How Do Tokenized Equities Work? Ft. BlackRock’s Head of Digital Assets

Petrit Berisha  0:10  

Welcome to tokenized. The show focused on stable coins and the institutional adoption of tokenized real world assets, and this time, we're live in New York City during digital asset Summit. You That was pretty good. Nice one. My name is pet barisha, co creator of tokenize, filling in for Simon this week, but at least it's like for like with British accents, I'm joined by the always fantastic and returning for what missed via record equaling time on the show. Rob had a GP at dragonfly.

Speaker 1  0:41  

How are you doing? Great. And clearly I'm not as good at this as you are, because I didn't get all of the spiel last time. It's reps. Yeah, it's reps.

Petrit Berisha  0:51  

And joining us for their debut is another Rob Robbie Mitch, Nick head of digital assets at BlackRock. Welcome to the show.

Unknown Speaker  0:57  

Thank you for having

Petrit Berisha  0:59  

me. Wow. Claps. Damn Robbie.

Unknown Speaker  1:01  

Got collapsed, and I didn't.

Petrit Berisha  1:04  

And last but not least, doing his best. Kai Sheffield impression with the jacket over there. Noah Levine, Partner A 16 Z part of the visa crypto mafia that's developing now. How are you doing? Great? Super excited to be here. Yeah, second time on the show. And now I'm going to do the bits that everyone wants to skip through. I need to remind you that the views or opinions of our contributors today are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the companies they represent. Nothing we say should be taken as tax, financial investment or legal advice. Do your own research, and also a huge thank you to our sponsors, visa and mesh for today's live show, and thanks to momentum X global for helping us put the event together on to our first story from everywhere Blackrock CEO Larry Fink sees tokenization making investing with your phone as easy as payments. So from the annual letter, he said, and I quote, half the world's population carries a digital wallet on their phone. Imagine if that same digital wallet could also let you invest in a broad mix of companies for the long term, as easily as sending a payment. Tokenization could help accelerate that future by updating the plumbing of the financial system, making investments easier to issue, easier to trade and easier to access. Robbie, I'm going to come to you first. Obviously, the response to this has been really interesting. Can you expand on that part of the annual

Speaker 2  2:17  

letter from Larry? Sure. I think it's consistent with some of the commentary that he's made now over multiple months and years, and was similar to what folks may have seen in The Economist Op Ed from November. But the idea is that tokenization, which we so often talked about as this efficiency story, is actually, in many respects, potentially even bigger as an access story, where you have this universe of investors who are crypto native, or they're more predisposed towards digital wallets and interacting in the digital assets and defi ecosystem, And today, they're under allocated, maybe 0% allocated to traditional investments. And how can they be given access to a much broader universe of potential investments than just, say, the 3 trillion out of the world's 400 500 trillion in assets, the 3 trillion that sits in crypto today. How do we expand that massively. And I think that's a tremendous opportunity for Financial Inclusion and helping people build complete, diversified, whole portfolios. Rob, do you want to dig

Petrit Berisha  3:30  

in a little bit in terms of that access point? Why the tokenization aspect increases access, not just across the board for maybe crypto native users who want to expand their portfolios, but for retail and institutional clients as well.

Speaker 1  3:44  

Yeah, so I'm gonna have a different kind of vantage point than Robbie will, and I'm sure he'll tell me I'm wrong, but from our perspective, right? One of the things that we're seeing a lot right now is very quickly, we're seeing global adoption of stable coins, right? And a lot of that started with, Okay, well, you know, I want us dollar access, because I have a currency that's inflating at 30 or 40% every year, and I just want to be out of that. I want to be able to be part of $1 economy. But stable coins have really been sort of this, like digital oil, for a movement of money across, like different tokenized assets. And when you can start more easily having assets that are in the same form factor of that stable coin. It's much easier to do a swap between those two different assets, right because right now, if I want access to some sort of equity, and I'm in an emerging market economy, the regulatory licensing that has to go into that, the infrastructure that has to go into that, the way things are structured. It can be quite costly for some of these companies. We've seen a lot of people get around this by, you know, if you look at the way, like Robin Hood is doing some of their quote, unquote, like tokenized equity exposure. These are basically derivatives on some sort of like us broker dealer that is buying an equity, you know, during. Normal market hours, and then issuing that, and then maybe there's a free floating token, but that free floating token is actually can't be met or redeemed at certain periods of time. And so a lot of these things have been sort of a stop gap today. And while they're kind of a regulatory arbitrage, they're not actually an asset that is in the same form factor, right? So when you start having these things be in the same form factor, you start to break down borders for technology. You start to break down borders for access. And then it just becomes a regulatory question, which, as a venture capitalist, I tell all of my companies to worry about that later. Look, Noah,

