I
Ishan Pandey
Guest
Stablecoins have grown to $301.4 billion in DefiLlama's snapshot of 20 October 2026, yet the dollars that a business holds in them earn no lending yield until someone compares lending markets, checks collateral and withdrawal liquidity and arranges custody, which are tasks that sit well outside the usual work of a finance team.
Frgmnt is a stablecoin protocol on Base that curates non-custodial Morpho Vault strategies for institutions while its Founding Allocator Program gives an initial cohort of 10 institutional allocators access to those strategies with onboarding through Anchorage Digital, dedicated reporting and regular strategy reviews. Today we sit down with Aurélien Roussel, co-founder and CEO of Frgmnt and former chief operating officer of Bricks.co, to discuss how a finance team decides which part of its treasury belongs onchain, how Frgmnt chooses the lending opportunities behind its strategies and what he hopes to learn from the first ten institutions.
Ishan Pandey: Hi Aurélien, welcome to our "Behind the Startup" series. You moved from helping scale Bricks.co to founding Frgmnt. Take us through that journey. What drew you toward stablecoins and how did you decide it was time to build something of your own?
Aurélien Roussel: My experience at Bricks.co taught me how to build and scale a financial product around a simple idea: making investment opportunities more accessible to a much broader audience. It also showed me that technology alone is not enough. You need a product people understand, a reliable operating model, and above all, trust.
When I started looking more closely at digital assets, stablecoins stood out to me. They had already become an important part of the financial system, but much of that capital was still sitting idle or earning yield through fragmented, complex DeFi strategies.
I saw an opportunity to bring those worlds closer together: the simplicity and utility of stablecoins with the efficiency of onchain finance. Frgmnt came from that conviction. I wanted to build something of our own that could make this infrastructure genuinely useful, first for individual users and increasingly for businesses and institutions.
Ishan Pandey: Why did you choose to build Frgmnt around making stablecoin capital productive? Was there a particular experience or conversation that made the opportunity clear to you and how did you decide what to build first?
Aurélien Roussel: It was less one particular conversation than a recurring observation: people were adopting stablecoins as a way to hold and transfer dollars digitally, but making those dollars productive often required them to understand multiple protocols, compare rates, manage liquidity, and take responsibility for operational complexity.
That creates a gap between what the technology can do and what most users are comfortable doing themselves. For a business, the challenge is even greater because capital allocation also involves internal controls, reporting, and risk management.
We decided to start with the core problem: how to allocate stablecoin capital across selected onchain lending strategies without forcing users to manage every underlying position themselves. Frgmnt combines stablecoin infrastructure with a strategy allocation layer designed to assess opportunities and manage allocations as conditions change.
The principle is simple: users should not need to become DeFi specialists to access onchain financial infrastructure. Our job is to make that infrastructure easier to use, easier to monitor, and more relevant to real financial needs.
Ishan Pandey: A finance team might need to make payments tomorrow while holding other funds for several months. Where does Frgmnt fit into that picture and how would the team use it in practice?
Aurélien Roussel: The starting point is to recognize that not all treasury capital has the same purpose or time horizon. A company needs immediate liquidity for payroll, suppliers, and operating expenses. Other funds may not be needed for weeks or months.
We do not believe all of that money should be treated in the same way. Funds required for immediate payments should remain in appropriate liquid arrangements. For a portion of its treasury that the company can allocate to onchain strategies, Frgmnt can provide access to selected lending opportunities through a more structured interface.
In practice, the finance team would assess its liquidity requirements, define the amount it is prepared to allocate, and select a strategy consistent with its risk constraints and investment horizon. The team would then use reporting and ongoing monitoring to follow its positions.
The objective is not to replace a company's bank or compromise its ability to make payments. It is to give finance teams another way to manage eligible digital-dollar balances while remaining conscious of liquidity, operational, and smart-contract risks.
Ishan Pandey: You have just launched the Founding Allocator Program, initially limited to 10 institutions. Why did you choose to start with a small group and what do you hope to learn by working with the first pilot participants?
Aurélien Roussel: We deliberately chose a small initial group because institutional adoption requires more than a functioning smart contract. It requires confidence in the process around the product: onboarding, strategy selection, reporting, operational procedures, and communication when market conditions change.
Working with ten initial allocators allows us to build those processes closely with the people who will actually use them. We want to understand how their teams evaluate onchain opportunities, what information they need before allocating capital, how they define acceptable liquidity constraints, and what their internal approval processes look like.
The program gives participants access to curated Morpho Vault strategies, with dedicated reporting and regular strategy reviews. In return, their feedback helps us improve both the product and the institutional experience around it.
