In this episode, Simon Taylor, Co-host of Tokenized, is joined by an array of guests from the 2025 Avalanche Summit, to discuss various topics such as Stablecoins, RWAs and Tokenized Equities.
In this episode, Simon Taylor, Co-host of Tokenized, is joined by an array of guests from the 2025 Avalanche Summit, to discuss various topics such as Stablecoins, RWAs and Tokenized Equities.
Timestamps:
This episode is brought to you by Visa
A world leader in digital payments, Visa is bridging the gap between traditional financial institutions and innovative blockchain networks, helping players in the payments ecosystem navigate the ever-evolving world of tokenized fiat currencies with confidence and ease. Learn more at visa.com/crypto.
***
We’d also like 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 are representing. Nothing we say should be taken as tax, financial, investment or legal advice, do your own research!
Music by Henry McLean
Sy Taylor 0:00
Tai, welcome to the tokenized avalanche summit special. We, of course, are the show focused on stable coins and the institutional adoption of tokenized real world assets. My name is Simon Taylor. I'm your host for today, author of FinTech brain food, and head of strategy at sardine. Today is a bumper episode of tokenized we've got a collection of interviews that really just give you a pulse on where the opportunity is moving to after stable coins. We recorded these interviews at the avax summit in London in May of 2025 and we asked leaders in this industry three or four of the same questions, but also got into a little bit more about what they're doing. So if you want to know what's going on, you have to pay attention to this episode. So before we get into this medley of interviews, I need to remind you, of course, that views and opinions of contributors today are their own and might not reflect those of companies they represent. Nothing we say should be taken as tax, financial investment or legal advice or any other form of advice. Do your own research. Folks. First up, we've got the always incredible Haseeb from dragonfly to give you the investor's perspective on what's going on at the intersection of trod fi and defi. I love this chap. Take it away his heap. Thanks for having me. No thank you for being on the show. Big fan of dragonfly. Of course, we had Rob on the show as well. Tell us a little bit more about you. And of course, dragonfly, so I'm one of the
Speaker 1 1:54
managing partners of dragonfly. Dragonfly, we're a global crypto investment firm. We invest across stack from early stage all the way to mid and late stage. We've been around since 2018 so we've seen quite a lot early investors in avalanche. We did their seed round way back in the day. Wow. So it's been amazing to have seen them go through this journey from back when crypto was still a very kind of cipher punk, risky subversive movement, to now seeing what it's become like, totally grown up and institutionalized. It's been
Sy Taylor 2:22
pretty amazing. It's been a wild ride, hasn't it, and it's been a wild ride for stable coins. It seems, since the stripe acquisition of bridge, everybody's paid attention. But is that the only reason they're so hot right now, or is there, is there something else?
Speaker 1 2:35
No, I mean, that's very much the sort of tail wagging the dog bridge was because of the fact that stable coins have gotten so big, and because stripe and every FinTech out there is seeing how massive the stable coin flows are starting to be. Even before stripe acquired bridge, you had PayPal launching their own stable coin. PayPal is the largest public FinTech in the world. So this the writing's been on the wall for a while. You've seen over the last year, stable coins have grown from 2024 I think it was started the year at one 40 billion, yeah, and we're now at just about two 40 billion. So we've added $100 billion of stable coins since the beginning of 2024 so massive increase in the total supply of stable coins that exist. Huge increase in the amount of flows. Huge increase in the internationalization of stable coins, where there's flying around from country to country, import, export, businesses used to be back in the day, stable coins were only really used to trade crypto. Yeah, that is not the story anymore, and that's why everybody around the world is seeing, Oh, crap, this thing is huge now, and it's a real business.
Sy Taylor 3:37
It's unbelievable that you when you hit those parabolas sometimes, then people pay attention, because Product Market Fit has arrived. It's fascinating watch, but there's something else going on as well, which is like the world of defi and tradfi used to feel like a barbell like and now that's converging. Why do you think that
Speaker 1 3:57
is so? It's It's pretty funny, having seen the history of how all this played out, right, where, in the beginning, defi was considered to be a toy. It was considered to be totally untouchable by institutions. And the whole idea was that, oh, we're going to use private blockchains, or, you know, Blockchain, not Bitcoin, or not crypto, in order to do some kind of interbank settlement type stuff. Or, you know, very, cordoned off in our own domains that are purely for the for the enterprises. And increasingly, what you're seeing is that, oh no, that's not the point of crypto and of blockchains. The point is to connect up to the wider universe of financial assets. And so seeing, you know, stable coins are big part of that story. If you're going to be issuing financial assets on chain, you want to be connected to that conduit of where all the capital and liquidity is flowing, which is, where are those two $40 billion of stable coins? I don't want to be shut off in some corner of the financial universe. Otherwise, why am I even using a blockchain to begin with? So this is one of the big stories behind avalanche to begin with, is that all of the L ones that connect up to the avalanche ecosystem, they're all. All able to bridge assets back and forth, if you don't have that, and you're just kind of living off on your own on an island, you know, if you're taking an enterprise blockchain like Canton, and you're just living out on your own, you don't care that they're stable coins, because you can't connect to them, right? So it's just like the internet. Back when many enterprises were talking about intranets and this idea, they're like, Oh, the point of the internet is that we can have our own and like, no, no, that's not the point of the internet. Point of the internet is that everything connects to everything, yeah, and you benefit from that global information liquidity layer. Well, we're doing the same thing, but for
Sy Taylor 5:33
financial assets, what's fascinating to me is even the Canton world now is coming into other chains and interoperability and that, like they that has landed, and I think avalanche was one of the first to really realize that and try and make that a reality. That's right, very, very, very early on. And then, of course, that brings in the institutions. What is it that they're seeing in what are you hearing from them in your conversations with institutions? What are they asking you? What do they want?
Speaker 1 6:00
To know? Well, institutions is a very broad term, you know. So institutions like say, Okay, what do people want? And yes, there's many different kinds of people who are at very different stages of institution. So you know, you talk about what Blackrock wants is very different than what you know fidelity wants, which is very different than what Morgan Stanley wants, is very different what JP Morgan wants. And you talk about, you can go further afield to like some you know, some, some credit fund in Europe, okay, they're very, very different, different set of needs and different desires than what you see from even those players so, and to say nothing of central banks and BIS and all these other groups that are exploring the usage of blockchains in their own systems. So the answer is that institutions are as varied as people are, yeah, they want different things, and they have their different points in their journey. The main thing, though, the main thrust of what institutions are looking for is that they realize now that most institutions are late. BlackRock is early. You have a lot of other folks who are early, who, you know, we've, we've paid a lot of attention to folks like Franklin, Templeton and you know, even Goldman, to some degree, has been relatively early on the asset class. But most people are playing catch up. Most people are looking at this and they're saying, Oh, shit, somebody sees something that I don't it's now almost all of the really big financial institutions are engaging with this stuff, right? We just saw, I think it was JP Morgan that announced that
Sy Taylor 7:19
chiasis is now become an available, open loop, and they're going to let their customers buy bitcoin.
Speaker 1 7:26
That's right, that's right. And so all of a sudden, you know that that last bastion of like, okay, Jamie guyman was constantly out bashing Bitcoin, and now you know he's even capitulated. And so I think all financial institutions are looking at this and they're saying, Okay, I need an answer to this, the answer might be, okay, we spend more time, we observe, we like, run some pilots or whatever. But everybody needs an answer at this point. That's what we are in the cycle. But it's still going to take a lot of time and a lot of work by that's the thing. This work doesn't happen on its own. It takes people proselytizing, educating, like going out and spending time with these institutions to help them understand, how can they benefit from the stuff that we've built, and bring them into it and help them also
Sy Taylor 8:08
build your point about institutions are varied, like people. There's also lots of people inside of these institutions, and they may be on the spectrum of understanding. So not only usually have an internal advocate, you'd have a lot of people that have day jobs that have nothing to do with tokenization or stable coins, that have to get comfortable and understand it. And if you're a data protection lawyer, or if you're in some other information security job, and this is one of like 30 things you have to worry about, then you're not necessarily going to be as in it as we are when we're looking at it. And I think remembering that is such a great point you make. So what's interesting you right now as an investor, what are you what are you excited by? What topics are really catching your eye? So I
Speaker 1 8:50
mean, I'm spending a lot of my time looking at what's happening. Obviously, on the stable coin side, we have the stable coin bill going through Congress. Just passed cloture in the Senate, yeah, and will not be going to a vote. It looks like very likely that the genius Act, which is the version of the stable coin bill in the Senate, is likely to pass the Senate. We'll see what happens when it goes to house and gets reconciled, but that's going to be a big accelerator for stable coins and stable coin adoption writ large. So as an investor, we're just spending a lot of time thinking about, okay, how does that change the landscape? The second thing that we're spending a lot of our time on, or at least I am personally, is looking on the information. The infrastructure side. So there's, there's a lot I think that can be done to accelerate blockchains, make them more efficient, make them more scalable. And there's always stuff that's happening, whether it's on, you know, node infrastructure, or networking level infrastructure, that I think is essential to making these things get bigger and faster, stronger. And then lastly, I spend a lot of my time looking at the intersection of crypto and AI. It's an area that's definitely nascent. It's not really clear yet where it's going, because both AI and crypto are both evolving in real time. But it's an area where I see a lot of the smartest founders going, Yeah, and a lot. Really futuristic, somewhat speculative, but still, there's kind of increasingly looks like there's going to be a there, there, yeah, but we don't know exactly what it's going to look like and when, yeah, and when, absolutely,
Sy Taylor 10:13
because with the whole VR thing, it's like you feel like it's inevitable. You just don't know when. For a lot of time, tokenization was the same. It was the same. It was inevitable. The question was, when it feels like we've passed that flipping point? Yeah? And there's also a lot of stable coins settlement for agentic commerce, types of conversations going on, and that may be an area where the rubber hits the road, yeah. But zooming out to macro, how do you think macro is impacting stable coins and your universe, generally, of tokenized real world assets and everything else.
