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New York, United States, September 16th, 2026, Chainwire
Co-founder John Lilic to lay out Tria’s institutional self-custody thesis as the company brings the infrastructure behind its profitable global neobank to major platforms
Tria, the self-custodial neofinance platform for trading, earning, spending and moving assets across chains, today announced a major presence at Korea Blockchain Week 2026 (KBW2026), joining as a Diamond Sponsor and bringing CEO Vijit Katta and Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer John Lilic to Seoul.
Tria is one of only two Diamond Sponsors announced for KBW2026, which runs September 29 through October 1. The sponsorship comes as Tria deepens its presence in Asia and begins taking the infrastructure proven inside its own consumer neobank to institutions and large platforms building financial products for their existing audiences.
Tria’s thesis is that every company with a large audience increasingly has the opportunity to become a financial company. The obstacle is the years of infrastructure work required to get there: custody, compliance, fiat connectivity, blockchain integrations, liquidity and settlement, often stitched together across vendors that were never designed to operate as one system.
Tria has collapsed those layers into a single stack combining banking-grade self-custody, multi-chain settlement, proprietary BestPath routing and a unified compliance layer across fiat and blockchain networks. It proved the stack first by building and operating its own global neobank on top of it.
Nine months after launch, Tria has more than 600k unique accounts across 150+ countries, has generated more than $8.5 million in revenue and became profitable in its eighth month, with zero paid customer acquisition. Japan and Korea together account for nearly two-thirds of revenue, giving Tria significant operating exposure to two of the world’s most sophisticated digital-asset markets.
“Japan and Korea are showing us what happens when sophisticated users stop accepting a tradeoff between usability and ownership,” said Vijit Katta, CEO of Tria. “We built Tria to prove that self-custody can feel as seamless as the best fintech products. Now we’re giving institutions that same infrastructure so they can build for millions of users without spending years recreating it.”
At KBW2026, Lilic will present “The Self-Custodial Banking Stack Institutions Build On,” examining why self-custody is evolving from a crypto-native principle into an infrastructure model for mainstream financial products. He will address what Tria learned operating the stack at consumer scale, why fragmented custody, compliance and blockchain systems break down as companies grow, and how institutions can embed financial products without exposing users to the complexity underneath them.
The institutional rollout has already begun. Lissen, a music streaming and creator economy platform reaching more than 12 million artists has signed to launch on Tria’s infrastructure, while the digital venture arm of one of the world’s largest entertainment companies has signed an MOU, with both expected to move from integration to market in months rather than years.
Those deployments also strengthen the underlying network. Consumer and institutional volume run through the same routing infrastructure and common identity and compliance architecture, meaning each additional platform brings more transaction activity, routing intelligence and history that future deployments can inherit.
“Crypto has spent years talking about bringing institutions onchain, but the harder problem is giving institutions infrastructure they can actually build their high margin products on,” said John Lilic, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Tria. “A music platform, marketplace or consumer app should not need to become an expert in custody, liquidity, compliance and dozens of chains before it can offer a financial product. Those problems should disappear into the infrastructure while the user keeps control.”
Tria’s consumer platform currently enables users to trade, earn, spend and move assets across more than 200 chains while retaining control of their funds, with card payments available across more than 150 countries. The same infrastructure is now being opened to companies that already have distribution but do not want to spend years assembling the financial and blockchain systems required to serve their users.
Katta and Lilic will be available for media meetings in Seoul during Korea Blockchain Week and for advance interviews ahead of the event. They can discuss Tria’s growth in Korea and Japan, the institutional case for self-custody, why major consumer platforms are moving into financial services, and what Tria learned from building a profitable neobank on its own infrastructure.
To book a meeting in advance of KBW or at the event, contact Tria@PhillComm.Global.
About Tria
Tria is a self-custodial neofinance platform enabling users to trade, earn, spend and move assets across more than 200 blockchains while maintaining control of their funds, with card payments available across more than 150 countries. Its proprietary BestPath technology routes transactions across chains and liquidity sources, while the same underlying infrastructure is being opened to institutions and platforms building financial products for their own users.
Contact
Jon Phillips
PhillComm Global
Tria@PhillComm.Global
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This article is not intended as financial advice. Educational purposes only.
