← The Wolf Of All Streets
Loading summary
Transcript120 lines
- [00:00]
Interviewer
When BlackRock needed someone to tokenize their first fund, they called him. When the New York Stock Exchange decided to trade stocks 24. 7 on chain, they called him. When Jump Trading, the largest crypto market maker on Wall street, needed a partner the morning of this interview, they called him. Carlos Domingo built Securitize from nothing into the company that every giant in finance now depends on to move real world assets on chain. Today, Carlos reveals why the DTCC is repeating the same fatal mistake that the telecom companies made when WhatsApp showed up.
- [00:32]
Carlos Domingo
The DTCC model is just about preserving the existing market structure. Same market structure, same market participants, same T plus one settlement. Kind of feels that they're not going to take advantage of the power of, you know, public blockchains and why the
- [00:47]
Interviewer
banks need the Clarity act far more than crypto does.
- [00:49]
Carlos Domingo
Crypto people have been doing whatever they want, no matter how much they'd be complaining, and maybe they have to file one or two lawsuits here and there. But institutions are very conservative. Without 100% regulatory clarity and making sure that they're not taking any risks, they're not going to do it.
- [01:02]
Interviewer
What happens when AI agents start trading tokenized assets?
- [01:05]
Carlos Domingo
Like, you have the agents that can actually trade in real time, but you also have assets that are on chain that move in real time. How that could transform capital markets is
- [01:14]
Interviewer
very interesting and much more. Let's go.
- [01:18]
Carlos Domingo
Let's go.
- [01:33]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
I decided to do three minutes of prep and do a quick Google search and see what security ties up to today. And in the last four or five hours, I think I had to scroll three pages just to see the news. Tokenization is absolutely exploding.
- [01:48]
Carlos Domingo
It is finally happening.
- [01:50]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Yes, finally happening. But you are far ahead of the curve. Does it surprise you even how far fast it's happening?
- [01:56]
Carlos Domingo
It surprised me it didn't happen before because this is kind of like the most obvious use case for crypto and for blockchain. Right. But it's also surprised me how it didn't happen for a long time and now it's like really exploding. Like there's literally every single company, even companies that were not doing tokenization. Like this morning, buoys announced that they are pouring liquidity that they're getting, you know, into the space.
- [02:15]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
So, so the announcement I saw this morning was with Jump.
- [02:19]
Carlos Domingo
That's the announcement we did. Yes, with Jump trading.
- [02:21]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Okay, so, well, what is it these days? It seems like you have a new partnership every day. But so what is that announcement specific?
- [02:27]
Carlos Domingo
So one of the things that we are pushing towards is what we refer to as native tokenization of stocks. There's some tokenized stocks out there that are like derivatives or price swaps and there's like five different versions of the same token as Tesla and all of them representing actual equity on Tesla. So we've been pushing for the model where the token does represent the same instrument, the same security, the same qc, the same rights, the same dividend voting rights, whatever. And then when you tokenize things, the number one question is what are you going to do with the tokenized stocks? You put them on the blockchain for what? Right. So and obviously one of the things that people want to do is to make them liquid on the blockchain, make instant settlement trading, 24, 7, et cetera. And that involves two different things or three different things. It involves one is the trading infrastructure on chain that uses permissionless infrastructure for trading permission assets because securities are permission. It requires market makers and it also requires a flow of the say crypto people that can actually access that. Right. So today we announced a partnership between us which are the main tokenization platform, but we're also a regulated broker dealer so we can actually trade stocks. Jam Trading, who is the largest crypto market maker by a mile. And it's probably one of the most influential also prop trading firms in Wall street and they've developed something called a prop AMM which is like an on chain proprietary AMM for trading any sort of crypto, but they can also extend to stocks. And the third leg of the partnership is Jupiter, who is the largest if you want defi app on Solana, that is going to bring the audience. So recently the SEC issued a no objection letter saying that front ends like let's say Jupiter or Metamask or Fantom, they can actually send trades to a broker dealer as far as the broker dealer is the one doing the trades for tokenized securities. So we're taking advantage of that no action letter letting the partnership with Jam as a largest market maker and Jupiter creating the audience and us, you know, dealing with the rest.
- [04:24]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
So I think we're in the first inning still right. Of tokenization. Even with all of this news and everything that's happening, this is the first iteration of what's possible. Is that accurate? I mean, I guess stablecoins are the first iteration.