Speaker 1 10:45
So it's interesting, because before we saw interest rates climb in 2022 on chain, treasuries basically did not exist. And the reason why they did not exist is that nobody cared, right? I mean, they were paying 25 basis points, right? So like, why would you ever want a treasury. Now, Treasuries are some of the most in demand assets on chain. They're growing really rapidly, right? So macro has a big impact on the way that you end up seeing the trajectory of crypto assets and tokenization on chain. I think you're likely to see more private credit, which, again, has also been part of this outgrowth of the macro situation. You're starting to see Apollo, I think, recently, tokenize one of their private credit funds that are bringing it on chain. So on chain, I think you see more of that and more ways to remix the yields from different traditional financial asset classes that are brought on chain at the end of the day, like macro, ends up affecting risk appetite across the board, and we're downstream of that, because crypto is a high risk asset class, so the overall demand for crypto will be inflected by what's happening on the macro side. But the biggest thing that's happening in macro is really just, you know, people losing confidence in the dollar period, right? You see it with with yields rising on treasuries, and, you know, overall demand for sovereign debt, you're now suddenly being questioned for the first time, long, long time, and that that is a real sea change, and I don't know, once that starts, how and when that stops? Yeah, because you've gone from a world where it was just unquestionable that, like, of course, the US is going to pay its debts, and now here we are, and it's, you know, it's not high whole faith and credit of the United that's great. That's right. All of a sudden, credit default swaps are pumping a little bit, and they don't do that, you know? So, the VAX is up, the VIX is up. I mean, it's, it's, it's just been a very chaotic time, yeah, and that chaos sheds more light onto why we built all this stuff to begin with. Yeah, right. I mean, it was in the vein of that initial chaos in 2008 that Bitcoin was created. Yeah, everything downstream of that has been a further response to this idea that, hey, maybe these promises aren't as good as we were once told.
Sy Taylor 12:49
It seems prescient, doesn't it? And there's, of course, the Genesis block of Bitcoin, Chancellor on the brink of the second bailout in 2009 that is a newspaper clipping that Israel was, was it was embedded in that. I know it does start to look like Nixon and Bretton Woods and this Mar a Lago summit could start to change the conversation. But sort of zooming back in a little bit from dragonflies perspective, what are your next sort of six months look like? What are you going to be getting up to?
Speaker 1 13:18
It's a good question. I mean, it's hard to say, to say, to be honest, in crypto, which is very hard, hours look like six hours. I'm hanging out here at Hatfield house, which is a pretty incredible venue, but the honest answer is that it's very difficult to predict the future. It's hard enough to predict the past. It's really hard to predict the future. So I would say I feel like I just entered the matrix. I know, I know, no, it is, but it's true is that I tell people at dragonfly that our job is not to predict the future, our job is to notice the present, and that is hard enough to really clearly see what's actually happening, what's going on on chain, what's going on with stable coins, what's going on with tokenization, what are the institutions really looking for, as opposed to what we want to say that they're looking for. Yeah, right, that that is hard enough to do as a VC. I've been in the space long enough to know that there are no VCs who can predict the future. I know I was there. I was there when they all were predicting what was going to happen, and everybody was wrong. Yeah, so the reality is that we're never going to be that good of a batting average at being able to see around corners, but you can notice the corners exist.
Sy Taylor 14:24
I feel like you've said that before. That was far too sharp, but I have, I have said I've sent it to our own team before. Yeah, that felt like a rehearsed message. But listen, has he this was, this was a great conversation. Thank you so much. If people want to learn more about you or dragonfly, where do they go to do that?
Speaker 1 14:38
So just Google my name, Haseeb, H, A, S, E, B. Can find me as well as my writings on Twitter, dragonfly, where? Dragonfly, dot, x, y, z,
Sy Taylor 14:48
See, I told you, you'd love that chat. What comes after stable coins everywhere? You might be wondering, well, of course, yield everywhere, everywhere a stable coin can go. Surely. Yield can. Go. So just before they'd recently raised $7 million I had the opportunity to speak to David Suter, who's the CEO of open trade. And of course, they're bringing yield as a service to FinTech companies. I think you'll enjoy this one.
Speaker 2 15:20
Open trade is a platform that provides yield as a service to stable coin powered fintechs. So Neo banks, exchanges, custodians, staking providers, digital wallets, anyone building on stable coins can plug into our platform and offer yield across many different asset classes, bonds, ETFs, treasuries, money market funds, private credit and trade finance. So we bring everything that the FinTech needs to earn yield and pay yield to their customers, and make it all accessible by a very simple API.
Sy Taylor 15:51
And give me an example of some of those neobank customers, any you can name or mention, and a use case
Speaker 2 15:57
that absolutely Yeah, so one of our favorite customers and use cases. Is a Colombian Neo bank called lithio, which serves now hundreds of 1000s of users across LATAM, and think of them like Revolut. For LATAM, they provide local users the ability to take local currencies, convert them to dollars and euros, and then spend, send, receive and save in dollars and euros, which is a tremendous up shift for these people. Yeah, it's something that everyone wants. We enable litio to offer their customers between two to 9% yield on euros and dollar balances. So two clicks in, one click out, very seamless experience. And now those customers, whether they're businesses or individuals are able to earn secure, stable yield on their dollar Nero balances, which is something that they've never been able to do before, especially in a market like LATAM. And so we power that for letio and other companies like Latio.
Sy Taylor 16:57
Sometimes I hear about these products, and I want them in the UK as well. It's just so simple sometimes, yeah, and the experience is so good. But why do you think that, like the defi trod fi convergence is happening? Is it led by the Neo banks, or some of the traditional banks coming in? Like, what's been the moment that shifted?
Speaker 2 17:15
Well, Simon, as you know, we've, we've talked before on this. I think it's a natural evolution of something that's been going on for over a decade. So it kind of pops up, and it gets really hot, and a lot of people are talking about it, and it almost seems like it came out of nowhere. It hasn't. I mean, large institutions have been working on tokenization and cash on chain for well over a decade, and a lot of the infrastructure and tooling and regulatory clarity needed to come before we could really start seeing such visible mainstream adoption. And so I see it really not as a big bang, but just as a natural evolution that's now being driven by some more macroeconomic forces that are making holding and saving in dollars more popular. And then the success of defi markets has given Trad fi institutions a blueprint for what on chain financial infrastructure can look like, and given them, you know, motivation to start accelerating the adoption of that technology. It's one of those annoying gradually, then suddenly, exactly, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Sy Taylor 18:14
So institutions are here. Have your conversations been with them?
Speaker 2 18:19
So it's interesting. So our customers are primarily fintechs that are competing with the institutions that are providing Dollar and Euro banking products that are faster, cheaper, smarter and more accessible than the incumbents. Our interactions with institutions are actually as customers of them. So we work with a lot of large financial institutions, brokers and custodians. They provide our off chain banking and custody infrastructure that allows us to serve our customers, but it's been really nice for once to be the customer as opposed to selling them. Yeah. Now look, I mean, please, please work with Yeah, exactly. Now, personally, I think you know what BlackRock and Franklin Templeton and fidelity and some of these big names are doing is, is awesome and but our role and our interaction with them is as a user of those services, not as a a seller to them of software. We're really focused on the the next generation of financial services. Then that's being driven primarily by fintechs and startups.
Sy Taylor 19:16
You're helping them distribute Exactly. It makes sense, exactly. So why is everybody so hot on yield bearing stable coins?
Speaker 2 19:23
Well, I think that it's just a natural evolution of the entire tokenization narrative. Stable coins clearly have become cryptos killer application. It's very obvious to anyone that uses them that one of the main features they're missing is yield. And so it's kind of a very obvious like, All right, let's Tai yield onto it. Now, the challenge has been in in, you know, major capital markets is that, from a regulatory perspective, they're mostly treated as securities, and securities are terrible payment instruments, yes. And so we actually think that the market is is still better. So. Suited with the separation of church and state, where you have stable coin issuers who pay non yield bearing that issue, non yield bearing stable coins, and those are payment instruments, and then you have companies like open trade that are able to take those like usdt or USDC and transform them into on chain investment products, but yield bearing stable coins as like a financial experiment are really cool. They're doing something that's never been possible, which is creating yield bearing digital cash.
Sy Taylor 20:30
And we'll see where this goes with the genius act that's passed the Senate when it makes it to the house. But one of the option is that we are seeing crypto companies going after bank Charters of regulation. Does that mean that one way or another passing on this yield to users domestically in the US is close? Do you
Speaker 2 20:48
think I think so. I mean, the regulatory discourse in the US has been fairly consistent in that they don't want to see stable coin issuers pay yield now if you do become a bank, then you're able to do maturity transformation and be fractionally reserved. I think the challenge that stable coin issuers will have with that model is that the stable coin issuer being fully reserved is, in my eyes, actually a feature and not a bug. Yeah. So the ability that you know, tomorrow's circle could redeem down to zero because their entire reserves are in cash like instruments, is a great thing. I think that that brings stability. And biggest risk they had was not being fully reserved exactly well with by putting commercial by holding commercial bank deposits Right exactly. And so I think that if stable coin issuers start, you know, taking on a more traditional bank like approach, where they're taking in, you know, demand, demand deposits, and then lending into illiquid, long term credit, like small businesses, like traditional banks, do that there's a serious risk of bank runs.
