The people buildingthe future of finance.

Who he is

Justin Walton is an entrepreneur, business executive and the Chief Executive Officer of Yieldz Holdings, Inc., where he leads corporate strategy, business development, capital formation and the company's expansion across the private capital markets and financial services. He is the architect of the Yieldz model — the idea that a real-world asset should be tokenized only when something real stands beneath it — and the person who assembled the bankers, capital-markets professionals, insurance executives and engineers who are building it.

He is a fourth-generation homebuilder and real estate developer. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather were builders, and he grew up in the business — working as a laborer, a framer and a skilled craftsman before he was an architectural designer, then selling and building homes through college with the family company, Diamond Custom Homes, on Lake Conroe. He earned his real estate license a week after graduating high school and a B.S. in Marketing from Sam Houston State University while wearing every hat the business had: sales, design, construction superintendent.

Thirty years of operating

Walton's corporate career was spent inside one of the largest production homebuilding operations in the country. At Emerald Homes, a division of D.R. Horton in Houston producing roughly 1,000 homes a year, he rose from Construction Manager — setting record production rankings — to Estimating and Architectural Manager, and then to Vice President of Purchasing, Architecture, Estimating and Design Center, managing a staff of twenty. He implemented the Continental line of homes for the Houston division to capture the entry-level housing boom that began in 2002, and negotiated some of the largest rebate savings of any division in the company, roughly $4,200 per unit. He went on to serve as Division President of Design Tech Homes in San Antonio, a full-service design-build custom builder producing 85 homes a year, responsible for the entire operation.

Then he built his own companies. He founded This New House to take raw land through entitlement to finished high-density townhomes and single-family homes in Houston, working directly with land planners, engineers, and city and county agencies. He founded and grew HG Walton Homes — later Black Oak Homes — into a 25-to-35-unit-a-year land development and custom home builder doing roughly $15 million in annual sales at its peak, and sold it to former colleagues from Emerald Homes: first-hand experience building an operating business through growth to a completed transaction. He founded JL Classic Homes, LJR Properties (a 24-unit build-to-rent duplex community), Black Oak Industries (commercial office condominiums on FM 1488 in Magnolia), Buildology (the marketing and digital-advertising arm that has supported every venture since), JL2E Investments, and The Mods Student Housing in the Bryan–College Station market. Across those companies he has taken projects from raw land to entitlement to completion, managed operations building homes from $150,000 to $1.5 million, and run businesses through recessions, booms and a pandemic.

The builder's instinct, applied to finance

Walton's passion for building and optimizing computers led him to construct his first Bitcoin mining rig in 2011–2012. That interest in extracting maximum performance from hardware became a company — Yieldz Consulting, then Yieldz, Inc. — that integrated mining operations under one platform and shipped its own wallet. It also taught him something a developer already knew from the other direction: capital is the constraint on every good project, and the market for private capital has none of the infrastructure — the listings, the comparables, the title company — that makes the real estate market work.

Yieldz Holdings is his answer. Under his leadership the company has developed an integrated set of services and technology around business valuation, capital-readiness planning, private securities offerings, digital securities and asset tokenization, investor data-room preparation and strategic capital advisory. It works alongside broker-dealers, securities attorneys, insurance professionals, valuation firms, financial institutions and technology providers to create compliant pathways for companies pursuing private capital — always with regulated activities conducted by appropriately licensed professionals within the proper regulatory framework.

The single most consequential decision in the model is his: every asset tokenized on Yieldz carries cash-value life insurance on its principals sized to cover or exceed its valuation. A builder knows what a lender needs to see before it funds a project. Sophisticated capital checks structure first — and improper structure, no key-man coverage, no buy/sell agreement, is the deal-killer past the elevator pitch. Walton made that structure the entry key to the platform, and in doing so gave investors continuity, gave founders the structure they were missing, and gave a bank an instrument it has understood for a hundred years.

What he owns at Yieldz

Walton sets the strategy and designs the products. The Yieldz VC accelerator that invests in founders first, the Capital Raise Blueprint and the Capital Concierge role, the tokenized Yieldz Club memberships, the Yieldz Capital Summit at the U.S. Formula 1 weekend, the nationally marketed Texas membership program, the Yall'aco entertainment-district proposal to Circuit of the Americas, the Poly DZ joint-venture structure for the bank and stablecoin — each began as his architecture. He personally leads relationships with banks and carriers, broker-dealers, ultra-high-net-worth investors, racing partners and COTA, and he serves as developer of record through JL2E Investments on the Elsinore Ring private-track and residential development in Lake Elsinore, California — a $75 million-infrastructure project engineered by Tilke that is positioned to become one of the largest real-world assets ever tokenized. He is a licensed insurance professional with existing carrier contracts, and he remains a working real estate developer.