Petrit Berisha  5:36  

I was going to ask you in the next story to kind of talk about the different types of wrappers, derivatives that Rob just mentioned. But do you want to give the audience and listeners and viewers a little bit of a breakdown of the spectrum of tokenized equities that we've seen in the market so far?

Speaker 3  5:51  

Yeah, for sure. I mean, probably can't do as good of a job as Rob and Robbie here, but will kind of do my best. The way I do it is there's kind of three categories for tokenized stocks. The first is the kind of the SPV structure where we see these new special purpose vehicles being established. They'll go out and acquire form of equity, they'll then tokenize the SPV and then distribute it broadly to, you know, a group of investors. And ultimately, like the value here is, if you want directional exposure to the stock. This is a really great tool, but even I've heard Rob talk a couple of times about some of the challenges with this, where, if you have something like that that's trading seven days a week and the market's only open during certain hours, there could be some challenges in terms of when there's a pricing mismatch. And also, I think too, as an investor, if you're buying the SPV and you don't actually have ownership of the underlying asset. There's a question of, what risks could you incur there? So that's the first category. The second category is sort of the tokenized entitlements, which I think is kind of what DTCC is doing. And I think to an extent, what the new Nis and securitized announcement is about, where you have an existing asset that is being issued or originated off chain, but then you're going and tokenizing that asset so that you can have people with wallets be able to hold and have exposure to that. The benefit obviously being that you can get things like 24/7, I think in some cases, there's some composability with things like defi. This is very exciting in terms of actually improving the efficiency of which these assets can move. But I think there's still room for improvement there. And then the third type of tokenized equity is fully on chain stocks. And so this is kind of what we're seeing from Super state from figure, where there's actually net new Q sips being issued on chain. By owning this asset, you actually own the underlying stock. And I'm pretty sure someone from figure has been on tokenized before. I remember listening to that, and I've listened to Robert leshner from Robert leshner from Super state talk. And some of the benefits there is you get things like cross collateralization. You can actually get ability to influence governance and have, you know, voting there. And so I think that's not just tokenizing an existing asset, but also in the future, getting to real on chain origination is is a really exciting area

Speaker 1  7:59  

as well. I have a question for Robbie on this point specifically, because you're, we're the first of this tokenized money market fund, and have pursued a lot of tokenization efforts. And I know continue to think about it. You've gone through the securitized kind of form factor of where it's an SPV that you sign up and they do the KYC, and then, you know, it's potentially represented on chain, but not necessarily free, freely transferable. When you think through the future of tokenization in your business, and potentially more freely transferable or assets, or maybe kind of this, you know, native origination that like a super state's thinking about, does that play a role, as you guys think about it? Do you expect there to be BlackRock and others to be part of that ecosystem?

Speaker 2  8:41  

Well, to be clear, what we did with Biddle was not a SPV, was not a feeder fund that was natively a de novo Fund, and the shares are issued directly as as tokens. The transferability, though, is still subject to private fund rules, as well as the AML obligations that that come with them as an issuer, so tokens are freely transferable between whitelisted parties, right? And that obviously remains a big sticking point and a challenge in terms of truly unlocking the utility in this space. Whenever you have to go through white listing, you add a significant point of friction that undermines liquidity, undermines usability, and defi and all those challenges. So I think a lot of the industry is still working through how to solve that in a way that isn't just pure regulatory arbitrage. And, you know, hope that you can beg forgiveness later, kind of strategy? I mean, I was

Petrit Berisha  9:43  

going to double click on that. No. I mean, I'd love to get your take on how we get there, like, I know Robbie said, We don't want to fast track and go for the regulatory arbitrage approach. What are some of the technical, product and logistical things that we can do, and what are some of the regulatory hurdles that maybe have to come to the. For, for this to become that pure form factor, more permissionless? Yeah, and I think it's a great question.