Sy Taylor 21:54
I think that it's so interesting to me that the bank lobby seems really concerned about narrow banking, and the crypto lobby seemed much more concerned about fractional reserve,
Speaker 2 22:07
yeah, well, narrow banking. I mean, like Mervyn King, we're here in the UK. I mean, he the former Exchequer, he after the GFC, he advocated for narrow banking to become more prominent, because payments are a utility, and that there should be payment institutions like stable coin issuers who are fully reserved. They're narrow banks, and what they what they do, why they exist, is to provide great payment utilities, and that it would give the consumer a choice where to put their money. Where now you have, well, with stable coins, that's changing, but in the traditional banking system, you're always at great risk, as we saw in March 2023, of seeing that fractionally reserved system fall down. I think that's one of the great benefit like stable coins are almost enabling people to rediscover the benefits of narrow banking.
Sy Taylor 22:58
Yeah, it's such a political and discourse hot potato. But actually, when you zoom out and you look at what's good for the market and good for consumer, it's a different conversation, absolutely one that we can come back to many times, I'm sure. So if people want to find out more about open trade, yeah, and they want to find out more about you, where do they get to do that?
Speaker 2 23:17
Just go to open trade.io, and you're going to find a ton of information on our products, on our company, who we are, why we do what we do. And if you're interested in, if you're FinTech, building on stable coins and you want to earn yield and build white label, you know, institutional grade yield products for either retail or institutional users, just get in touch. We're growing really fast, and are looking, always looking for great new partners.
Sy Taylor 23:46
So after we've got stable coins and US Dollars everywhere, we've got yield everywhere, what comes next? What about securities everywhere? Because the US stock market is hard to access for many in the Global South, tokenization potentially opens those markets and creates new buyers for us. Stocks. Next up, we have Anna, who is the Chief Business Officer of denari, to explain the global opportunity for tokenized securities.
Speaker 3 24:20
Denari is the leading provider of tokenized US Securities. So we do US stocks, ETFs. We have over 100 names now, and we work with distribution partners around the world. So we have end customers in over 70 countries. Wow. And growing very fast.
Sy Taylor 24:37
The topic that keeps coming up on our show a lot of the moment is, of course, stable coins. What is it that's made them so hot, right?
Speaker 3 24:44
I think, oh, there's probably two things. One, it's it's a very clear use case so people understand kind of what it is. It's a lot easier to explain a stable coin to your neighbor than it would be to explain the appeal of a meme. Coin, for example. But also it's any financial product that makes things faster and cheaper is very appealing, right? So, with a stable coin you have, you know, you can send money anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes and be completely finished with the transaction on normal rails, on traditional rails you're looking at, you know, days, sometimes even over a week. So it has a very strong appeal that I think is just hard to ignore.
Sy Taylor 25:26
It's very hard to ignore clear use case. I think that's powerful given your background. Why do you think that defi and tradfi are converging? What's brought the institutions into the conversation recently? It seems like the momentum's really improved.
Speaker 3 25:41
Yeah, I think you're right. The momentum is really, is really there right now. I do think we've seen a lot of institutional interest in the space for a long time, but it's been almost theoretical, right? Like, what is this? What is it for? You know, there's teams that have been looking, I mean, in some cases, you have institutions that have been looking at crypto, or kind of involved in the space for over a decade, but taking that from idea to practice has has taken some time, and I do think stable coins have had a lot to do with that. It's, I mean, that's something that you can present to your boss, right? Yeah, and as as an obvious win for everyone involved. But the other reason, I think, is also there's regulatory clarity now that we haven't had for a long time, and that's taken many years to many years to get to a point. You know, have Mika in Europe. There's digital asset license progress around the world, even in the US, you know, hopefully we're converging on some stable coin regulation, yeah. So, you know, we're getting there, and I think that really helps institutions to feel free to operate in the space.
Sy Taylor 26:42
Come clarity, I can't come soon enough. I was like, let's talk about tokenized stocks and equities. They're making headlines. But I want to understand why is that an unlock?
Speaker 3 26:53
I think, similar to the stable coin use case, and then we've seen the Treasury, you know, use case stocks again, there's something that are it's understandable. And if you can tokenize stocks, you can again, make it faster, cheaper and just a better user experience to access US markets. So just like there's a lot of demand for the US dollar, just like there's a lot of demand for US Treasuries around the world, there's a lot of demand for US financial markets and capital markets. And so what we're seeing is you're making them more accessible. You're making it fast and cheap to invest. Hard to ignore that.
Sy Taylor 27:29
And we've seen, as you rightly point out, that finances going on chain, stable coins, lending credit and, of course, stocks, but as those kind of more complex products go to other markets, do you think it will be the consumer that adopts them? Is it corporate treasuries? Are you seeing that demand for that portfolio from any particular user base, and who's the like ideal client profile for tokenized stocks?
Speaker 3 27:59
That's a really interesting question. And I think it does vary to some extent around the world. I mean, you do have retail interest. We primarily, I mean, really only at this point, work with distribution partners. So I can tell you, you know, from, from our partnerships, and from, you know, those that are we're talking to that are in our our pipeline, as it were, it it ranges incredibly widely. So you know, we have institutional interest. We have Neo banks and, you know, brokerages around the world that are looking to just enhance their offering, enhance their user experience. We even have, of course, like we have web three native partners, wallets and other protocols. So I do think that, just like the demand for US stocks is global in nature, and ranges from, you know, the very biggest investors in the world to, you know, the auto enrolled for 1k participants and other consumers. I think that that holds for the tokenized version of it as well. Again, we're taking something that exists at denarii, we're backing it one to one, and we're just making it available in a way that is easier for people in terms of their user experience. You don't have to, you know, go through a different brokerage account. You don't have to do anything complicated. You use the app that you're already using. We make it faster and we make it cheaper for a financial product that's that's simply a great value.
Sy Taylor 29:19
It makes me think of a company like drive wealth or alpaca a little bit, those sort of infrastructure middleware companies that were sort of taking funds and relationships with custodians and many others and being a brokerage themselves and wrapping it behind an API. They didn't remove the expense, they just made it developer friendly. And I think when you can reduce the cost and you can increase the timeliness of some of these things. You expand the total addressable market. It'll be exciting to watch you guys. So what do the next 612 months look like for Denari?
Unknown Speaker 29:54
Growth, growth growth growth growth growth,
Unknown Speaker 29:57
says the chief officer, yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 3 30:00
It's very predictable coming from me. I think we've done a really great job at making our product very easy to integrate. So you've just alluded to that make it, make it easy for our partners around the world to work with us. I think we've taken a very strong approach to regulation, and, you know, making sure that we are we're very much on the risk averse side of of you know, how much regulatory risk do you want to take? We have taken the long term view that one has to work with regulators and make sure that we are, you know, making it easy for financial institutions to to come to us and to partner with us. So you'll see a lot of news on that front, hopefully good news on that front and yeah, we'll just continue to expand our offerings and our partnerships, and you'll be hearing a lot from us over the coming months.
Sy Taylor 30:49
Phenomenal. Where do people find out more about you and Denari?
Speaker 3 30:53
Obviously, you can go to our website, denari.com where we provide basic information. You can follow us at denari global on X, also a great place and read about us in
Sy Taylor 31:06
the news. Excited for that. Thank you very much for joining us. So much. Thank you. ANNA Vanek is an asset manager, but also there are surprisingly active VC in the tokenization ecosystem. So I had the good fortune of sitting down with Wyatt, who's a GP over at Vanek ventures, to get a pulse on what they're seeing.
Speaker 4 31:30
So Vanek is a traditional asset management firm. We have about $120 billion under management, primarily in ETFs mutual funds. Our crypto journey really began in 2017 we were one of the first firms to file for the Bitcoin and spot Bitcoin and eth spot ETFs, which took a number of years. They were just approved last year 2024 but during that time, we started building out our suite of services in crypto. So we have a research team now our ETFs. We have now three ETFs in United States. We have a liquid fund that invests basically, you think of it as like growth venture in liquid tokens. And then last year we created my Fund, which is Vanek ventures, $40 million early stage fund, very much focused on pre seed and seed. And our thesis is really FinTech 2.0 and crypto rails, or FinTech at the intersection of crypto and AI,
Sy Taylor 32:25
I called us day walkers for a long time because we were the vampires that could go out in the sunlight. They were rare, and now they're becoming more common. I'm so glad to see that, and I'm glad you got that fun running. The big topic at the moment is stable coins. What is it that's made them so hot at the moment?
Speaker 4 32:42
Yeah, it's interesting. Stable coins have been around for like, a decade, but I think really it was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel around legislation in the United States, since the US was probably the most hostile towards crypto in general, and stable coins up until the Trump administration. And so prior to that, you saw big moves by stripe, acquiring bridge for over a billion dollars. And I think that started shifting people's attention to stable coins. And once they started looking at them, you could see that all the metrics were up into the right yeah, like 2024 settling $27 trillion of annual volume. You know, it's been completely up and to the right throughout its history. You know of about two, 60 billion stable coins in market cap. And so when you see tech companies like Stripe move, and you see a potential for for an actual comprehensive bill so that every company around the world can leverage this, I think people start, you know, their minds start turning and they're like, How can I apply this to my business?
Sy Taylor 33:41
It just feels like a post. Feels like a perfect set of dominoes. Didn't it like the stripe news, then potential regulatory clarity, then the momentum with everybody else trying to get into it, and the numbers were already up and to the right? Yes, just stripe made everybody look at them.