- [04:38]
Carlos Domingo
Stable coins are probably the most successful tokenized asset. There's no argue about that. Like you know, more than 300 billion, 10 times bigger than the rest of the RWO space. I think that Terry Atkins at a conference a few weeks ago, he said something that we are at the end of the beginning. And it kind of resonates with me because it feels that way in tokenization. We finished the beginning. So I think all that stuff that we needed to do in terms of getting infrastructure, licenses, regulatory clarity, etc. And then the first kind of like institutions coming on Ecom board, but now they kind of the next journey is to actually make this a reality and grow it to like a trillion dollar in. In volume.
- [05:14]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
You said regulatory clarity, you didn't say legislative clarity. How important is that?
- [05:18]
Carlos Domingo
Because tokenized securities are securities. Right. So regulators. We don't need to. Yeah, we don't need to. There's a misperception about what Congress needs to do versus the sec. I think the SEC has a lot, you know, room to do things without having to go to Congress. Of course, if certain things are absolutely new, like stablecoins are new. Right. So going to Congress to just putting in on legislation so nobody can actually change them after that is probably a good idea. But in the case of tokenized securities, they are securities, right. So the SEC has all the room to maneuver to basically allow people to use crypto infrastructure in a regulated measures.
- [05:51]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Is there anything that we still need to see from the regulatory side to open more avenues for you or do you have all the clarity you need?
- [06:00]
Carlos Domingo
We have enough clarity to do a ton of things, but there is more things that I would like to. So a lot of the regulations are actually not built for a digital world. Right. So like we're a transfer agent, which is basically the SEC register entity that takes securities and puts them on a ledger and we put them on a public distributed ledger on a blockchain. But transfer agents have very all outdated regulations in terms of how they need to deal with. They need to know their physical addresses. Well, if I have their wallet and the email, then I can communicate with them. I don't want a physical address. I don't want to mail proxy vaults and paper or like. So there's a lot of small things that are not designed for a pure native digital world that we would like to modernize. We've submitted a very long letter to the SEC, to the crypto task force with one by one regulation 1467, whatever. It's very complicated. All the things that we want to modernize on transfer agency. The second thing I think is tokenized stocks trade under inflation or market structure. Right? You have the TCC as a clearinghouse, T plus one settlement, the national exchanges, the rocker dealers. And they have things like the best price, best execution that everybody has to comply with. Once you move them on the blockchain, some of those things you probably don't need them and not using them actually will provide more flexibility in terms of trading.
- [07:15]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
I mean it's so ridiculous to even think about T plus one.
- [07:18]
Carlos Domingo
I know.
- [07:20]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
How about T plus zero seconds?
- [07:22]
Carlos Domingo
Well this is T plus block, right? So every block you can actually settle a trade. We actually announced this week that we got a license from the SEC that allow us to do custody of tokenized securities with our broker dealer but it allows us also to do atomic swaps between stable coins and tokenized securities. And that means that we can actually sell a trade in a block. Like every time the blockchain adds a new block that could include a trade that has settled in that particular instance. So yeah, it's pretty amazing if you think about it.
- [07:50]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Yeah, I mean one of the stories this week was the DTCC saying that they're going to run a pilot basically in July of tokenized ft. I believe I saw your name in there among the 50 institutions.
- [08:03]
Carlos Domingo
We were actually not there participating. I think that this is, we're proposing a different model and I think they probably, if you think of who was not there, Superstate was not there, we were not there. Centrifuge version of their, all the transfer agents computer service.
- [08:18]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Why is that?
- [08:19]
Carlos Domingo
Because the DTCC model and obviously all the respect for them for trying to innovate and do new things, that's great. But it's just about preserving the existing market structure. So I'll give you like a similar so you can understand it. I come from, I used to work in telecommunications many years and then when WhatsApp came, the telcos, instead of trying to build a WhatsApp which is open, anybody can download it, anybody can communicate with anybody, it's on the open Internet, it's you know, free, whatever. They were trying to improve SMS because SMS is where the telcos make money and then they're trying to kind of maintain the incumbency position, they're trying to add features there. So it kind of feels a little bit like what the DTCC is doing. It's a bit of that, right? Like same market structure, same market participants, same T +1 settlement. The tokens is not clear but it doesn't seem that you will be able to take those tokenized entitlements that don't do native tokenization and put them on a, on a self custody wallet of an individual investor and then take them to a DEFI protocol and borrow against them. So it kind of feels that they're not going to take advantage of the power of public blockchains and it's going to be more operational improvements into the existing market structure. It's less interesting in my opinion.