Throughout his career he has done one thing in different forms: build operating businesses, identify the financial opportunity inside them, assemble the executive and professional teams to execute, and connect companies with the capital, institutions and strategic partners they need. Yieldz Holdings is that same discipline at the scale of a financial system.

Who she is

Andrea Perlak, CPA, is a senior banking and finance executive with more than twenty-five years of experience in regulated financial institutions, treasury and capital markets, risk management, financial reporting, internal controls, audit and corporate governance. Her career has run through the three institutions that define institutional finance — a Big Four accounting firm, a publicly traded U.S. bank and The World Bank — and in each she held the roles where the numbers have to be right: auditor, controller, financial lead for a treasury operation.

As Chief Financial Officer of Yieldz Holdings she is responsible for the company's finance function, controls and governance, and for building the institutional-grade financial reporting that a bank charter application, a broker-dealer registration and an institutional investor base all require. More recently, she has applied that institutional banking and risk-management experience to digital-asset financial infrastructure, focusing on the financial, regulatory, operational, risk and governance frameworks required for institutional financial products and emerging financial technologies. That is a rare combination — and it is precisely the one Yieldz needs.

Capital markets at the largest scale

At The World Bank, Perlak served as Senior Financial Lead in Capital Markets Operations and Treasury, overseeing functions supporting a $100 billion bond and derivatives portfolio. Her responsibilities included financial and operational risk management, valuation, collateral analysis, settlement, controls and reconciliations, financial reporting, and coordination across the front, middle and back offices. She led those functions during the global financial crisis, managing complex financial and operational issues in one of the most controlled institutional environments in the world, at the moment when counterparties, collateral and settlement mattered most.

Every part of that job maps onto what Yieldz is building. A tokenization platform with a dollar settlement rail is, operationally, a settlement and reconciliation business. A stablecoin backed one-to-one by dollars in a bank account is a reserve, valuation and controls problem. A bank that lends against the cash value of insurance policies is a collateral-analysis problem. Perlak has run each of those functions at a scale and under a scrutiny that few financial-technology companies can claim on their leadership team.

Inside a public bank

Perlak served as Controller and Vice President of Technical Accounting for First Charter Bank, a mid-tier publicly traded U.S. bank, where she was a member of senior leadership and executive advisor to the Chief Financial Officer. She oversaw SEC and regulatory financial reporting, accounting, technical accounting policy and SOX/internal controls, and worked closely with Treasury, Asset Liability Management, Internal Audit, external auditors and the other control functions of the institution. She also led bank M&A due diligence and integration — regulatory filings, the valuation of loans, deposits and investments, and acquisition accounting — the technical core of the very transactions Yieldz Holdings contemplates as it evaluates ownership interests in banks.

Where the discipline was formed

Perlak began her career at KPMG, working across Risk Advisory, CFO Advisory and Audit. Her engagements included Sarbanes-Oxley implementation, banking treasury and cash-management engagements, internal controls, and establishing an Internal Audit function consistent with NASDAQ and Institute of Internal Auditors standards. She holds a B.S. from Wake Forest University's Calloway School of Business and is a Certified Public Accountant.

What she owns at Yieldz

Perlak is building the finance and governance infrastructure of a company that intends to hold a bank, a broker-dealer and an insurance distributor under one parent: the financial reporting and controls of Yieldz Holdings; the capital model, projections and affiliate-transaction framework behind the Yieldz Bank offering; the reserve, reconciliation and reporting standards for the USDZ settlement rail; and the risk and governance frameworks that let tokenized instruments sit inside a regulated institution. She brings to a growth company the thing growth companies most often lack — an institutional control environment built by someone who has run one — and she brings to regulators, bank boards and institutional investors a counterpart who speaks their language because it is her own.

For the future of finance Yieldz is building, that matters more than it might in an ordinary fintech. The whole thesis is that tokenized assets earn trust when a bank and an insurer stand behind them. Trust, in a regulated institution, is a controls function. Perlak is the person who makes it real.

Who he is

Ethan Walton is a technology executive, entrepreneur and the Chief Technology Officer of Yieldz, responsible for the company's technology strategy, platform architecture, technical infrastructure and the continued development of its financial-technology ecosystem. He has been involved with Yieldz since its earliest development, is an original shareholder and a member of the leadership team, and has served in corporate governance roles within the organization, including as a director and Secretary of YieldZ, Inc.

Most financial-technology companies of Yieldz's ambition run on someone else's rails. Yieldz runs on Ethan's. He built the Yieldz wallet himself, and he leads the development of the rest of the platform — the minting engine, the marketplace and the ecosystem around them are built to his architecture by a development team working under his direction. He has also played the central role in the development and ownership of the intellectual property associated with the platform as the company progressed from its original concept into a broader financial-technology organization. That ownership is a strategic asset: in a category where Pantera Capital finds that 77.6% of tokenized assets are mere wrappers around off-chain processes, Yieldz's ability to build native on-chain issuance, custody and settlement in-house is the difference between renting the future and owning it.