Speaker 4 33:56
Yeah, no, I think that's totally fair. I mean, like I, prior to starting Vanek ventures, I was at circle for five and a half years. And so, you know, I remember USDC being launched, and I remember people not really getting it and being like, why do we have $1 it doesn't go up. And the reality was, it was serving a very unmet need, unmet need in the market to buy digital assets in $1 form, versus having to trade crypto for crypto and constantly settled to cash. And so that's evolved. And people, I mean, that's the beauty of commercialist systems, is that people started using stable coins in unique ways. And eventually businesses started using stable coins in unique ways. And I think the best use case to highlight there was really cross border payments, where you would have these difficult corridors, and businesses would leverage stable coins. And think you guys helped coin, the whole stable coin sandwich name, and again, as you see a player like Stripe come in and buy bridge and really push that strategy, anyone who's moving large sums of money needs to now look at stable coins and say, like, what's
Sy Taylor 34:56
our strategy? I gotta say, shout out to Goldie. Ryan Goldie five. Blocks is the originator of that term of art, so it's him, but we may have made it more popular. We definitely, we definitely have look defi and tradfi are converging. Why is that happening now? And where's, where are the key intersections?
Speaker 4 35:15
Yeah, I mean, I think this is broadly tokenization, and I really look back at the early years of stable coins, and kind of all the lessons learned there. Stable coins are just kind of an over the top protocol for cash. It allows us to more or less settle cash transactions instantly, without having to go through the entire banking systems and all the networks that typically are applied to a transaction. And so defi has showed us that we can start to do some of this with tradfi products, namely lending. So you've created these kind of very large internet native credit marketplaces that are just cheaper, more globally accessible, faster. Again, doesn't apply to everything. We can't just broadly apply it to every single type of asset in tradfi, but it's shown us that things are possible. And so recently, we actually made an investment in a company called tanari, who's starting to do this with equities. And so it's a really exciting trend. And again, I think similar stable coins, as you have more and more people start to develop this technology, you have more regulation that's actually encourages entrepreneurs to build here, you're going to have a similar trend to AI, where it's just going to accelerate a lot faster, and we're going to figure out which use cases it's really good for
Sy Taylor 36:29
gradually, then suddenly, feels like the knee of that curve we get to, we
Speaker 4 36:34
get to build on the back of stable coins. If you think about, you know, the people that are holding stable coins today, they're largely ex us. They're using it as a currency to hedge against their own inflation, and then they're typically using it as a payment rail. And so the next thing I think makes sense is, how do we feed them products that they can use dollars to invest in? So in the same way they think, you know, stable coins, we were exporting the US dollar and exporting US dollar savings. The next part of that is the financial markets. But again, defi has already created this kind of internet capital market system, and so, you know, it's phenomenal for stable coins that it's their predominantly
Sy Taylor 37:10
screw in the Tai of customers that you can potentially serve if you're selling those kind of products. And do you think the institutions will come? Will there be crypto native institutions that serve those like, what do you think the timing of all of that looks like?
Speaker 4 37:25
I think the you know, institutions are already here. They're already, you know, playing around with this technology. And, you know, folks like Van Eck, we just announced our own tokenized money market fund called V bill. I think it was last week. So you're starting to see kind of our crypto forward Institute. Yeah, it's great to start to play out the technology, but just kind of, kind of looking back on my time in this industry, it all starts within these kind of permissionless marketplaces, and I think that eventually drives when institutions will adopt and so we're seeing this, you know, JP Morgan announced they've settled over 2 trillion of their overnight repo market. That's fantastic, but we still haven't really broken that into Main Street, and that's what I'm kind of more excited to see. Is like, how can institutions Now, using this programmability of blockchains actually go direct to consumers in a more interesting way?
Sy Taylor 38:19
You've invested in multiple stable coin businesses, tokenized real estate. You've been in this space for a little while. What does the roadmap of tokenization look like from where we sit now,
Speaker 4 38:34
I think the biggest piece to solve for since a lot of these assets that are that are coming on chain, I think there's two parts. One we need, we need regulation. We need to actually be able to use the blockchain for what it's good at, as a primary record of ownership and as a means of exchange. And today, the way the system is set up is that these are all kind of off chain, you know, paper based securities with some digital form, and then there's the secondary copy on a blockchain. So a lot of what you see in tokenization, Tai like, they don't really do anything on or off chain. They kind of just sit there. It's great. It's great for us as an industry to kind of build off that momentum. But I think the second part is, how do we bring these net new assets on chain, something that could be hard to access, like a basket of real estate products, and actually build secondary liquidity around those assets? So a lot of what I'm seeing in tokenization is, what would you what previously would have been a fund that was maybe only available to qualified purchasers or high net worth individuals can now be published to the internet, and we can use these kind of cryptographic primitives to just enable much larger scale distribution. So I always say it's kind of like taking the financial markets, but putting them on, like, Instagram scale, and so that's what I'm excited about. But it starts with regulation. It starts with, you know, working with regulators like the SEC to get no action letters in the interim period, and then eventually, just, you know, solving for liquidity, which I still think is an
Sy Taylor 39:58
issue, and it's gonna be exciting. Think couple of years ahead. So where do people find out more about you and Van Eck ventures? Yeah, vanek.com,
Speaker 4 40:07
for me on Twitter at Wyatt, underscore Lonergan and I have to give a shameless plug to the Van Eck intern. Our Twitter account was just just great place to learn about us and all the different things we're doing. At Vanek.
Sy Taylor 40:19
All right. Thank you. Wyatt. Next up we have Farooq, who is the co founder of rain, to talk stablecoin linked cards. He, of course, has been on the show before, but this is a really clear understanding of the stablecoin linked card opportunity. Don't miss this one.
Speaker 5 40:38
My background is mostly traditional financial services. I was in international banking for several years, and part of that I was in private equity focused on frontier and emerging markets. And at rainn, we have been building a lot of the financial tooling to service a global customer base. I think what we realized when we started RAINN was that the last several decades have been punctuated by the success of global platforms like platforms like Airbnb, Facebook, marketplace, you know, Amazon and other, you know, large global companies that have that are servicing people around the world, right, both businesses and consumers, and what we realized was, is that they didn't really have financial partners or enablement partners to provide financial products around their global customer base. And so that's where we started realizing that there was an opportunity to build a global enablement player and start providing kind of FinTech associated services to large global platforms. And, you know, communities that have a broader customer base, and we realized that stable coins and stable coin infrastructure was really the best way to provide that utility for dollar balances and digital dollars and digital dollar utility,
Sy Taylor 41:54
I want to go into stable coins, because what is it that's driven this moment in time, like, Why have they become so hot at this moment? Do you think?
Speaker 5 42:04
Well, I think it's, I think it's just a waking up of the collective conscious, right? I think one of the things that we've realized is like, so 75% of dollars live outside the US, right? And the every major FinTech that's been created over time, over the levy, certainly more recent, time has been focused on that 25% market segment, which is domestic and stable coins have been, have become a way, a new way, right over the last like several years since tether and circle started this industry to be A way for providing dollar utility and dollar savings and dollar access to people around the world right outside of their traditional kind of Euro banking partnerships. And so that's where I think we've seen a lot of demand coming, where people have woken up and said, hey, you know USDC or usdt or other stable coins are a way to hold dollars without having to go open an account at Deutsche Bank. And that's really where I think that people have started realizing, Hey, this is now a way to provide access to these services, and a way to for me to hold savings in dollars and potentially earn yield in dollars and things like that. And that's where stable coins, I think, have really started taking off, where just that collective consciousness, like people wake up, and then all of a sudden it just happens, right? It's like Garfield,
Sy Taylor 43:30
what a perfect metaphor. And what do you think has happened to sort of make this convergence of like tradfi and defi happen? Because you work with a lot of partners that are more on the tradfi side to deliver what you deliver, but you're using, arguably, defi rails to do it. What's unlocked
Speaker 5 43:49
at Yeah. I mean, look, I think our thesis when we started rain was pretty simple, right? Which is that digital money is going to be a thing whether we like it or not, whether central banks around the world like it or not, it's already a thing. It's already, you know, at the time it was over, you know, it was almost $100 billion industry when we started the company, and that's much larger than many nation states, right, economies, and so we realized that it was going to be a thing, because it was already a thing, right? It was no big, smart idea on our side. It was just that we realized that this is something that's inevitable, and people are using it like money, and they expect it to behave like money. And so Trad, Fi and defi. I think the convergence is happening largely because people are realizing that, hey, people that hold these tokens as money expect it to behave like money. And so a lot of the underlying infrastructure that we built rain on top of, has been focused on, what does a post regulatory clarity world look like, and how do we start front running some of these use cases and building that utility and that infrastructure so that as regulatory clarity comes in, as larger institutions want to participate, how do we give them access to the same type of infrastructure and to. Ling and certifications, and, you know, security certifications, etc, that they expect to have from other software vendors. And so with rang, we spent a lot of time working on the credit side, right? Because private credit is an industry. Private creditors are not banks. They've been largely flexible when it comes to transacting in stable coin infrastructure and in the defi ecosystem anyways. And so we started borrowing a lot of money on the blockchain to support our credit card programs. And we we actually started tokenizing all of our credit card receivables, and each transaction that happens on the Visa card that we issue that's a credit program product, we actually borrow that correspondent settlement money from a lender?
Sy Taylor 45:44
Wow, I did not know that. Yeah. Sorry. Just unpack that for me the flow of funds, please. Yeah.
Speaker 5 45:52
I mean, so maybe it's better to kind of give you, like, an idea of how traditional programs work, yes, please, and compare the two. Yeah. So in a traditional program, you'd have, like, a warehouse lender, right? Yeah, warehouse lenders typically will be there to buy the receivables after the transaction been originated. And you need to kind of consolidate X number of dollars of transactions, and then you have to fill out a bunch of paperwork and put an Excel spreadsheet, and then mail it off to your banking, you know, your lending partner, and then they'll review it, and then they'll say, oh, you know, this is $251,000 and that fits within our limit. And okay, here's $251,000 of warehouse advance. But generally, there's like a two week lag between when that transaction happens and when you get your money back. And so working capital wise, it's quite inefficient, because as the program scales like that, activity in that two week period will also scale, right and so on. What we've done is that we've started being able to tokenize the transactions on the receivable at a per swipe business. Yeah. So we can actually turn around and let's say I spend $10 at a cup of coffee for a cup of coffee, or, you know, breakfast, you know, I guess cup of coffee is our $10 these days, but we turn around and we we can actually borrow that money from our Capital Partners and then settle that money with Visa entirely on the blockchain.