Speaker 3  10:05  

So, I mean, I think it's two fold. One, obviously, I think regulatory clarity is is very important. You know, I think we're just getting started there. Obviously, a lot of great work is being done within the SEC, and a lot of guidance has been put out, even just in the last month or so, which I think is getting us much closer. And then I also think too, like a secondary point to that too, is, if you look at something like what super state and what figure are doing, obviously they need to run a an external ATS in order to get liquidity and to trade it. And so I think, you know, while that may work temporarily, I think those things will ultimately need to scale in order to be used in a more institutional context. And so I think it's really a combination of continuance of regulatory clarity and guidance, as well as getting increased liquidity when you want to do

Petrit Berisha  10:44  

those types of things. Let's move on to our second story. This was an exclusive from Wall Street Journal NYSE. Partners with securitized to develop 24/7 tokenized securities platform, which was mentioned by Rob earlier, securitize have been named as the first digital transfer agent eligible to mint blockchain native securities for corporate or ETF issuers on the upcoming NYSE affiliated tokenized securities platform. That was definitely a mouthful. They plan to partner with securitize as a premier design partner in the development of a digital transfer agent program intended to support on chain settlement of tokenized security transactions. Rob break that down for the audience, please.

Speaker 1  11:21  

Well, we're seeing a couple. I'll talk about that specifically, but I'll see maybe talk about, like, the broader theme that we're seeing right now, which is, everyone believes in the tokenization, right? And I think there's a reason for that, which is kind of a few fold, but one of the reasons on the equity side is that we do want to enable trading. That is over the weekend, we want to enable trading that's trading that's overnight. You know, right now you have a lot of market makers are willing to quote, unquote dirty hedge overnight, which is like, Okay, you kind of like, move with the sun, and you can find some sort of, like, exposure that's close enough to hedging, you know, whatever they have in inventory at that time. But my perception, and I think a lot of the very sophisticated counterparties agree with this, not all of them, but it's really hard to hedge exposure well enough over a weekend, right? And so if you're going to do it, if you're going to manage collateral, if you're going to be able to do any sort of kind of leverage over that period of time, you're going to have to be able to do it on on chain rails, over the weekend. And everybody wants to, you know, we don't want to have 24/7 trading, because that means we're going to work more on Saturdays, but at least the companies and leadership want that. And so now we're seeing people try to figure out how to solve that, right? And so both NYC and NASDAQ have started to talk about ways in which to do that. In this case, they're talking about sort of a potentially a segregated order book that's a completely different exchange that uses a specific transfer agent for that exchange that's separate from what they do today, I think NASDAQ has talked about doing something that's maybe consolidated, where you have both tokenized and non tokenized assets that are can be treated against each other and are functionally equivalent. That's a different type of way to solve this problem. I believe, Amy talked earlier about trying to light up tokenized assets in one of their dark pools. And so we're seeing a lot of people try to figure out what is the best way to bring this reality to market. I think end of the day, this is all good for all of us in the whole industry, because there's going to be more innovation around this, and eventually we're going to have, in my mind, all assets be tokenized.

Petrit Berisha  13:24  

Agree with that last bit, Robbie, I think

Speaker 2  13:27  

there's a very decent chance of that. I definitely don't think it's a foregone conclusion at this point, but that's okay, right? Because the level of transformation and impact if that does happen, if we do have the ROB haddock thesis of everything that's going to be tokenized is massive, right across our entire financial system and infrastructure, and the role that various players play, or will no longer play, or play differently in the value chain, and how markets operate and how investors Access and trade and what they have exposure to. So, so you don't have to believe it's 100% to place big bets around it, right? You just have to believe it's some material probability. I think a lot of times we struggle as a general human form with uncertainty and probabilities and things that are, you know, well, between zero and one, and this is one of them. But there's good reason for, you know, all of us here and in this room to be taking significant steps in recognition of what could happen.