We see this as a foundation for long-term distribution, rather than simply a short-term acquisition campaign. If we can demonstrate that onchain strategies can be accessed through a disciplined and transparent process, we can build a much stronger basis for broader institutional adoption.
Ishan Pandey: The program includes dedicated reporting, regular strategy reviews and direct access to your team. What will that working relationship look like for an allocator and how will you help its finance team get comfortable with using onchain lending?
Aurélien Roussel: We want the relationship to feel like a working partnership, not simply access to a vault address. Institutions need to understand what they are allocating to, why a strategy has been selected, and what could change its risk profile.
That is why we combine access to selected Morpho Vault strategies with dedicated reporting, regular strategy reviews, and direct communication with our team. The aim is to explain the underlying markets, allocation rationale, liquidity conditions, and the risks that come with onchain lending in language that a finance team can evaluate.
Onboarding is also important. Where relevant, we work with partners such as Anchorage to support the institutional access process and help align the setup with each participant's requirements.
We do not expect trust to come from a presentation or a headline yield figure. It comes from making the strategy understandable, being transparent about its limitations, and maintaining consistent communication. Our role is to help institutions make informed decisions, not to suggest that onchain lending is risk-free.
The Founding Allocator Program extends that route to curated Morpho Vault strategies. Frgmnt states that participants pay no program fees, face no lock-up and can withdraw on the same day under normal operating conditions, with allocations and underlying activity open to review through onchain data as well as dedicated reporting.
Ishan Pandey: The program gives participants access to Morpho Vault strategies curated by Frgmnt. How do you choose the lending opportunities behind those strategies and how do you balance the returns participants are looking for with the liquidity they need?
Aurélien Roussel: We do not look at yield in isolation. A high advertised rate is only useful if the underlying opportunity is compatible with the allocator's risk profile and liquidity requirements.
Our assessment considers several factors: the quality and concentration of collateral, market utilization, borrower demand, liquidity available for withdrawals, smart-contract and oracle risks, and the characteristics of the underlying lending markets. We also look at how quickly conditions can change and whether a strategy remains appropriate under less favorable market scenarios.
From there, allocation is about balancing competing objectives. A strategy designed for capital that may be needed soon should not necessarily look like one designed for a longer investment horizon. We aim to select and adjust allocations based on both the expected return and the risks required to pursue it.
Morpho provides the vault infrastructure, while our curation and allocation approach focuses on selecting suitable opportunities and monitoring their evolution. The goal is not to chase the highest rate at every moment. It is to pursue sustainable, risk-adjusted returns while respecting the constraints that matter to each allocator.
No strategy can eliminate market, liquidity, or protocol risk, and we believe that distinction should remain explicit in every institutional conversation.
Ishan Pandey: How has the move from COO to co-founder and CEO changed the way you spend your time? What part of building Frgmnt has taught you the most about yourself as a founder?
Aurélien Roussel: As a COO, I was primarily focused on making the business work: execution, operations, coordination, and turning priorities into concrete results. As a co-founder and CEO, I still care deeply about execution, but I spend much more time deciding what we should not do, where we should focus, and how to build the right relationships for the long term.
At Frgmnt, that means balancing product development with institutional partnerships, distribution, risk management, fundraising, and team building. In an emerging market, you cannot simply copy a proven playbook. You have to keep learning while making decisions with incomplete information.
The biggest lesson for me has been the importance of focus and credibility. It is tempting to pursue every opportunity in a market as dynamic as DeFi, but a strong business comes from solving a specific problem consistently and earning users' trust over time.
Building Frgmnt has reinforced my belief that ambition and discipline need to go together. We want to build a substantial business, but we need to earn every step of that growth through a product that works and relationships that last.
Ishan Pandey: Last question. If Frgmnt becomes the company you want it to be, how will a finance team’s working day look different? What will it be able to do with its money that it cannot easily do today?
Aurélien Roussel: I would like finance teams to spend less time navigating fragmented infrastructure and more time making decisions about their capital.
Today, accessing onchain opportunities can mean evaluating multiple protocols, understanding different interfaces, monitoring changing rates, and assembling information from several sources. Those are meaningful barriers for a team whose core responsibility is running a business, not managing DeFi positions.
Our ambition is to make that experience much more integrated. A finance team should be able to identify which portion of its stablecoin balances is suitable for deployment, understand the strategy and its risks, access the relevant infrastructure, and monitor its positions through clear reporting.
Over time, we want Frgmnt to become a bridge between stablecoins and institutional treasury management: combining strategy allocation, onchain infrastructure, and a more familiar operating experience.