Sy Taylor 47:10
So that is disruptive for anybody operating a credit card program really and really, much more meaningfully efficient. And I think that sort of really speaks to why institutions might come into this because they want efficiency just as much as anybody. How have your conversations been with those larger institutions? Because you said, here are a lot of them waiting on the sidelines for regulatory clarity, but what are you hearing from some of the banks, domestically, internationally, and some of the other players in the ecosystem?
Speaker 5 47:40
Yeah, I mean, we're starting to see a lot of inbound from both traditional financial players as well as just banks around the world that are interested in using stable coins as a way to improve efficiencies in their settlement stack. Right on the private credit side, we've also seen a lot of inbound on folks that are trying to learn more about how do we actually facilitate this activity, because not only is the borrowing entirely on the blockchain and using stable coins with rain powered programs, where all of our repayments from clients are actually all on the blockchain, so nobody's taking any Fiat repayment risk, so the lenders actually get repaid automatically when our clients repay us. And in that way, you kind of close the loop on borrowing, yeah, because
Sy Taylor 48:19
it goes straight through. It's just exactly and then it
Speaker 5 48:23
automatically goes to the smart contract. Interest is taken out, principal is taken out, and we get the money at the bottom end. So it's a lot more efficient. And then the other thing which was interesting, right? Is when we we actually had two offers from Capital Partners early on, and one of them was a traditional sort of credit Fund, and the other one was more was open minded about lending money to us on the blockchain and just in the legal documentary cost of doing it in the tradfi space versus the defi space, we actually saved probably about $180,000 in just legal documentary costs because we didn't need to put all these covenants in on repayments and Our accounts need to be controlled by the lender. We need to be able to give them account access, because all of the repay knows that exactly, and all the repayments are forced to go through the repayment flow.
Sy Taylor 49:10
You have no choice. Cryptography is ensuring that that has to happen. You have
Speaker 5 49:16
no choice, and we need the lender's consent to be able to change where repayments go.
Sy Taylor 49:19
Yeah, it's incredible when you unpack the real world use case, I think it really starts to speak to what you've built in kind of a different way, but speak to the consumer side as well, like we've seen crypto link cards for a little while and but you know, Kai Sheffield says that the world now calls these dollar cards. People just want access to dollar cards. What are you seeing and where are you seeing that product market fit the most.
Speaker 5 49:46
I think Kai is totally right, right like I think people want dollars. I think increasingly people are realizing that accessing dollars through banking as a service channels at regional banks is. Probably not a sustainable long term model, and stable coins as a global sort of dollar correspondent mechanism provides the functionality of $1 balance, the utility of $1 balance. Now when you add it to the visa network and other card networks, and then the utility of dollars, because you can hold it, you can earn it, you can earn revenue on it, and you can spend it. Right, like, that's the same thing that people expect all of their money to do, right, is you can earn it, you can hold it, you can save it, and you can spend it.
Sy Taylor 50:31
But that's not true for everybody, everywhere around the world with their local currency.
Speaker 5 50:35
So Exactly, yeah, and that's where we've started seeing, like, a tremendous amount of market adoption, right? Where you have people that are earning money from more developed economies, right, the US, Europe, et cetera, those monies are flowing in the form of salaries or remittances or vendor payments around the world, and the recipient is having to receive them into a local currency, which may have sort of high inflation, but beyond that, it may also have high fees, right? Like all the banks in those markets, generally, these economies are fairly small banks. Banking is not very competitive. Banks charge high fees. And so not only are you paying a fee on the way in from the US back into you know, Country X, you're also paying fees on the way out. So if you're receiving money from a vendor, right? Let's say you're a dev shop, right? You're receiving funds from me that I'm paying you, and then on top of that, you're turning around and you're paying for Adobe or Google Cloud or AWS, or, you know, Microsoft Teams, all of those transactions are now being up charged to you by your local bank when you're going back to dollars, right? Because the US dollar is still very much the currency of global commerce.
Sy Taylor 51:44
Since we are at the avalanche summit for why don't you tell me about the avalanche code?
Speaker 5 51:50
Yeah, I mean, we had an opportunity to work with the avalanche foundation on building a truly unique product, as you know, like avalanche is a global sort of blockchain, global customer adoption, and we wanted to work with the avalanche team to provide a product where a large swath of their global customer base could access it. And the avalanche card is a self custodial product. It's the user's wallet. It's attached to a visa credential that you can use anywhere that Visa is accepted globally, and all the funds on there are fully in the user's custody at all times. And you can spend USDC or usdt or avax or wrapped avax, and, yeah, we've seen a lot of success among the community. I think that even while I was waiting in line to come in, several people turned around said, Hey, are you from rain? And they showed me their, you know, virtual card on their, on their, on their phone. And then, you know, some of the folks even had our tokenized cards, which, you know, which light up as you bring it closer to an NFC, which has been pretty cool.
Sy Taylor 52:55
Oh, nice, nice little detail. Any, any NFC nerdery is fine with me. So tell me what's next for you and what's next for rain. Where are you guys headed? Yeah.
Speaker 5 53:05
I mean, look, our our goal is, I mean, pretty straightforward, right? Is our customers expect to be able to service their global customer base. I think that, you know, we benefit from our partnership with Visa, because visa is a global payment platform and a global payment network. And so our ambition really is to continue getting additional licensing and additional markets so that we can continue expanding the global footprint that is available for our customer base. Right? We want to make sure that stable coins and stable coin backed infrastructure, as that expands globally, as demand expands globally, and as our licensing footprint expands globally, we're able to just continue servicing clients with a single API, right? So you connect, once you sign one commercial agreement, and you go where we
Sy Taylor 53:50
go, well, thank you so much. Farooq, where can people find out more about you and more about rain? Yeah, I
Speaker 5 53:56
mean, you can find out more about rain at rain dot XYZ, and I think you can, you know, check out my Twitter, where I don't post that much, but
Sy Taylor 54:06
definitely do always. Thank you so much. Thank you. Next up, we have Gerald David, who's the CEO of link networks.
Speaker 6 54:18
Link networks is a consortium that was put together by three core partners, Arca, which is an asset manager in the digital asset space, and has been so since 2018 a company called Tai set, which is a technology provider. They've been about round as well for about the same amount of time, and are most well known for creating the Signature Bank Signet implementation, exactly. And then Tzero, which is special purpose broker dealer in the US, there's a broker dealer has one of two licenses in order to operate as such. The three of us put together a company that's called link, expanded it to include p2, c2, winter, mute, Galaxy, crypto.com, and we'll be announcing several other different partners. Unfortunately, I can't break them here on the show over the course the next couple of days, the most recent one on Thursday, and we've created a. Real Time broker dealer facilitated settlement system that uses avalanche as a technology to create a share of a fund that's used to drive interest back to the users of the platform.
Sy Taylor 55:10
That's phenomenal. So if I'm in that share of the fund, if I'm using the platform, I'm generating that yield kind of throughout and so contextualize that in terms of my operations at galaxy, my operations a winter meat, give me, give me use cases to kind of bring that life day to day.
Speaker 6 55:31
You've got it. Settlements always been a problem in this space. It really has been. There's bespoke settlement mechanisms, folks using stable coins, folks using wires, still at this point right now, and it's manually intensive. And at one point, there was a place where everyone could congregate in the industry, and it could transfer, you know, tokenized deposits back and forth to settle a trade, to onboard to an exchange, and even to go and create already a stable token. And that system was amazing until it wasn't, yeah, and we've recreated that now outside of the US banking system, we've recreated that in a broker, dealer facilitated ecosystem, and as such, now we're able to attach it to a fund that's been created and advised by Arca, which allows for users of the platform, the ones I mentioned before, and many others, to subscribe to the fund and then have interest bearing tokens that are being used to settle transactions.
Sy Taylor 56:19
That's absolutely incredible. My settlement has gone from being a back office nightmare to something that might actually be beneficial. And I think that's a mindset shift that's kind of huge.
Speaker 6 56:30
It is. It's a mindset shift, and it also really embraces Now this, this yield generation, you know, kind of craze that you're seeing everywhere. So now what we've done is we've taken, you know, kind of a tokenized deposit. It's invested in this fund, and it allows for users on the platform. The platform to have what we refer to as yield in transit, which is really very cool. It means basically that if you hold a position on the platform for, let's say, half a day, you get 50% of the yield that's generated each day, which then is delivered at the end of each day via the avalanche blockchain on a Senate tokenizable.
Sy Taylor 56:58
It says making operations just much, much, much more efficient. I want to kind of zoom out for a second and just get your take. We're asking everybody, what is it that makes stable coins so hot right now?
Speaker 6 57:11
Yeah. I mean, I think it's the natural evolution of the way this market started. When you think back to the first stable coins that were out there, and they were the first one, I think was in 2012 you know, the whole reason was that the US financial system or the global financial system? I should say, unfortunately, was inadequate. It wasn't able to keep up with the transferability and the speed of blockchain. So now, I think what you're seeing is this logical evolution now of traditional finance, whereby, you know, institutions are looking at the future. They're trying to understand how they adopt you're seeing explorations like JP Morgan, then traditionally, we're using private blockchains that are now expanding out into expanding out into, yeah, out into the public, public blockchains as well. And if you take a look at what they're using that in that scenario, it was a yield bearing stable
Sy Taylor 57:50
token, if finance is really going on chain, and settlement and payments is probably the obvious place. But I want to ask the why now question with defi and tradfi, you know, I was in a financial institution in 14, 1516, there was a lot of blockchain, not Bitcoin, and then there was kind of DLT, distributed ledger tech, and there was all of these things that were private, permissioned for a while. Why do you think it's now converging? What's changed?