- [09:29]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
It's interesting in that they're adopting a technology to replace the dinosaur technology, but it doesn't really resonate with I think the broader audience or retail because it's just plumbing.
- [09:41]
Carlos Domingo
They are actually not replacing their underlying infrastructure. They're kind of like layering up on top of it. So DTCC still will keep the securities on a centralized database. You know, with T plus one settlement, et cetera. They're only going to give you, instead of like an entry on a database, they'll give you a token with an entry on a blockchain on the side. So it's, you know, doesn't that somewhat
- [10:01]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
speak to, it's like a cautionary tale, I guess about the decisions that institutions have to make right now, like whether to build this out themselves or try to keep it within some sort of walled garden or to go to an Ethereum, you know, build on an Ethereum or a Solana, something permissionless and open. Basically a battle between the crypto incumbents and them just co opting the technology and doing it in their existing system.
- [10:25]
Carlos Domingo
Look, in Innovation there is a very famous book by a guy that unfortunately passed away like around 10 years ago called Clayton Christensen, which is called the Innovator's Dilemma. And he talks about like how an incumbent in an industry, what he's trying to do with the new technology comes, is trying to serve better their existing customers and not try to serve the underserved customers. So if you think about what DTC is doing, it's just, it will help the broker dealers that connect there, it will maybe help these changes, but it's not going to serve, you know, a crypto guy with a, with a Jupyter app and a wallet that wants to trade a tokenized stock and then borrow on a defi protocol that's not their target customer. Right. So it just feels that it's a little bit this innovator's dilemma that they have to adopt some of this technology because it's coming and they know, but usually, you know, people that go underneath and build something from scratch that leverage 100% of the power of new technology end up winning long term.
- [11:16]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
When speaking to the big institutions, how do you convince them that working with you is the right path to take? Because you've secured some of the largest names out there obviously.
- [11:26]
Carlos Domingo
So it's getting easier because two or three years ago, or maybe three years ago, it was more about like, why tokenization, why securitize, et cetera. I think now it's more about when and what do we do? Because obviously, I think everybody at this point is convinced that tokenization is unavoidable, that it's coming. All the institutions are embracing it one way or another. They've also seen, as you said, some of the biggest names already doing things and most of them fortunately doing with us. So we can't check the box. I remember when I won the blackrock build, which was very complicated to be chosen by them. Rob Bolsting, their chief operating officer, he told me, like, we're going to give you a hard time making sure you're up to the blackrock standards, but when you're up to the blackrock standards, then nobody's going to question you, ever. And that's exactly what has happened. It was very hard, very complicated. We had to do a lot of things improving the company policies and procedures and infrastructure. But now we're there. And that's really typically not the discussion. It's more about, okay, we want to do tokenization. What do we do at what time, maybe which blockchain do we do it on? Solana, we do it on Ethereum and things of that nature.
- [12:31]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
With a company like BlackRock, everybody's sort of seen their public evolution, sort of watched Larry Fink seemingly get orange peeled in real time on Bitcoin ETFs, but quietly, when everybody was talking about the ETFs, the same annual letters were talking about tokenization years ago. I always found that fascinating because everybody was so focused on the ETF race and it was such this good media story. But he wrote more about tokenization of everything. And that was three or four years ago.
- [12:59]
Carlos Domingo
So I think that first you got to give them a lot of credit because now everybody talks about tokenization. Now we have a friendly sec. Now we have a lot of regulatory clarity that has come in the last few months from the SEC. But when they did it was two years ago. It was in March 2024. They didn't have that environment and they still decided to go for it. They very convinced you, you're saying their founder and CEO openly talking about it in the annuals who hold the letter and CNBC, etc. So I think if you consider a company like BlackRock, which is extremely large and company within that industry, that they took this very earliest step, I think it was a great thing that Helped the entire industry, but obviously help us the most. But I think it moved the entire industry because once you see blackrock coming then nobody else is questioning.
- [13:42]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Same way once securitized got the stamp of approval from BlackRock. That's the same for the whole industry.