What he has built

The Yieldz App is the ecosystem in a pocket, and its foundation is the self-custody wallet: a multi-party-computation wallet with no seed phrase to lose, built on 2-of-2 key shares, one held on the user's device and one by Yieldz, so that Yieldz never holds a client's assets and cannot move them without the client. On that foundation he leads the development of everything else — native minting of Yieldz's own tokens; personal and business wallets; portfolio tracking; the ability to hold tokenized offerings, memberships and event tickets; and the mint, hold and redeem flows for USDZ — each designed by him and built by the development team he directs. He designed the peer-to-peer and automated-market-maker marketplace — swap-first, with an order book, compliance gate, settlement and liquidity pool behind it — and he is leading development of the membership smart-contract framework on Polygon, Yieldz's EVM chain, along with the integrations that let a credit-card purchase mint a token straight into a self-custody wallet for a buyer who has never owned a stablecoin or a wallet. Fiat-first onboarding to tokenization is the mass-market unlock for the entire platform, and it is his architecture.

Building something revolutionary

It is worth stating plainly what the Chief Technology Officer of Yieldz is actually doing. He is building the first true blockchain-to-blockchain financial platform — one where an investment originates on-chain and settles on-chain, end to end, through a bank-backed dollar rail — at the same time as the company builds the bank that will back it. He built, with his own hands, the wallet a regulator can be comfortable with because the company can never move a client's funds, and the wallet a first-time buyer can be comfortable with because there is no seed phrase to lose. He is leading the development of the issuance engine that lets a founder's company, a race team's season, a private track, a copper reserve or a Texas membership become a compliant digital asset with key-person coverage beneath it. And he is doing it as an owner — directing the development team that executes the vision, protecting and expanding the company's intellectual property, and working alongside Yieldz's executive leadership to evaluate new technologies, develop scalable systems and establish the technical foundation for the organization's long-term growth.

His professional focus is on building technology that bridges traditional private capital markets and financial services with emerging digital infrastructure, while ensuring that Yieldz's technology is capable of operating alongside appropriately licensed, regulated and professional financial-services organizations. The Bank of Tomorrow will not be built by bankers alone. It will be built by bankers, and by the engineer who gives them rails worthy of a charter.

Who he is

Steve Harper is a senior banking and finance executive with forty-five years of finance, banking and regulatory experience. His career spans the full arc of a bank's life: he has supervised institutions as a regulator, founded and run one as its chief executive, financed companies as a corporate treasurer, and restructured hundreds of millions of dollars of troubled credit as a consultant. Few bankers have worked every one of those seats. Fewer still have done it across the community-bank scale — from $100 million to $3 billion in assets — that a de novo institution must grow through.

At Yieldz he leads Yieldz Financial Services, the entity responsible for the company's bank strategy and its premium-finance lending products, and he is the proposed Chief Executive Officer of Yieldz Bank. He is, in the words of the Yieldz Bank offering, among the strongest attributes of the application: management depth is a principal factor in a regulator's review of a de novo charter, and Harper brings the depth regulators recognize because he was one.

The regulator

Early in his career Harper served as an Examiner-in-Charge for federal and state financial regulatory agencies, leading examinations of financial institutions ranging from approximately $100 million to $3 billion in assets. An Examiner-in-Charge does not audit a bank; he judges it — its asset quality, its credit risk, the adequacy of its capital and its management, the honesty of its books — and he writes the report the bank's board and the agency act on. Harper also developed asset-search functions supporting the RTC/FDIC Gulf Coast Region during the resolution of the savings-and-loan era, tracing and recovering assets from failed institutions. He is a Certified Financial Examiner.

That experience is not a line on a résumé at Yieldz; it is an operating advantage. A de novo application is written to be examined. The business plan, the capital adequacy, the internal controls, the management team and the projected performance are all read by people who do what Harper did. He knows how the plan will be read because he read them.

The banker

Harper founded Brazos Valley Bank and served as its President and Chief Executive Officer, growing the de novo institution to approximately $200 million in assets. He has already done, once, the thing Yieldz Bank is setting out to do: take a charter from an application to a functioning community bank with a real balance sheet, real depositors and a loan book that passed examination. His career also includes senior executive leadership in private industry, where he was responsible for corporate finance, treasury, risk management, accounting and capital strategy, including structuring significant institutional financing to support company growth — the borrower's side of the table, which every good lender should have sat at.