Petrit Berisha  14:33  

Yeah, if anyone there was a way to, you know, look, no, I was going to ask you. This comes at the same kind of time that hyper liquid has been referenced by JP Morgan, bunch of other mainstream media press as well, on the kind of 24/7 weekend trading. 2025 seems to be the year of stable coins. 26 is the year of capital markets. Is what Kai keeps saying. So you're. Mean, you're itching to tell me

Speaker 3  15:00  

what you think. So gone. No, I completely agree. And I remember, you know, Kai's big tagline last year was, you know, every bank needs a stable COIN strategy. And, you know, I think a lot of the episodes are about stable coins. But you know, kind of going back to the point we discussed earlier. You know, it feels like we've made so much progress in terms of stable coins evolving from simply crypto capital markets and really into becoming this new financial infrastructure, and what does the future of FinTech look like, where any developer that's trying to build a FinTech product, I think nowadays are doing something on top of stable coins, because it just makes a lot of sense. But I think the natural question is, let's say I have a financial product that is a primary financial account for an end user. They can hold dollars today to Rob's point, but I think the next question is, well, what can I do with those dollars? I think last year, a lot of the conversation was things like stable coin, Link cards, different types of yield. And I think now the question is, well, can you expand that into investing? And my take is that the bigger opportunity for these tokenized assets is a lot less. The 24/7 nature of it, the ability to purchase on Saturdays or Sundays or even in off hours is really more of if I'm holding my primary balance in a stable coin wallet, like I want to do other things and just look at my balance or even make payments. So I think that is honestly where a lot of demand is coming from, and where I see a

Speaker 2  16:13  

lot of the growth coming. I think 2026 is going to be a year of stable coins too. I think it was just getting started, and genius only happened in midway through 2025 and we don't have rule making done yet. So yes, there's been pretty good stable coin penetration into crypto exchanges and into defi, but hasn't really even started in any material way, into cross border remittances, into corporate global multinational liquidity management and payments into capital markets use cases adjacent to tokenization, so that, I think has a lot of runway left to go.

Sy Taylor  16:51  

This episode, if it's not obvious, is brought to you by our friends at visa, a global leader in payments. Visa's tokenized assets platform vtap, uses smart contracts and cryptography to help banks bring fiat currencies on chain. Vtap allows financial institutions to issue Fiat back tokens, improving financial efficiency and enabling programmable finance. You can check out the links in this episode's description to express your interest in vtap. This episode is sponsored by privy a stripe company stable coins. Can move money anywhere, but only with powerful wallets at the core, trusted by more than 100 million accounts across 180 countries. Privy powers secure customizable wallets that enable you to go global from day one, from fintechs to consumer apps. It's the infrastructure making the future of money programmable. Start building with privy. Learn more@privy.io This episode is sponsored by mzero. Stable coins are becoming global financial infrastructure. It's time for that infrastructure to mature. If you are a brand, you should have your own stable coin set to the behavior of financial flows moving through your product. If you are an issuer, you want to be the stable coin partner for the most valuable brands. Mzero is the only platform where issuers and brands get together to build digital money products for the world. Mzero. Make your own money. Get started on mzero.org

Petrit Berisha  18:26  

story three from everywhere. We referenced this on the show last week. US regional banks Tap zksync to build tokenized deposit network. It's called Cari network, C, A, R, I, and involves Huntington, first horizon, M and T Bank, key Corp and Old National Bancorp. It's targeting rollout this year, in 2026 and it runs on providium, the permission blockchain built by z, K, sinks, matter labs. I feel like we've had loads of episodes on the show where it's kind of stable coins or tokenized deposits, and keeps cropping up. What do you think about this story here?

Speaker 1  18:58  

Rob, I think this like conversation around stable coins or tokenized deposits, sort of like Mr. Deposits, sort of like misses the point, right? And so in many ways, like, there's cash equivalents, there's not a cash equivalents. We've already seen conversation from the regulators to things like, Basel is going and the capital controls are going to get remade right now. And there's a lot of conversation we just had it from the US government that you can now treat stable coins, same as you can treat other cash equivalents, right? Which helps a lot from the capital control perspective. And so I expect these will all serve kind of different purposes. I believe strongly that we, like I said before, about the tokenization of all of these assets. It might be true, depending on this depends a little bit on what happens with the yield conversation on a little bit, what happens with the genius act rule making that we're starting to see right now from the OCC which is that, okay, maybe the quote, unquote payment stable coin is a, you know, a money movement instrument. Maybe the tokenized deposit, you know, represents a different type of instrument, and then the you know, call it the tokenized money market fund. And is a different instrument, right? And then it looks a lot like the things that we have today, right? Which is this, we have them more digitally native. We have them more easily swappable with each other. It's more liquid. We don't have the same kind of plethora of problems from a back office perspective, in terms of like reconciling these things. And so I don't really know if the question or the conversation matters, to be honest,

