Hey Guinch! Thanks for jumping in.
As cool as I think this would be, brokerages and institutional offerings operate under pretty strict regulatory requirements and are only just now dipping their toes in to simply cryptoasset holdings offerings (as Evan mentioned, even staking is something that needs to be rolled out slowly with their partners because it carries a whole different class of risk requirements).
These folks are not ready for onchain primitives like Hydro and other DeFi protocols. We can’t bake this into any commercial arrangement with Paxos or their partners because it’d be essentially impossible to execute. I think with the current regulatory environment and market conditions we’re trending in that direction, and I personally believe brokerages will offer DeFi products to their customers one day (shoutout to Robinhood and Coinbase trying to lead the way here), but that day is not today, sadly.
Evan pretty much covered this already, but the major benefit is that this integration unlocks dozens of potential listing partners rather than just one. Paxos is not a venue themselves, they provide the infrastructure for institutional venues to easily integrate ATOM into their own offerings. Without Paxos, we’d have to approach each venue individually, probably pay some sort of integration fee for each of them, and help bootstrap liquidity for each one.
The benefit that Paxos provides is that via this single, one-time integration they provide all of that for us for every venue they support, and every venue that they will support in the future. Paxos is growing rapidly so I expect there will be many cases where we see new ATOM listings that would have previously taken months or years to land happen much more quickly (sometimes likely even without our involvement).