset issuance in the Cosmos ecosystem, creating a stable, native liquidity hub. Discussing the importance of stablecoins, she reveals how Noble's 'boring' design enhances security. Jelena also touches on the roles of issuers, the exciting composable yield model, and plans for an EVM app layer on Celestia to expand functionality in the crypto landscape.

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INSIGHT

Stablecoins Need Legal Frameworks To Scale

The 2023 stablecoin moment differs because legislation (e.g., the Clarity Act) and clearer rules are enabling mainstream payment innovation.
That legal clarity plus mature blockchain rails finally make stablecoins viable for mass payments.

INSIGHT

Yield Is Legal, Not Just Technical

Passing yield from collateral (T-bills) involves legal nuance under new regulation, and issuers can't automatically pass yield to users.
Distribution partners (exchanges, DeFi apps) will be the main channels that can legally deliver yield to end users.

ADVICE

Be A Neutral Issuance Infrastructure Provider

Build neutral infrastructure and let issuers control product decisions like yield distribution.
Do not conflate infrastructure provision with being a stablecoin issuer; focus on secure transmission and distribution.

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In this episode, Sebastien is joined by Jelena Djuric, co-founder of Noble, a generic asset issuance chain built for the Cosmos ecosystem. Jelena shares her journey into crypto, which began with an interest in political science, leading her to discover Bitcoin's potential. She describes the origins of Noble, created to solve a critical need within Cosmos: a native, fungible source of liquidity like USDC.

Before Noble, assets were often bridged in fragmented ways, creating poor user experiences. Noble was designed as a simple, secure, and neutral "asset issuance hub," a purpose-built chain for natively issuing assets and distributing them throughout the Cosmos network via IBC.

Jelena emphasizes that Noble is intentionally "boring," with a minimal feature set to reduce the attack surface. It operates with a proof-of-authority consensus model to meet the compliance needs of asset issuers like Circle. Jelena also discusses the importance of CCTP for moving USDC between Cosmos and other ecosystems, with Noble as the routing hub. Looking ahead, Jelena sees a future where Noble supports a diverse range of assets beyond stablecoins, including RWAs.

Topics discussed in this episode:

Introduction
Jelena's background and entry into crypto
Why fragmented liquidity is holding crypto back
Noble's vision for unifying liquidity
Why a "boring" chain is a more secure chain
Noble's proof-of-authority model for issuer trust
Bringing a single source of truth for USDC to the Interchain
Using CCTP to connect liquidity across ecosystems
Noble's business model
The future of solving liquidity for RWAs

Links mentioned in this episode:

Jelena Djuric, Co-Founder, Noble: https://x.com/jelena_noble
Noble: https://x.com/noble_xyz

Sponsors:

Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at gnosis.io

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture.