From 'Dr. Doom' to DeFi: Longtime Crypto Critic Nouriel Roubini Launches Tokenized Fund 'USAFi'

It is a plot twist that few in the web3 space could have predicted. Dr. Nouriel Roubini—the NYU economist famously dubbed "Dr. Doom" who spent years calling Bitcoin the "mother of all scams" and blockchain "the most overhyped technology ever"—has officially launched a blockchain-backed token.

On June 23, 2026, Roubini’s asset management firm, Atlas Capital Team, and its subsidiary Atlas AI Labs, unveiled USAFi. Positioned as the world's first regulated, permissionless security, USAFi is a tokenized representation of Roubini's actively managed, Nasdaq-listed ETF, the Atlas America Fund (ticker: USAF).

The Anatomy of USAFi and the "Technodollar"

USAFi is a permissionless ERC-20 token built to function as a highly resilient, yield-bearing reserve asset. Unlike algorithmic stablecoins or speculative cryptocurrencies, USAFi is backed 100% by the tangible assets in the $17 million USAF fund: US Treasuries, gold, real estate investment trusts (REITs), and food and strategic commodities.

Coinciding with the token's launch, Roubini co-authored a whitepaper defining the global economy's transition to what he calls the "Technodollar".

"For years I argued that most digital assets offered no protection from inflation or economic shocks because they had no real assets behind them," Roubini explained. "What Atlas has built is different... It is designed to hold value when any single market breaks."

By converting a regulated ETF into a permissionless token, USAFi allows institutional investors outside the US to access high-grade collateral that trades and settles 24/7 on DeFi rails without the friction of conventional brokerage hours.

Securitize and BNY Power the Back-End

To pull off this structural feat, Atlas partnered with Securitize, the BlackRock-backed tokenization pioneer. The underlying reserve assets are custodied by the Bank of New York (BNY), while the token itself will launch under the regulatory supervision of Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA).

USAFi is issued under VARA’s Asset Referenced Virtual Asset Rulebook, creating a compliant, secure bridge between traditional capital markets and decentralized finance.

The Trillion-Dollar RWA Squeeze

Roubini’s pivot is the ultimate validation of the Real-World Asset (RWA) tokenization boom. According to data from rwa.xyz, the value of tokenized assets on-chain has exploded from roughly $6 billion at the start of 2025 to over $32 billion by mid-2026.

As institutions like BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase aggressively migrate traditional financial products to the blockchain, Roubini’s transition from a hostile critic to a blockchain architect highlights a fundamental truth: the efficiency of blockchain technology is far too immense for Wall Street to ignore.