Speaker 6 58:21
Well, I think that regulation, obviously, is playing a huge part, right? I think that everybody was on the sidelines in the US, and all of a sudden you're seeing kind of people flocking back to the US with the hopes that legislation is going to fall favorably, such that, you know, traditional finance will have the ability to really do what it's supposed to be doing. I think that there is going to be this friction assignment that exists right between traditional financial firms and how it is that they actually embrace or don't defy, and I think that there are a couple of real, real important things that one has to be conscious of. And the most important that we've been struggling with for the longest time is AML, KYC, how folks actually, you know, kind of adhere to that. If you're using some sort of defi infrastructure,
Sy Taylor 58:57
it's always been the blocker, and it's still not 100% solved without question. But the institutions have finally arrived. You know, we've got the likes of Blackrock, Franklin, Templeton, Wisdom Tree, many others who are now starting to lean in, and as you mentioned, JP Morgan with Connexus and starting to open up. Robin Hood, of course, is a large, large player in stable coins. Increasingly, how have your conversations shady been with some of the larger institutions, and are they? You've seen more activity in the crypto natives, the buy side, the sell side, where's the activity?
Speaker 6 59:33
Yeah, believe it or not, we've actually been exploring, you know, kind of tokenized solutions, specifically treasuries within banking infrastructure. For years, we started working with US Bank, and I know that doesn't seem like a logical name, but we've been working with us bank now for three years. And in fact, the fund that I mentioned previously, they're actually the custodian of that fund. And I think that what you're seeing from the banking sector right now is, how is it that they can adapt, and how is it that they could take their traditional structures and actually morph them into what they need for the future? So US Bank is a great example. You know, they're looking at their servicing arm. So how is it? They can become a transfer agent. They can be a fun custodian, which they're now, you know, able to do based upon regulatory changes. How is they can be a fun admin as well. And then I think the cooler part will be when you start seeing things like tokenized treasuries, yeah, for collateral management, replacing what you see now are traditional Treasury is moving which has a t plus one or t plus two.
Sy Taylor 1:00:23
Lat, you know that instant 24/7, kind of flip is just unbelievable. And again, for a lot of their clients, to be able to offer that out to them, if they're operating on a global stage as well, well, listen. JD, this has been phenomenal. Where can people find out more about you, and link network, if they
Speaker 6 1:00:40
want to definitely find out more about link network, at link dot network, and you can also visit the Orca site, the tacit site or the t zero site to be redirected. Phenomenal. Thank you so much. Judy, thanks for having me on the show.
Sy Taylor 1:00:55
Thank you. JD, now a really, really surprising conversation. I sat down with nikhil sharma, who is Ed and head of growth at Connexus digital of course, a part of JP Morgan. Listen to the numbers in this one,
Speaker 7 1:01:13
Conexus digital assets forms a part of one of the four things within Connexus. I'll take a step back in terms of like talking about what Conexus is. Conexus is our blockchain business unit within the firm. So everything that we do in terms of building traditional financial products on blockchain that's happening within Conexus, where we sit in the firm, is within the payments unit within the firm. And that's because of legacy, that's because of how we enable other business lines within the firm. But we end up working with like all our business lines, and primarily what we do is we're helping clients move information money and cross asset settlements faster, with a lot more certainty, with a lot more precision, with a lot more control. Primarily, what my day job is is to look at this platform that we've built out called Connexus digital assets, and that particularly looks at tokenizing traditional assets and settling them, settling them in a delivery versus payment format, or a free of payment format, which is you'll have cash on the other end and an asset on the on one end. Or you can basically post assets as margin that those are the things we do on our platform. And that came in from a pain point of like, you have traditional siloed systems where assets move on one ledger, cash moves on the other ledger.
Sy Taylor 1:02:18
You got to reconcile them and take days weeks. Yeah, think you're wrong. Totally.
Speaker 7 1:02:23
You would think that within a bank that would be easy just to create one ledger doesn't work that way.
Sy Taylor 1:02:27
So when you got 60 mainframes in 60 different markets, that suddenly becomes and each of those markets actually has five to 10 different systems of record, it's Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 7 1:02:38
So we collapse the two. So what happens today is we've essentially created this general purpose utility infrastructure, front to back, where we have the protocol layer. We tokenize assets, we build services in which those assets can be woven into and then clients use it. Clients have been using it. We've been live for more than four and a half years. So like in terms of large institutions, we keep saying, like, institutions are coming. They've already come. Yeah, been on our although they've they've been on our gated platform. They've been there for like, four and a half years, transacting like more than two to 3 billion daily.
Sy Taylor 1:03:10
I think that's fascinating, that there's that level of transaction kind of happening. The institutions are already here. They're just not in the place you might have expected them. And I think that's kind of also starting to happen now. We've had been speaking to Wisdom Tree and Van Eyck today, and many, many others, they are also seeing, kind of in the permissionless blockchain world, in the that world that there is institutional adoption. But what I've observed, and what we've been asking everybody today is, like stable coins seems to be really having their moment. What is it that's helped that catch fire? And do you think instant 24/7, is the killer app for tokenization?
Speaker 7 1:03:51
I think it's sort of emerged that way. And the operative word is, like they're hot right now. And like, fundamentally, if you think about the use cases. They've sort of only evolved. Use Cases have existed for a while, but if you see what has actually changed or catalyzed in the past, sort of whatever period that we've seen is tokenized wrapper products coming in, like mid last year. Well, march 2024, is when Blackrock Biddy came in. Benji has been around for a bit longer than that. So instant payments in terms of like one the tokenized wrappers, giving yields on your stable coin balances that sit on chain, and the ability to kind of move in and move out very quickly. Yeah, that's almost created this dynamic where, if I am a, and I'm not saying a corporate, sort of regular way treasurer, but if I'm an on chain sort of protocol managing a treasury of liquidity, then I have now options where I can move in my liquidity, manage that liquidity on a daily basis, earn yields on it, and, like, get out when I want to. Yeah. So that's been one of the sort of catalyzing factors. I would say. In addition to that, what you've seen like from the beginning of the year is some clarity around, like, regulations terms of what stable coins are. How do you hold them? How do you record them in your. Balance Sheet. What do you use them for? And that helps, because then it's sort of reaching out to a wider swathe of the market who's now looking at these assets and saying, oh, maybe we can use this for some use cases. Is this? Is this a one size fits all solution? I don't think so. I don't think it's a zero sum game, which sort of goes back to what our focus has been, which is, like we've been looking at how deposits commercial bank money can be, can be represented in a tokenized format. Yeah, parts of it have existed, or in some format it has existed in the past, which is the blockchain deposit accounts that we have where we move cash on chain. Yeah, that will evolve in terms of structure, in terms of construct, etc. And the third thing I would say, like, in terms of stable coins, is, in general, there is this, there is this dynamic of looking at stable coins as almost like a collateral optimization tool, yeah, where? And that's a narrative that's starting to sort of build up. So that's why I think we're hot right now.
Sy Taylor 1:05:55
Yeah, it's a great answer to the question. I think wonderful nuance inside of that. And I think the this sort of perception of the world that you diverged there as to like the role stable coins play and the role commercial Money plays that's tokenized, they are slightly different horses for different courses. They exist in a similar ecosystem. And on that basis, I saw an interesting announcement with chain link and Ondo and you guys a couple of weeks ago. Do you want to unpack that and where that fits into the broader strategy?
Speaker 7 1:06:29
Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, this goes back to sort of giving some context to your listeners, perhaps. So within Connexus, we also have a product called Conex digital payments. It's a stripe where we are essentially moving payments cross border, 24 by seven, helping our corporate clients, our fi financial institution clients, non banking, financial institution clients, to move money quickly. So they could be moving money into their intra company subsidiaries. They could be moving to their counter parties that sit elsewhere. But essentially how we enable that is we have a formal sub ledger inside the bank, which is distributed ledger based. And you would think that it's a bank. I mean, how difficult is it to kind of put in but then, going back to our conversation earlier, like these are different jurisdictions, different sort of legal wrappers through which they sit. So the ledgers are different. So the benefit of actually putting it in a distributed ledger construct is that you can create these near instant payment, this dynamic which sort of helps as a product inside R. So that's what essentially can access digital payments. Is we started with a single Bank Ledger, then we moved on to a multi Bank Ledger, where we invested in a company called party, or in Singapore, where we started working with multiple banks to do multi currency settlements. Now, when you start to look at where this evolution takes us to, it's almost a universal ledger, kind of a construct where payments can move and they can technically settle in assets that could be moving on different ledgers. And that's essentially what the experiment with Ondo and chainlink was, where if we are enabling payments on our ledger, is there a way by which we can connect to this translation layer and connect to where assets are settling, so assets could be on a different ledger, and like, payments happen on this ledger, and then there's a translation mechanism connecting it? Is this new for us in terms of a concept? No, because, like to go back to what I was telling you earlier, like we are conscious that everything that we build, that we've been building so far, although those numbers look big, we have processed close to, like a $2 trillion number through our platform still date. But that said that's still within our backyard. So we are looking to sort of connect to ledgers outside of our
Sy Taylor 1:08:37
backyard, because you have a very large backyard as one of the world's largest banks. So it's not they're big numbers, but there's only so much fun you can have on your own blockchain. Totally.
