Nouriel Roubini, the economist who built a career warning about financial bubbles and once called Bitcoin the “mother of all scams,” is launching USAFi, a blockchain-based token backed by the $17 million Atlas America Fund.

Developed with BlackRock-backed Securitize under Dubai’s VARA framework, the product targets international investors and reflects growing institutional adoption of tokenized real-world assets.

From Dr. Doom to DeFi convert

Roubini first entered the asset management world with the Atlas America Fund, which launched in late 2024 on Nasdaq. The actively managed, multi-asset ETF bundles US Treasury bonds, gold, real estate investment trusts, and food commodities into a single vehicle designed to help weather economic turbulence.

The fund is managed by Roubini alongside Carlo Zola and Puneet Agarwal. It marked Roubini’s first venture into the ETF space, a major departure for an academic economist better known for forecasting the 2008 financial crisis than for building investment products.

Atlas Capital Team had already been exploring the intersection of traditional assets and fintech innovation as early as 2023, including climate-related tokens. USAFi is the next step on that trajectory: turning a regulated, Nasdaq-listed ETF into a tokenized structure that can trade outside traditional market hours.

Why tokenizing an ETF matters

This is someone who testified before the US Senate in 2018 and called blockchain “the most overhyped technology ever.” The pivot reflects the growing trend in financial markets to tokenize assets and distribute them on-chain.

The permissionless nature of the USAFi token is a key design choice. Unlike tokenized securities that restrict who can hold or trade them, a permissionless token is accessible to anyone with a compatible wallet. That makes it a potentially broader-access vehicle for a diversified, institutional-style portfolio.