Yzi Labs Strategic Investment in Aspecta: Solving Illiquid Asset Challenge with "AI + Blockchain"

Original Article Title: "Understanding Aspecta, Invested by Yzi Labs, in 3 Minutes"

Original Article Author: Alex Liu, Foresight News

On the evening of July 10th, Yzi Labs announced a strategic investment in Aspecta. This article aims to briefly explain Aspecta — its goal is to establish an on-chain standard and trust mechanism for "illiquid assets" in the traditional capital market. This includes the project's design logic, product system, progress in applications, and industry potential.

Team Background

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

Co-founder Jack He speaking at TreeHacks

Why Now? What Pain Points Does It Solve?

In the traditional market, a large number of assets such as early-stage equity, locked tokens, private equity, and real-world assets (RWA) cannot be traded on public exchanges, leading to a lack of transparent pricing that significantly restricts liquidity and pricing efficiency. Aspecta proposes to give these "closed assets" an on-chain "life," which not only enables pricing but also provides trading capability, thereby reducing information asymmetry and increasing asset utilization.

When analyzing this logic, consider this scenario: a project locks a portion of its tokens in Series A funding, but after the lockup period, it hesitates to exit immediately due to a lack of market liquidity and pricing mechanisms. Aspecta, through a standardized "packaging + reputation mechanism," allows these assets to be priced, traded, and tracked — unlocking new value for them.

Two Key Products: BuildKey and Aspecta ID

Aspecta's design logic is clear, with the core divided into two complementary paths:

BuildKey: Asset Standardization and Lifecycle Pricing

BuildKey presents illiquid assets in tradable ERC-20-like tokenized form. For example, pre-TGE equity, lock-up period tokens, private sale rights, etc., can all be issued and traded on-chain through BuildKey. This mechanism not only supports various pricing methods such as AMM, order book, auctions, etc., but also allows assets to transition through different lifecycle stages, such as the "on-chain relay" from venture capital to the public trading market.

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

Aspecta ID: AI-Powered Trusted Identity Protocol

If BuildKey is an asset tokenization tool, Aspecta ID is a trust mechanism endorsed by the issuer. It integrates GitHub commits, on-chain activities, project contributions, etc., uses AI algorithms to create a credit profile of developers, projects, and asset issuers, and issues credit scores.

This mechanism ensures that assets are not packaged in a "trust vacuum." During the early stages of a project or when it is in a closed phase, the trust output of Aspecta ID can reduce concerns for investors and traders. Currently, over 54,000 GitHub developers have completed verification, and the system is transitioning from a trust protocol to community governance.

Product Integration: How to Form a Closed Loop?

In Aspecta's architecture, BuildKey and Aspecta ID do not exist in isolation but complement each other, running through and building a complete closed-loop ecosystem from asset generation to trust establishment to transaction circulation. For example, when a developer commits code on GitHub and links it to a project, their technical contributions and on-chain activities are identified, evaluated, and used to form a credibility profile by the Aspecta ID system. Based on this identity authentication mechanism, when the project later issues illiquid assets such as pre-TGE equity, it already has clear trust support. These assets are then tokenized on-chain through the BuildKey mechanism, publicly offered for sale, undergo initial price discovery, and establish transaction records.

With deepening community participation, the AMM, order book, and auction mechanisms supported by BuildKey gradually enhance asset price transparency and trading depth. Throughout the process, users, based on the issuer's credit rating and market pricing, flexibly decide whether to subscribe or exit investment, allowing assets to form a complete lifecycle trajectory, accumulating a verifiable transaction history and value feedback. This mechanism not only promotes early asset pricing transparency but also creates a positive feedback loop between the trust mechanism and liquidity: on the one hand, Aspecta ID provides underlying credit anchoring for assets; on the other hand, on-chain transaction data continuously feeds back into the trust assessment 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 54,000+ developers verified through GitHub, who play a crucial role in ecosystem development, further strengthening the practicality and attractiveness of the identity system. Meanwhile, BuildKey has supported on-chain issuance and trading of over 25 types of illiquid assets, demonstrating the mechanism's broad market adaptability. Active community participation has also driven rapid implementation of mechanisms such as cross-chain compatibility, hybrid AMM, and order book models, expanding the overall ecosystem towards a more open and flexible direction.

From a practical perspective, Aspecta is building an "AI + Asset + Community" triangular structure, attempting to connect the full-process closed loop from identity recognition, asset packaging to on-chain governance and incentives, preliminarily forming an infrastructure-level network effect.

Conclusion

Aspecta is using its own methodology to try to bridge the gap between traditional capital and Web3 with "trusted identity + lifecycle asset packaging + on-chain liquidity mechanisms." From GitHub commits to token credentials, from closed issuance to secondary market trading, its product system continues to self-consistently upgrade. Although still in its early stages, with over $50 million in BuildKey trading volume and a user base of over 650,000, it has established a strong foundation.