- [13:47]
Carlos Domingo
Correct. It just validated that tokenization was a real use case. That there was a way to do it in a regulated way without getting into fraudulence with the regulators and that you could actually do it successfully because people don't remember but BlackRock, the product that they did is bidl which is the tokenized treasuries. Right. When we launched bitl, the whole tokenized treasury space was like three or four hundred million dollars. It was Franken.
- [14:10]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
I remember when it hit a billion and we were celebrating and then it
- [14:12]
Carlos Domingo
hit a billion when BlackRock entered. Then BlackRock hit first half 500 million, then a million a billion, then 2 billion. Now it's above 2 billion and the entire industry is like now 11 billion. And that growth has been driven primarily because of BlackRock entry in the space. And now there's a ton of other people that are trying to do the same things.
- [14:29]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
11 billion is still, it's nothing dropping the pocket.
- [14:32]
Carlos Domingo
Well, only BlackRock on the cash management part of their business which is where they sell treasury based products and I don't want to get it wrong but I think they manage around $2 trillion just BlackRock. Right.
- [14:44]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
So and then BlackRock's total assets under management 11 trillion. Like 11 trillion or something. I mean so when you look at these small numbers you have to imagine that now that BlackRock also has internally accepted this as legitimate in the future that they have internal plans to do quite a bit more.
- [15:03]
Carlos Domingo
I cannot speak on behalf of BlackRock
- [15:05]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
but can you speak on behalf of that non specific to blackrock and their plans? I think it was just the idea that if they've done it and it's working now you're going from them looking at this very cute small thing to maybe having exposure to the full 11 trillion in their assets.
- [15:25]
Carlos Domingo
I mean that's what their CEO keeps saying. Right. So he's not speaking on their behalf, but he's definitely passionate about it and he definitely has the right vision of all these tens of millions of people with digital wallets, digital native, they behave differently than other people that don't necessarily have access to the same financial services products that most of the professional investors have. Right. And that's one of the things that tokenization solves, the democratization of access which I think For a firm like BlackRoad, where any other asset managers is hugely important because at the end of the day they want more aum, they want more customers using their products.
- [15:58]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
And most of those will just be AI agents. Right.
- [16:01]
Carlos Domingo
And maybe BI agents. Yeah, we don't need people when the organization is taking off them. We have like AI like hitting on the other.
- [16:09]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Do you have a plan is AI deep thought?
- [16:13]
Carlos Domingo
Yeah, we've published a couple. First, we've adopted AI a ton internally in our company for. For. Not just for. For programming obviously. All our developers have a lot of AI infrastructure. I use it myself all the time. It's just like a much more efficient way of producing contents, creating, you know, summaries of meetings, you know, marketing materials. What I want to do, cost. I just research topics. It's just a much more efficient. And we've published some articles about agentic trading and how when you have the two legs like you have the agents that can actually trade in real time, but you also have assets that are on chain that move in real time. Tokenized securities alongside tokenized dollars, stable coins. How that completely could transform capital markets is very interesting.
- [16:56]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Yeah, I find it fascinating and I think that that's. It's just mind blowing how many transactions even just in stable coins are going to be done by agents?
- [17:06]
Carlos Domingo
I mean that never I believe because if you look at how.
- [17:10]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Yeah, of course.
- [17:11]
Carlos Domingo
How quickly dollars move in the traditional industry for payments and stuff like that, securities move a lot more because first the market is, you know, 50 times bigger and there's a lot more assets that trade, you know, a lot every day. So a lot of that is already automated, but it's not driven by AI. Right. So that's kind of like the next evolution.
- [17:28]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Let's fast forward into the future, your perfect vision for five years from now. What am I doing as an individual with a portfolio using tokenized assets?
- [17:42]
Carlos Domingo
I think you have an app that the app has connectivity towards, you know, a bunch of different trading facilities. You can buy and sell different, you know, tokenized assets with instant settlement, et cetera. And then you have an AI agent that works alongside you, gets to know you, understands your priorities in life, where you want to save money for retirement or you want to buy a house or you want to speculate with a portion of your assets, etc. And the more it learns like how your needs are, it just basically creates this portfolio that it's updated in real time. So that's actually a reality. I think that's definitely going to happen in five years.
- [18:14]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
And is that the same wallet that I'm using for all of my daily transactions and to buy coffee and to send my family a remittance to a foreign country? Is it all one place?