Ultimately, making money productive should not require businesses to become experts in every layer of the technology. We want to give them more choice over how they manage digital-dollar liquidity, with the transparency to understand what they are doing and the controls to make decisions responsibly.
Don’t forget to like and share the story!
Frgmnt is a stablecoin protocol on Base that curates non-custodial Morpho Vault strategies for institutions while its Founding Allocator Program gives an initial cohort of 10 institutional allocators access to those strategies with onboarding through Anchorage Digital, dedicated reporting and regular strategy reviews. Today we sit down with Aurélien Roussel, co-founder and CEO of Frgmnt and former chief operating officer of Bricks.co, to discuss how a finance team decides which part of its treasury belongs onchain, how Frgmnt chooses the lending opportunities behind its strategies and what he hopes to learn from the first ten institutions.
Ishan Pandey: Hi Aurélien, welcome to our "Behind the Startup" series. You moved from helping scale Bricks.co to founding Frgmnt. Take us through that journey. What drew you toward stablecoins and how did you decide it was time to build something of your own?
Aurélien Roussel: My experience at Bricks.co taught me how to build and scale a financial product around a simple idea: making investment opportunities more accessible to a much broader audience. It also showed me that technology alone is not enough. You need a product people understand, a reliable operating model, and above all, trust.
When I started looking more closely at digital assets, stablecoins stood out to me. They had already become an important part of the financial system, but much of that capital was still sitting idle or earning yield through fragmented, complex DeFi strategies.
I saw an opportunity to bring those worlds closer together: the simplicity and utility of stablecoins with the efficiency of onchain finance. Frgmnt came from that conviction. I wanted to build something of our own that could make this infrastructure genuinely useful, first for individual users and increasingly for businesses and institutions.
Ishan Pandey: Why did you choose to build Frgmnt around making stablecoin capital productive? Was there a particular experience or conversation that made the opportunity clear to you and how did you decide what to build first?
Aurélien Roussel: It was less one particular conversation than a recurring observation: people were adopting stablecoins as a way to hold and transfer dollars digitally, but making those dollars productive often required them to understand multiple protocols, compare rates, manage liquidity, and take responsibility for operational complexity.
That creates a gap between what the technology can do and what most users are comfortable doing themselves. For a business, the challenge is even greater because capital allocation also involves internal controls, reporting, and risk management.
We decided to start with the core problem: how to allocate stablecoin capital across selected onchain lending strategies without forcing users to manage every underlying position themselves. Frgmnt combines stablecoin infrastructure with a strategy allocation layer designed to assess opportunities and manage allocations as conditions change.
The principle is simple: users should not need to become DeFi specialists to access onchain financial infrastructure. Our job is to make that infrastructure easier to use, easier to monitor, and more relevant to real financial needs.
Ishan Pandey: A finance team might need to make payments tomorrow while holding other funds for several months. Where does Frgmnt fit into that picture and how would the team use it in practice?
Aurélien Roussel: The starting point is to recognize that not all treasury capital has the same purpose or time horizon. A company needs immediate liquidity for payroll, suppliers, and operating expenses. Other funds may not be needed for weeks or months.
We do not believe all of that money should be treated in the same way. Funds required for immediate payments should remain in appropriate liquid arrangements. For a portion of its treasury that the company can allocate to onchain strategies, Frgmnt can provide access to selected lending opportunities through a more structured interface.
In practice, the finance team would assess its liquidity requirements, define the amount it is prepared to allocate, and select a strategy consistent with its risk constraints and investment horizon. The team would then use reporting and ongoing monitoring to follow its positions.
The objective is not to replace a company's bank or compromise its ability to make payments. It is to give finance teams another way to manage eligible digital-dollar balances while remaining conscious of liquidity, operational, and smart-contract risks.
Ishan Pandey: You have just launched the Founding Allocator Program, initially limited to 10 institutions. Why did you choose to start with a small group and what do you hope to learn by working with the first pilot participants?
Aurélien Roussel: We deliberately chose a small initial group because institutional adoption requires more than a functioning smart contract. It requires confidence in the process around the product: onboarding, strategy selection, reporting, operational procedures, and communication when market conditions change.
Working with ten initial allocators allows us to build those processes closely with the people who will actually use them. We want to understand how their teams evaluate onchain opportunities, what information they need before allocating capital, how they define acceptable liquidity constraints, and what their internal approval processes look like.
The program gives participants access to curated Morpho Vault strategies, with dedicated reporting and regular strategy reviews. In return, their feedback helps us improve both the product and the institutional experience around it.
We see this as a foundation for long-term distribution, rather than simply a short-term acquisition campaign. If we can demonstrate that onchain strategies can be accessed through a disciplined and transparent process, we can build a much stronger basis for broader institutional adoption.
