Kiln to launch Railnet protocol for institutional onchain asset management

Kiln, an institutional onchain asset and yield management platform with more than $18 billion in assets delegated in 2025, has unveiled Railnet, a new protocol designed to streamline and scale institutional capital deployment onchain.

In a statement shared with The Block, the company said Railnet will allow regulated asset managers to build structured strategies across stablecoins, tokenized assets, and real-world yield sources, with distribution through neobanks, custodians, exchanges, and wallet providers.

Users can then deploy capital into those strategies based on a manager’s reputation and performance track record, with funds held in non-custodial contracts that deploy directly to underlying protocols and assets selected by the financial institution, Kiln explained. The asset managers collect performance fees when strategies exceed expectations.

Scheduled to launch in the first quarter of 2026, industry partners including Sentora, Chainlink, Ondo Finance, Ethena, and Safe are among the first planning to use Railnet infrastructure, according to Kiln.

Addressing idle and underutilized capital

Kiln said Railnet aims to make capital more productive across DeFi, RWAs, and tokenized markets, particularly as large amounts of assets remain underutilized. The firm cited a stablecoin economy growing 30% year-over-year, while more than $250 billion in stablecoins sit idle. It added that trillions of dollars in tokenized assets are moving onchain without sufficient infrastructure to deploy them, while regulated managers face gaps in KYC workflows, settlement tools, compliance systems, and cross-protocol deployment rails.

"Making capital productive at institutional scale requires neutral infrastructure," Kiln CEO Laszlo Szabo said. "Railnet provides the open standard that makes every yield source composable, enabling asset managers, including regulated institutions, to launch sophisticated strategies faster than ever before and giving both existing and new users access to yield products that were once reserved for a few."

Railnet's core architecture is built around "Vehicles," smart contracts that implement STEAM — the State Transition Engine for Asset Management — an open standard for managing capital flows. Each Vehicle wraps a specific asset type or protocol — from DeFi lending markets to tokenized treasury funds or staking positions — with a unified framework for deposits and withdrawals. Kiln said Vehicles allow strategies to interact with both instant-settlement and compliance-gated assets consistently.

Asset managers compose strategies by allocating across multiple Vehicles, covering categories such as liquid staking, DeFi lending, and RWAs based on yields and risk parameters. Because every Vehicle follows the same standard, new yield sources can be integrated by building a single Vehicle, which then becomes accessible to all strategies on Railnet, Kiln explained.

Unlike protocols that compete for deposits, Railnet is designed as a neutral infrastructure and is permissionless, allowing any institution to create strategies and any platform to integrate them.

"Protocols implement the STEAM standard to gain access to asset managers. Asset managers create strategies without rebuilding infrastructure. Platforms integrate strategies to offer them to users," Kiln said.

Railnet is currently live in testing on Base mainnet, with plans to expand to Ethereum, BNB Chain, Optimism, Arbitrum, Cronos, and Polygon. The firm expects security audits from Spearbit and Trail of Bits to be completed ahead of the launch.