Petrit Berisha  20:23  

what about the kind of consortia strategy? Where do you where do you stand on that? Especially for banks that aren't that big,

Speaker 1  20:31  

there's a lot of bank consortiums that have done well, like a lot of things have come out of bank consortiums, like, famously, we can talk about like Visa, or, you know, MasterCard. Obviously, there's things that are maybe less well known, like early warning, which Zelle came out of, which is sort of a bank payment, instant payment network, or like, even, like, synchrony was still inside Goldman when I was there. And so, like, I do believe that a lot of the kind of core infrastructure that needs to exist probably is best off in these kind of, like consortium networks, because it's hard to get a net new startup to go and fund and then kind of sell to all of these different counterparties. I think Amy mentioned earlier during our fireside about how there's a lot of like, you know, startups that are good at like, one thing, but aren't good at like, all of the things. And I think in part because, like, it's really hard to build all of the things for and with venture capital and with being self funded and to serve the different needs of a bunch of these different counterparties. And so it's very clear to me that bank consortiums should play a role, or asset management consortiums should play a role in a lot of the innovation that's happened on the capital market side. And you almost have to have that

Speaker 2  21:37  

Well, I think you're being charitable by zooming out in terms of the broader history of cases where consortium has been successful, because in this space, I think we would probably agree it's been a pretty tough track record, and that's putting it lightly for consortiums, which isn't to say that some construct in that area can't work, but I think we need to kind of go in recognizing how Hard it has been to produce things of meaningful economic value through a consortium structure thus far in the blockchain and digital asset space. So what would you propose and say, I was gonna ask that as well. I That's for other people to figure out. I'm not running a bank.

Petrit Berisha  22:16  

So I mean, Noah, in your time at visa, you must have spoken to dozens of bank where do you stand here and when you're having conversations with them, when they're talking about tokenized deposits, what leads them down

Unknown Speaker  22:29  

that road? Yeah, that's

Speaker 3  22:30  

a great question. I mean, look, I think there's a common misconception that banks are just sleep at the wheel and don't care and don't want to do something. I think they recognize that there's a massive opportunity to leverage this infrastructure to create competitive products and continue to innovate. I think the biggest challenge with banks in general has just been lack of regulatory clarity. And I think Rob made the same point earlier, like, Sure, genius pass. But you know, we still haven't gotten guidance, and it's still, you know, things like, how does compliance work? How does ml work? Like, it's still very unclear. And so I think banks are going to be very cautious and move slowly. But I also think it's worth noting that there are a bunch of banks who have who have been on the more aggressive side, relatively speaking, I think, like, you know, jpm obviously, was very early with jpm coin, and now going into jpmd, which, you know, is issued on a public blockchain, Citi, with Citi token services. You know, obviously we're seeing a few consortiums. And sure, I think the probability of any individual project or consortium succeeding is low because it's hard. But that being said, you know, I think that for a lot of these banks like they want to participate, they just it's looking for the right opportunity, and it's how much risk are they willing to take to get involved well. And I

Speaker 2  23:35  

think the other piece is there needs to be a really clear definition of why a tokenized deposit solves something or offer something different than stable coins already do, and I don't think that's been made particularly clear anywhere yet. I think

Speaker 1  23:50  

each individual bank would tell you it just allows them to be in their own deposit base and allow them to continue to do some sort of fractional banking. And that's good for them, but on the other side, it's good for you, but on the other side, it's good for you to continue to manage the money market funds, right? And so I think that would be the push pull of what's happening there between the different stakeholders.