Ishan Pandey: The program includes dedicated reporting, regular strategy reviews and direct access to your team. What will that working relationship look like for an allocator and how will you help its finance team get comfortable with using onchain lending?
Aurélien Roussel: We want the relationship to feel like a working partnership, not simply access to a vault address. Institutions need to understand what they are allocating to, why a strategy has been selected, and what could change its risk profile.
That is why we combine access to selected Morpho Vault strategies with dedicated reporting, regular strategy reviews, and direct communication with our team. The aim is to explain the underlying markets, allocation rationale, liquidity conditions, and the risks that come with onchain lending in language that a finance team can evaluate.
Onboarding is also important. Where relevant, we work with partners such as Anchorage to support the institutional access process and help align the setup with each participant's requirements.
We do not expect trust to come from a presentation or a headline yield figure. It comes from making the strategy understandable, being transparent about its limitations, and maintaining consistent communication. Our role is to help institutions make informed decisions, not to suggest that onchain lending is risk-free.
The Founding Allocator Program extends that route to curated Morpho Vault strategies. Frgmnt states that participants pay no program fees, face no lock-up and can withdraw on the same day under normal operating conditions, with allocations and underlying activity open to review through onchain data as well as dedicated reporting.
Ishan Pandey: The program gives participants access to Morpho Vault strategies curated by Frgmnt. How do you choose the lending opportunities behind those strategies and how do you balance the returns participants are looking for with the liquidity they need?
Aurélien Roussel: We do not look at yield in isolation. A high advertised rate is only useful if the underlying opportunity is compatible with the allocator's risk profile and liquidity requirements.
Our assessment considers several factors: the quality and concentration of collateral, market utilization, borrower demand, liquidity available for withdrawals, smart-contract and oracle risks, and the characteristics of the underlying lending markets. We also look at how quickly conditions can change and whether a strategy remains appropriate under less favorable market scenarios.
From there, allocation is about balancing competing objectives. A strategy designed for capital that may be needed soon should not necessarily look like one designed for a longer investment horizon. We aim to select and adjust allocations based on both the expected return and the risks required to pursue it.
Morpho provides the vault infrastructure, while our curation and allocation approach focuses on selecting suitable opportunities and monitoring their evolution. The goal is not to chase the highest rate at every moment. It is to pursue sustainable, risk-adjusted returns while respecting the constraints that matter to each allocator.
No strategy can eliminate market, liquidity, or protocol risk, and we believe that distinction should remain explicit in every institutional conversation.
Ishan Pandey: How has the move from COO to co-founder and CEO changed the way you spend your time? What part of building Frgmnt has taught you the most about yourself as a founder?
Aurélien Roussel: As a COO, I was primarily focused on making the business work: execution, operations, coordination, and turning priorities into concrete results. As a co-founder and CEO, I still care deeply about execution, but I spend much more time deciding what we should not do, where we should focus, and how to build the right relationships for the long term.
At Frgmnt, that means balancing product development with institutional partnerships, distribution, risk management, fundraising, and team building. In an emerging market, you cannot simply copy a proven playbook. You have to keep learning while making decisions with incomplete information.
The biggest lesson for me has been the importance of focus and credibility. It is tempting to pursue every opportunity in a market as dynamic as DeFi, but a strong business comes from solving a specific problem consistently and earning users' trust over time.
Building Frgmnt has reinforced my belief that ambition and discipline need to go together. We want to build a substantial business, but we need to earn every step of that growth through a product that works and relationships that last.
Ishan Pandey: Last question. If Frgmnt becomes the company you want it to be, how will a finance team’s working day look different? What will it be able to do with its money that it cannot easily do today?
Aurélien Roussel: I would like finance teams to spend less time navigating fragmented infrastructure and more time making decisions about their capital.
Today, accessing onchain opportunities can mean evaluating multiple protocols, understanding different interfaces, monitoring changing rates, and assembling information from several sources. Those are meaningful barriers for a team whose core responsibility is running a business, not managing DeFi positions.
Our ambition is to make that experience much more integrated. A finance team should be able to identify which portion of its stablecoin balances is suitable for deployment, understand the strategy and its risks, access the relevant infrastructure, and monitor its positions through clear reporting.
Over time, we want Frgmnt to become a bridge between stablecoins and institutional treasury management: combining strategy allocation, onchain infrastructure, and a more familiar operating experience.
Ultimately, making money productive should not require businesses to become experts in every layer of the technology. We want to give them more choice over how they manage digital-dollar liquidity, with the transparency to understand what they are doing and the controls to make decisions responsibly.
Don’t forget to like and share the story!