Speaker 7 1:08:46
And we're fortunate to have that. I mean, we have, we have the strength of the franchise to kind of tap into different pockets and create these pools of liquidity on our own, but our clients are actually looking at a broader sort of experience beyond that. Yeah, that's what we want to cater to so in terms of the interoperability story, in terms of how we connect our ledgers to ledgers outside of our ecosystem, that's been a that's been a sort of a continuing story for us, and the first sort of checkpoint on that story for us was like two years ago, when we connected our ledger with avalanche And provenance and basically tested out tokenization of funds and, like, plugging them into model portfolios, and I'm throwing a lot in here, yeah, but, but essentially it's, how do you use alternative investment funds in, like, a model portfolio and do, like, automated, automated rebalancing. So doesn't happen today, no, but then you could potentially do that.
Sy Taylor 1:09:41
And so unless you've ever done rebalancing, you don't know that the pain and the steps and the manual work involved, there's somebody somewhere that's dealing with spreadsheets and copying and pasting and kind of just like this nightmare set of scenarios that is just a lot of work. And whenever you have that manual work, you have the. Risk of error. And whenever you have the risk of error, things go wrong, and it becomes costly and it becomes slower. So automating that means is really, really powerful, but you need to really test and ensure that the link between those two blockchains is secure. It's consistent that the workflow works, and there's a very large, regulated financial institution, you want to be really sure before you move there. So what does what are your next sort of three six months look like? What are you focused on? What are your priorities?
Speaker 7 1:10:28
So my priority day to day has been growing the platform, network activity on the platform, which look like additional apps that are coming onto the platform. So today, we have three live applications, one where we enable our clients to do repos, which is, you can provide an asset and like you can borrow against it. So if you think about repos, the way they happen in the traditional markets is going back to the framing of assets move on separate ledgers, cash moves on another ledger. So to be able to kind of compress this within a day, it's just difficult, yeah, what we've been able to do is compress it down to 30 minutes, where you, as a borrower, can present, can can bring in a traditional asset and borrow to as low as 30 minutes, and you can pay on a minute by minute basis, wow, while you're borrowing it. That's like a paradigm shift for treasurer, if you will, yeah, where they're looking to kind of optimize their liquidity to down to the minute. Yeah, where, like,
Sy Taylor 1:11:22
I can imagine corporate The other type of CTO chief Treasury officers of some of the world's largest corporates, especially multinationals, with 190 countries, that meaningful.
Speaker 7 1:11:34
It is, it is totally meaningful gives them precision and control over over their liquidity optimization techniques that they use today. And it's sort of, I wouldn't say it's a replacement to what happens today, but it's almost like a just in case I need this cash, I have this mechanism. Okay, so interesting positioning, yeah. So because, like in many cases, you would sort of do a repo overnight or term, which we do support on our blockchain sort of platform, but then where it starts to get you, like clear benefits, is in the intraday repos. That's what we started with. That's been sort of our long standing product, which we have grown through. But then I'm sort of deviating here. So what we have live on the platform is, one of the products is repo the other product is where we are posting collateral in the form of tokenized assets. And third product is where we are issuing, transacting and settling bonds. So when it comes down to my focus, like we have proved out the fact that blockchain works, it shows you benefits in terms of settlement efficiencies, reducing reconciliations, etc, with these three products, what we want to do, and that's my immediate focus, is to basically parlay these learnings and the technology into products that are in the pipeline. So one that we are working on right now, and one that you will hear about in next coming months, is something that we're doing in the tokenization of alternative investment funds. Yes, so clear pain points,
Sy Taylor 1:13:01
prior credit, private equity, that whole space is just, yeah, very, very fragmented, very, very manual, very paper based, very intensive. Yeah.
Speaker 7 1:13:12
So infrastructure funds, private equity funds, long lock up funds where there has been tokenization of these funds in the past. But I think one key difference that we're looking to sort of solve for is solving for that capital call drawdown mechanism. Oh, interesting. So typically, like tokenized funds, tend to be capital call structures, where you're actually calling capital once the deal is ready. Yeah, today, most of the tokenized funds that you see out there in the private investment space, like in the private fund space, is like one shot capital call, and it basically sits there. What we are intending to do is basically create a solution that that streamlines the entire process, and it's a start point. It basically goes, goes back to what we started out as an experiment, like two years ago, where we started with a thesis of what would it take to kind of put this asset class in a portfolio which can be rebalanced? Yeah, I can see how those two things are linked. So from the outside, it looks like we're doing these disconnected, isolated experiments, but from the inside doesn't look like that at all, like it's basically like one step in the journey where, for a portfolio, you need a universe. For a universe, you need to kind of start ground up where you're tokenizing a front fund from the very fundamentals of, how do you create that universal ledger? How do you meet funds where they are, instead of, like creating a whole new shock value straight
Sy Taylor 1:14:38
away, new operating model, new software, and knew everything. It's like, no, here's a value case that you use today. It's in addition to what you have, and you're sort of walking them
Speaker 7 1:14:46
through, yeah, and then you build on top of that, and at some point in the journey, you have a universe that's big enough you have a universe that's varied enough that you can create a portfolio, at which time you sort of revisit what you had built as like a technology. Be, yeah, successful experiment already, and like, plug it back in, phenomenal.
Sy Taylor 1:15:04
Well, Nikhil, thank you so much for explaining all of this. If people want to learn more about everything you're doing at Connexus, where do they go?
Speaker 7 1:15:11
You can go to our website, which is like, quite, quite obviously the case. But then you can find me on LinkedIn as well, happy to answer, kind of answer any questions that you might have. Look at collaboration opportunities. We're definitely looking at this space quite keenly. Like public blockchain tends to be sort of thrown at us, saying you've not done anything on it, and I keep reminding people that we did something back in 2022 in the public blockchain space as a live transaction. So if you are talking about public blockchain, don't think of us as a bank that doesn't look at it. Doesn't look at it. Definitely speak to us. Come have the conversation. Come have the conversation. All right, you
Sy Taylor 1:15:47
heard it here, guys, thank you so much. Nicole, thank you. Well, you heard nickel. Go talk to him and what they're doing at Connexus. And last, but by no means least, our closer for today's episode, I had the absolute pleasure of speaking with Meredith, who's the head of biz dev for digital assets over at WisdomTree. Again.
Speaker 8 1:16:11
Thank you so much for having me. So I'm Meredith Hannan, and I lead business development, as you mentioned. So what that means at WisdomTree is sales and partnerships. So I spend the majority of my time with the defi community, also with the tradfi community, that I think we'll talk a bit about today, to really understand what this intersection of defi and Chad by Chad phi could be, and how to bring more assets onto chain in a really, really thoughtful way. And I'll talk about this more, I think, through the rest of the questions, but with a real focus on meeting our clients where we are. So Wisdom Tree isn't $110 billion global asset manager. The heritage is very much in ETFs and etps. So you might be thinking to yourself, so why are you in tokenization, and how did we get here? But if you think about what an ETF or an ETP is, that's, again, an exchange traded fund or product. It's really a new wrapper, compared to a mutual fund or to other traditional wrappers of assets, and it created an opportunity for standardization, meaning, could just use a brokerage account to purchase all of these assets, liquidity, obviously, they're exchange traded, and then also standard transparency in terms of what the underlying basket is. So those three principles are a lot of what you'll see in tokenization as well. It's really a new, better wrapper to provide access to our end investors for traditional assets. So really excited to talk a little bit more about what that means and the platforms that we
Sy Taylor 1:17:35
have that's powerful frame and very, very useful whenever you can just describe something as something you've seen before, but with a new technology, I think it helps the penny drop for a lot of folks, but just changing gears ever so slightly, one thing we've been asking everybody today is, why do you think stable coins are so hot right now?
Speaker 8 1:17:54
So this is an interesting question. Because stable coins, and just looking at the stats this morning, there's 260 billion in assets and stable coins. There's over 160 million stable coin holders. So while it feels really hot right now, this has definitely been an active market for quite some time, and I think the crypto community, but also just retail investors, have been using these assets for cross border payments to be able to access different types of assets that maybe they couldn't have before, via wallets, we were having this conversation about buying a cup of coffee before using a stable coin that you're able to do now. So I do think that all of that has been happening for a few years. I think why it's so hot right now is that there's so much opportunity. There's so many new stable coin issuers, and as more assets come on chain, like treasuries, like equities, there needs to be that mechanism, that payment mechanism and that settlement mechanism, and stable coins are a perfect example of that. They're 24/7, there's 365, they're off the traditional banking rails, meaning, from a timing perspective, you can really instantly transact. And a lot of what is done in traditional finance requires pre funding, requires capital pools, all of that is eliminated using stable coins. So beyond just the use case of it, I also think especially in the US, the stable coin legislation and a lot of the headlines around that has given this a lot of air time, literally and figuratively, and also really increased what the market is looking like.
Sy Taylor 1:19:32
It's crazy that a lot of institutions are dealing with the fact that their settlement windows are closed at a weekend absolutely 23 six with fed wire and like, That's just you can't trade on some days. Like it's just impossible. And in this global 24/7, instant world, it's just, it's just not fit for purpose. And it kind of leads me to, why do you think that the defi and tradfi world are converging, and why is that happening now, I think you. Sort of uniquely placed to see that.
Speaker 8 1:20:01
Well, we absolutely are, and I think this is where there's two sides of this. There's on the TRad fi side, the use of this technology internally, from a cost savings perspective and an efficiency perspective. I think a lot of players are really starting to see and not necessarily, that entire trading desks are now on chain, but it's one process of a sales contract, or it's one process of cross border payments, or it's one process of, in our case, a CFO wanting to use a money market fund or a stable coin to be able to do account to account transfers instantaneously over a period of time. So there's use cases like that. But then I also think that there's a huge community that has been brought on chain, and we've seen this with the advent of whether it's Bitcoin ETFs or also ether ETFs and etps that are launching here in Europe. We have a full suite of crypto etps that have been around for many, many years beyond the US market, dating back to 2019 so I think this new asset class has really brought a lot of attention to the tradfi space. To say there's a new asset class, but now there's also a new use of technology. How do we think about a better world that we could live in that's more efficient, that's also more transparent, and potentially some cost savings too. So I think those are the key factors that have really led to both the defi space and the traditional finance space to converge and come together to say, what if we create a world that's a little bit better than what we all grew up with?