Petrit Berisha  24:10  

I want to ask you, now that you're outside your visa

Unknown Speaker  24:12  

remit in your new role,

Petrit Berisha  24:15  

what's your feeling on the kind of consortia potential success in the future, especially when it's not, yeah,

Speaker 3  24:21  

it's a good question. I mean, look like I said before, I think it's really challenging for any of these things to succeed. You know, I think another point with stable coins and tokenized deposits is that they're fundamentally different products. Like, I think we as an industry try and put things together, but at the end of the day, like the primary user of a tokenized deposit is completely different than who the primary user of a stable coin is going to be. I mean, I think if you look at whereas stable coins really gone product market fit, it's the majority of it is crypto capital markets. So moving value between exchanges engaging in defi, and then dollar store value outside of the United States. And so I think for a lot of these banks, and again, in this example, they're all US banks, like, there isn't a huge value proposition or opportunity for them to say. Say, Oh, I'm going to go and serve, you know, M and T Bank isn't looking at serving customers in Argentina like it's just not their, their primary customer base. And so I think for them, it's, you know, more wholesale, it's more money movement, it's more back end, back office stuff. And so I think for that specific use case, this could be successful, but I don't think it's the type of thing that you necessarily see on headlines, because it's much less of a retail thing and more. So, you know, an efficiency standpoint.

Petrit Berisha  25:23  

And Robert, I wanted to ask you one last question, because there's also been this kind of, like, big privacy push across the board in crypto. And obviously, I know zksync and the providium thing is really interesting. Why has it taken so long to realize, from the crypto native side that the builders that this is such a important point for institutions.

Speaker 1  25:42  

I don't think it's taken that long to realize people have been building around the topic for a long time. I think the part of the problem has been that there has actually been no demand for privacy, really. Or the only demand for privacy to date has been for like, nefarious reasons, like, if you look at what happens right now, so we can talk a lot about, like, payments and stable coins, right? And there's been a lot of common lot of conversation around, okay, well, if you're going to do all of your payments on chain, then you want to do payroll. You want to do, you know, kind of payouts. Like, you need to have some sort of privacy, because you don't want to know exactly how much each individual person is getting paid. Well, how did we solve that problem? We just did netting, right? Like, they're like, you know, people put an order into BB and kbnk netted everything over the day, and then the end of the day they settled in one block transaction to Ethereum, right? And so that was, in and of itself, basically privacy, because nobody could actually solve those problems, right? Or could figure out who was, who was getting what. And so the demand today has been solved by a lot of these types of kind of use cases. I think actually the capital markets piece is what has gotten people has accelerated the conversation. Because if you're going to do weekend capital markets and you're going to do things like collateral mobility and management on chain, that becomes a much different conversation, because there is nothing you can't necessarily do netting in that case, when you need to do a capital call when something's moving against you, right? And so, especially if you think about some of the chains that people are using to do this, where it's potentially very much like a silo, and not necessarily kind of a active, public and permissionless chain, there's has to be, or there are people, at least, there's conversation around having to be, you know, some way to shield those transactions. Zk, which has been, you know, obviously the providium chain and zk sync, this is part of what they're been focused on. ZK proofs go a long way in certain types of transactions to allow you to to have some sort of privacy, but DK proofs are not made for all types of transactions. And I think that's been the question, or at least that would be the argument, if I was sitting at the Canton side, that they would make right? And so I think we're starting to figure out ways to solve those problems. I think I am a strong believer that more and more of this will happen on public permissionless chains, and not on a lot of these like private permissioned chains that people are trying to do today. But it is continuing to be a very tough to solve technological problem if you're going to do it on a public chain.

Petrit Berisha  28:13  

I think we've got time for maybe two or three questions. So anyone want to be on the podcast, we've got a Scotsman here. I'll translate. Don't worry, guys,

Speaker 4  28:23  

anything to get a second appearance. There's been a lot of talk about stable coin adoption, a lot of focus on dollar adoption. This is obviously very biased, but can we get people's thoughts on non dollar stable coins?