His career encompasses commercial lending, credit administration, regulatory compliance, bank operations, capital formation, liquidity and cash management, financial restructuring and executive leadership. He has originated and managed multimillion-dollar credit portfolios, driven cost-saving initiatives and led organizational restructures, and he brings a deep network of private-equity and banking relationships — the relationships that a de novo bank's deposit and loan migration ultimately depends on.

The workout specialist

Harper's consulting and restructuring record is the education a banker gets only after the cycle turns: approximately $30 million in multifamily debt restructurings, $300 million in real estate litigation matters and $100 million in bankruptcy-related principal-balance workouts. He has placed approximately $60 million in non-conventional commercial loans and performed due diligence on loan portfolios exceeding $400 million. He has seen what goes wrong with real estate credit, multifamily credit and commercial credit when underwriting is loose, and he has been the one hired to fix it. That is the credit culture he brings to a bank whose primary lending will be secured by cash value rather than by hope.

What he owns at Yieldz

Harper is critically important to the development of the new loan products being introduced through Yieldz Holdings — premium-finance lending against cash-value life insurance, the Premium Finance Protection Facility that offers partner banks credit enhancement, and the bank's conventional community-banking book. He leads the charter effort itself: the choice of jurisdiction and charter type (a Wyoming de novo, with a Texas charter path under evaluation), the composition of a bank board weighted toward career bankers and former regulators, the FDIC deposit-insurance application under the agency's new two-phase process, and the recruitment of the bank's senior officers. He has a proven track record of delivering new financial products to the market, and he is doing it again.

For a regulator reviewing the application, for the board of a bank Yieldz may acquire an interest in, or for a premium-finance lender deciding whether to partner, Harper is the answer to the first question they will ask: who here has actually run a bank?

Who he is

Geoff Reeves is the Chief Executive Officer of Yieldz Motorsport — the racing program that is Yieldz's first tokenized asset, its most public proof of the model, and the venue where the entire Yieldz ecosystem meets in person. He came to the role by an unusual road: eight years as an officer in the United States Navy SEAL teams, a second career representing the world's luxury and performance car brands, and a third as a professional racing driver, instructor and, today, the driver of the official pace and safety car for every series that races under the SRO banner in America.

After leaving the Navy, Reeves's passion for cars led him to represent major luxury and performance brands across the country. That work, and on-camera experience in Los Angeles, brought invitations around the country and overseas to test drive, review and host the latest creations from the automotive industry. Wanting more, he sought out and trained at several of the best high-performance racing schools in the country. His determination found him sponsorship, and he began racing professionally in the Grand-Am Continental Tire Series with a Nissan team. After several seasons in the endurance format, he moved to sprint racing in the Pirelli World Challenge with a Chevrolet-backed Camaro team. He also taught at the famed Bob Bondurant High Performance Driving School in Chandler, Arizona — teaching the public to become better drivers on the road, and others the skills needed to compete on a race track.

Fifteen years at the top of the sport's commercial world

For the last fifteen years, luxury manufacturers and dealerships — Lamborghini, Ferrari, Aston Martin, McLaren and Rolls-Royce among them — have hired Reeves to represent their models at special events, on the road and on the race track, assisting prospective buyers and demonstrating what the cars can do. From Amelia Island and Pebble Beach to global unveilings, media launches and private track days, he has spoken to and driven countless media, buyers and enthusiasts. His abilities on track made him a recurring hot-lap driver for a premier British performance brand at both American Formula 1 circuits and premier IMSA races, putting invited influencers and VIPs in the right seat for laps they remember for a lifetime. He is the founder of Apex Club International, and he continues to work at the center of the sport as the official pace and safety car driver for all five series that race under SRO America.

That résumé matters to Yieldz for a specific reason. The people who buy Lamborghinis and Aston Martins at Pebble Beach, who sit in the right seat for a hot lap at Circuit of the Americas, and who spend race weekends in the paddock are the same people who write checks into private companies. Reeves has spent fifteen years earning their trust one lap at a time.

What he owns at Yieldz

Reeves leads Yieldz Motorsport: the racing program itself — the team, the drivers, the series calendar and the road from GT3 toward a tokenized Formula 1 team — and its four token lines: ownership, sponsorship, membership and driver seats. He owns the experience layer that surrounds it: the Yieldz Capital Summit at the U.S. Formula 1 weekend in Austin, the Yieldz Club trackside membership community at Circuit of the Americas, the race weekends and private track days where Yieldz issuers host the investors they need, and the relationships with the drivers, manufacturers, series and circuits that make those rooms possible. He is the person who can put a founder, a family office and a race car in the same place on the same afternoon — and make the afternoon worth remembering.

For a company whose positioning is that platforms don't write checks, people do, that is not a hospitality function. It is how the network grows: the rooms bring together the next issuers and the next investors. Reeves — SEAL officer, professional driver, instructor, brand ambassador and pace-car driver for an entire racing series — is the executive who makes the rooms real.