Sy Taylor 1:21:35
And it's interesting that the institutions are going on chain fully, you know, as $110 billion asset manager, yourself as an institution, where do you see the key opportunities, and what do you think your peers and yourselves see in this, in this market space over the next few years?
Unknown Speaker 1:21:57
Sure. So
Speaker 8 1:21:58
I think for us, we're very unique in terms of our approach. So we have 13 tokenized funds, which is more than anyone in the traditional finance space that I know of, actually any asset issuer. So whether that's a money market fund, whether it's a full fixed income suite, equity products, asset allocation models, we have this entire suite, plus a gold token and a stable coin to be able to offer, again, this access to our customers, but what that means is meeting them where they are. So on one end, we have wisdom true prime, which is a retail based mobile app for US investors, that you can go in. It looks and feels like any other finance app that you have, but you can buy gold in less than 30 seconds, you can invest in Bitcoin. You can also invest in a Wisdom Tree 500 meaning a US large cap product. You can also invest in a money market fund, and then you can spend off of those assets with a Visa card. Yes. So it's really the power of this technology being able to be used, that you can hold all of these assets in one wallet and spend off of them. The end client has no idea that they're on chain. It's obviously in the terms and conditions, but it's not, it's not it doesn't feel it doesn't feel like it. You don't have to set up your own wallet, you don't have to remember pass phrases, you don't have to be able to have gas loaded into your wallet to make transactions, all of those steps that are barriers to entry for the retail market, We've abstracted away and again, meeting clients where they are on their phone. On the other side, we launched, we call it an institutional platform, but it's really a B to B and A B to B to C platform, Wisdom Tree connect, that's meeting the defi clients where they are, and that means within their own wallet setups. So clients are using bitgo, they're using other types of custodial platforms and wallets, and they want to access our access our assets, but they don't want to necessarily have to go to Wisdom Tree, set up our own wallet that can only be used within our own ecosystem. They want to be able to hold it in their existing infrastructure. So we built this platform that is ERC 20 based in terms of all the tokens that we offer, and then also we have. And this, I think, is really important, is from a KYC perspective, because I know we'll get to regulation. This is really key, the clients on board with us. But then we send them a sold down NFT. Oh, wow, that is, it's an ERC 721 to get technical. It's upgradable. And then that denotes that wallet as being a Wisdom Tree client. So what that means is you can access all the assets that we have in any other assets to come. So it's not just, Oh, you are onboarding for one money market fund or one equity fund. It's not
Sy Taylor 1:24:39
one to one. I can
Speaker 8 1:24:41
buy all the Exactly, yes, it's anything that's on the shelf and anything to come. But what's really key about this is what that means is that, if you're a Wisdom Tree, connect customer, and so am I, we can also peer to peer, transfer to each other. So then that enables us to create, essentially, a network of networks solving this. K. KYC, an identity issue that can we can also, over time, add other networks that we would accept, and really creates, I think, the next step in defi for Trad, five players that it again, doesn't it removes that you have to come to the financial institution directly to gain access you do to KYC. But then beyond that, it really creates a peer to peer type of transfer opportunity. So I think for both of those, those are really, really key functionality of meeting either clients where they are on chain, or meeting them on their zone, which they are yes and and provide broad based, tokenized reward.
Sy Taylor 1:25:39
Is there a third answer, which is, like, I'm, like, a consumer app. I'm a consumer brokerage. And, you know, would I use Connect for that? Would I use something
Speaker 8 1:25:48
absolutely, great point. So that's why I was describing connect as a B to B and B to B to C app, because we not live right now, but down the line, absolutely, there's opportunity for there to be a consumer app on the other end, that you would also be accessing these assets, but it would look and feel like it would be from your local regional bank, as an example,
Sy Taylor 1:26:10
that makes complete sense. I want to talk a little bit about why the demand has really shifted into real world assets going on chain, which I still find a slightly odd phrase, but traditional asset clashes, kind of moving becoming tokenized. What is the core impetus there? Who's the buyer, who's the seller? What's the business case?
Speaker 8 1:26:32
Sure, yeah, and I agree. I The terminology is always interesting, but it stuck. So, so for tokenized real world assets. I think there are a few different client profiles. So like I just meant to mention, from a retail investor's perspective, they want to hold Bitcoin, they want to hold a US large cap. They want to be able to hold a money market fund. Enabling tokenized real world assets to come on chain means that there are alternatives to only buying ETFs or only buying etps, that you can actually hold spot of the crypto and then also be able to buy funds. So I again, just think meeting retail customers, where they are, which a lot of them are becoming, on chain in new and really creative way, I think is really important there. On the flip side for institutions, we work with a lot of stable coin issuers. We work with a lot of foundations. I mentioned CFOs before. This is about timing, and it's also about settlement. So it's being able to access a money market fund, for example, 24/7 365, soon we'll have instant redeemability of these assets as well, that you're able to again hold them within the same wallet construct that you're using today. So that means that, just as an example, you don't have to sell out of Bitcoin, get cash, move that to your brokerage, move that from your bank to your brokerage to then buy a money market fund. That's at least, it's at a minimum, 48 hours. And speaking with some of our friends here, it can take three to five business days. So think about not even just the time, the operational burden, but also you're missing three to five days of yield, four or 5% that you are missing out on, versus doing it on chain, that now you're capturing that day's yield, yeah, instantly.
Sy Taylor 1:28:22
You know, as a veteran of the FinTech world, I always thought about open banking, and how was I going to aggregate all of this? And there's a real push in the financial market space to try and aggregate and create one wallet to rule them all. But actually, this is the inverse, that you come from the token up, you get all of that feature functionality kind of, kind of out of the box. So I think to unlock that though, and take it to the next stage, the confusion, the chaos, has always been about regulatory clarity. You've been in a lot of conversations with regulators as an organization. How have they shifted? And what are you hearing, seeing that you think is important for the industry to be aware of?
Speaker 8 1:29:05
This is a really interesting one, particularly for us, because I mentioned before we have this suite of 13 tokenized funds. These are 40 Act funds that are affected with the SEC so we went through the entire process of working with our local regulators in the US to really explain what this technology is and that it's an application of this technology, while still using the existing framework and laws of what 40 Act funds mean. And there's a lot of benefits to those, whether it's bankruptcy remoteness and even just having a Trust Board, but really being able to have this regulatory structure was important to us. We're a publicly traded company. We're a regulated financial institution. We believe in going through the quote front door and really responsible defi and we've seen a lot of options if you've been in the space of a while of not being responsible with clients' assets. So we do take that that very seriously. So I would say for we went through that over the last four years. We also have a New York trust license. We have MTLS, which is money transmission licenses too per state. So again, we're very heavily regulated, but that's really for the protection, but also of our end customers, and also a belief that that's the right thing to do, what we've seen now, I think, with changes in whether it's with the presidential change or even just shifts within Congress, I think it's actually really encouraging in terms of the stable coin bill that we talked about before, but even a really pro business mindset that we're excited to see what the next few years bring, but very much still focused on regulation and working with our regulators to deliver products that are beneficial to
Sy Taylor 1:30:52
our own clients. I like that nuance that you added right at the end there, which is this shift in posture from the new administration from regulators, doesn't absolve responsibility of working with regulators and leaning into it and that role of an institution and maintaining that credibility. How much do you see that being a differentiator for Wisdom Tree going forward and sort of what do you think the risks are? Because are we going to see another blow up? If people feel like it can, you can just run away with things a little bit Absolutely.
Speaker 8 1:31:28
I think for us, we do see it as a competitive advantage. I think the structure of our products leads us to, I mentioned bankruptcy remoteness. I mentioned the establishment of really clear transparency in reporting holdings. We have a prospectus. We have a lot of requirements to meet for these funds to be 40 Act funds, and those rules are in place for a reason, for things that happen, you know, close to 100 years ago and and we really do believe that that's an important part of offering, especially investment vehicles to retail investors, that those are established in a way that safeguards and protects them in terms of what it means for what could potentially happen. We've been in crypto in this space for a while. There's always something new to watch, but I do think that for me, and I think especially for our firm, the transparency to the end investor is critically important. And if we're asking or maybe not giving advice, but suggestions, is read the fine print. For sure, as an investor, in terms of what these
Sy Taylor 1:32:35
products are, definitely always read the fine print Well, where can people find out more about what you're going to get up to in the near future. Can you tell me a little bit about your plans for the next 612 months?
Speaker 8 1:32:46
Sure, absolutely. So you can find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, we're very active, wisdomtree.com, lots of good resources there too. But over the next six to 12 months, we will have a lot of announcements related to a lot of the things that we've talked about here. So whether it's defi integrations and really providing new utility for our assets to be used on chain and in some really cool, interesting ways, and we should also maybe have some new products coming out too that I think will be really exciting.
Speaker 9 1:33:16
Oh, well, tuned. Come back to Tokyo. Tell us all about thank you so much. Meredith, thank you so much. I really appreciate the time.
Sy Taylor 1:33:25
That's all we've got for today. This massive edition of token Ives was brought to you by friends at avalanche, recorded at the avax summit in London of 2025 and if you want each one of these as little mini episodes, you can, of course, check them out on YouTube by searching for tokenized podcast on YouTube, and if you want us at your event, then throw us a message on LinkedIn or x or via email. You can get us at tokenized on both of those social platforms, or head to tokenized pod.com and you can find me at sy Taylor on all of the things. Thank you so much the avalanche folks. Thank you so much for watching and listening and being part of our journey. We'll see you soon.