Petrit Berisha  28:36  

Rob is their demand. I mean, there's not

Speaker 1  28:38  

today, right? But obviously, and I understand that you have a Sterling Pound stable coin, and so that's probably the generous of the question. I do expect that if the things that we are talking about, which is that all of these capital markets come on chain, there has to be also tokenized assets, or tokenized stable coins in other currencies. Because if you're a hedge fund in the UK, you clearly, you know potentially, most of your exposure is in sterling. You don't want to have to then deal with the FX risk, right? The same is going to be true across the world, right? So the use cases today to Noah's point earlier, which he was completely right about, which is, it's been entirely call it US dollar demand in these emerging markets. But if the entire world comes on chain, if all this tokenization happens, it has to be a world in which there's also other currencies on chain. I think there's a broader point that we were talking about, a little bit about earlier, which is simply that, like, we're sort of in a currency cold world right now, globally, I think, and it's there's a question, I think, whether or not we need, and whether or not there will be all of these currencies in the future, and whether or not we need all of these currency need all of these currencies in the future, and what that means for, I think, a lot of countries, you know, geopolitical, national security and monetary policies. But that's, I think, a much longer conversation.

Speaker 5  29:53  

Next question, anyone? Yeah, so I think it's like undeniable that stable coin has a man. It's like utility and value. But outside of, like the financial ecosystem, it seems like a lot of regular consumers still have a lot of biases against using anything under the crypto umbrella. How long does that take to go away? And how do you think that's going

Speaker 3  30:13  

to happen? Yeah, well, I mean, I think a lot of the, again, a lot of the adoption has been in crypto, but I think if you start looking at some of these newer stable coin based products. Some of the Neo banks that are built on stable coin rails, like, from the consumer's perspective, they don't even realize that they're using stable coins. And so I think a lot of it is more of a building product on the front end, and doing a better job of hiding away the crypto component. Because frankly, for a lot of these things, I don't think it matters that they know it's stable coin or not. And so I think as that continues to develop, you know, we'll see more

Speaker 2  30:42  

adoption, yeah. And I also think it's a cross border versus domestic thing too, right? If you, if you're trying to jam stable coins into US domestic payments, I don't think that's going to meet a lot of resonance. But once you get into cross border use cases, people exposure to those frictions, less access to US dollars, then it starts to become a lot more compelling. We had

Petrit Berisha  31:03  

one more and then we'll do the outro.

Speaker 6  31:06  

Hi guys. Tai from Bloomberg, so let's say, five years out, you know, things move on chain. Tokenization happens. Can we talk about what the market structure looks like, particularly in terms of what are the traditional players who benefits, who is on the short end of the stick? You know, five to seven years

Speaker 2  31:25  

out, hardest question, gosh, ask about quantum computing or something. So obviously, this is, this is very speculative and uncertain, but I think fundamentally, we're looking at an environment where value chains become shorter, right? And that the number of intermediaries that that separate or that process simple financial transactions today, like the trading of an equity security, for instance, which involves an investor, a prime broker, an exchange, sometimes a CCP, a CSD, right? All of these different functions of transfer agent, depending on the nature of it, a fund admin. So you got a lot of intermediation, and ultimately, a good chunk of that can be significantly streamlined, compressed, collapsed, automated, right? And so that is a big opportunity, in many ways, for end investors, which is part of what what we're excited about, enabling that efficiency in the same time as the access that that we talked about previously. And I think it's a big opportunity for asset managers, because there's a whole population of citizens and investors around the world who haven't had access to the broadest possible suite of investment opportunities that today they will. And I think it's a big opportunity for crypto exchanges, who to date, have been serving their audiences with less than 1% of the investable assets in the world that that is going to grow potentially very significantly.

Petrit Berisha  33:09  

Well, on that great answer, we will wrap up. Thank you so much for listening at home, watching at home, and also watching and listening in the room. Rob where can people find out more

Unknown Speaker  33:19  

about you? At haddock M on Twitter or my LinkedIn.

Speaker 2  33:22  

Robbie, I'm just on Twitter, but I don't post. So my team told me I have a bunch of followers. I'm not sure why I have zero posts. So then n

Unknown Speaker  33:31  

Levine 19 on x. You can find me

Petrit Berisha  33:33  

at pepperisha on x and LinkedIn. If you haven't already, please subscribe to tokenize. Tokenize pod.com or on Apple. Spotify, wherever you listen or watch podcasts. And finally, if you enjoyed this and want more, leave us a review. It really does help us out. Simon in the notes writes, it legit helps us. So there we go. Please. Round of applause for our guests.