- [18:24]
Carlos Domingo
I think that this definitely has to be a convergence of kind of like the digital wallets that people use or the apps that people use with the crypto apps. Because part of the fiction today to use crypto is the fact that they're disconnected. You have to create a new app. You have to. Maybe now the wallets, the user experience have become better, but we still have to make blockchains a bit more transparent, right? Like that you're using a blockchain without knowing you're using a dev team. Always talk about the same, you're younger than me, but when I started using Internet, you have to download TCP IP software into your computer. You have to have a physical, don't think about that anymore, dial up, then you're connected. Then when you finish your session, you disconnect from the Internet. Today you open your phone, you open your laptop, you're on the Internet. You don't even think that you're on the Internet, right? So I think that the blockchain and tokenized dollars and tokenized assets will break through the mainstream when that happens, right? That you use them transparently. And the day that we don't talk about tokenized finance, we just talk about finance the same way that today you don't talk about, you're an Internet company.
- [19:26]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Yeah, they're just assets. They're not tokenized assets anymore. They're just assets.
- [19:30]
Carlos Domingo
You know, 30, 40 years ago, people say, I'm an Internet company and they put a dot com in their name. Now nobody will do that today.
- [19:35]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
One thing I find surprising, we talk about how fast all this adoption has been. One thing that's been very slow, in my opinion, is the UX UI making, you know, because of private keys.
- [19:45]
Carlos Domingo
And my theory about that, my theory is that it's partly the fault of, without offending anybody, the VCs, because VCs have been pouring money into infrastructure, because obviously infrastructure with the whole talk and play and stuff like that, from an investment perspective, became a much more profitable business. And then if you build a consumer app and you hire a bunch of like, you know, UX designers and UI developers, et cetera, how you're going to monetize that, the first, probably you don't need a token. And second, how you're going to monetize that is just clear, right? So I think that the, if I look at the. And then there was this, this fat protocol thesis thing that happened like you know, eight years ago and a lot of the money poured into the infrastructure layer and a lot less money pouring to the app and the UI layer.
- [20:27]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Yeah.
- [20:28]
Carlos Domingo
And I think that that's a reason why that part of the industry has developed less than the rest. Right. Because at the end of the day is a, it's a factor of how many companies are working on solving a problem.
- [20:37]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
It's obviously the biggest problem.
- [20:38]
Carlos Domingo
It is the biggest problem, 100%.
- [20:40]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
It's the old, you know, can grandma use it?
- [20:42]
Carlos Domingo
It's exactly. It's definitely the biggest problem in my opinion. How we simplify user experience so you don't have to think about passphrases, you don't have to think about private keys, you know, when you don't have to sign transactions. Like there's, there's so much stuff that you do when you interact with a wallet and a crypto protocol and the normie is not going to be able to do it.
- [20:59]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Right. So I wonder if any of the sort of crypto native wallet providers will end up winning or if it's just going to be Schwab comes out with an app.
- [21:08]
Carlos Domingo
I don't know, Schwab or Apple or.
- [21:12]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
I think it'll be Coinbase, I think Amazon and Apple. Yeah.
- [21:16]
Carlos Domingo
So people that are like good at designing consumer and modern experience. Right. Like they say Apple everything.
- [21:22]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Yeah. In your Apple Wallet.
- [21:24]
Carlos Domingo
Even simple things like I use the Apple wallet with a credit card. I mean things that you will think that there's no room for improvement. Right. So how I pay my credit card with my phone, they've actually. A credit card, they've actually improved it. Right.
- [21:33]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
So.
- [21:34]
Carlos Domingo
So I think we need, we need that kind of mentality coming into crypto for sure.
- [21:39]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
How far do you think we are from that?
- [21:41]
Carlos Domingo
I think we're going to get close. I think that the fact that now token prices for companies are kind of depressed is going to move people more into thinking about equity value for companies and then these companies that are more equity based, let's say like a company that signs an end user up, et cetera, are going to start getting more funded. And at the end of the day it's a factor of how many people are solving in a problem to get it solved. Right. And then it's the fact that now crypto is becoming regulated, hopefully the Clarity act passes, et cetera. I think that some of these more traditional providers, like let's say Google or Apple or Amazon, that has been kind of a bit of a sideline that they haven't actually done anything really, in the crypto space. It's like maybe providing infrastructure kind of enter the space and that helps, you know, accelerate.
- [22:23]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Yeah, I think it's interesting. I had a conversation with Chris Giancarlo, who's the ex commissioner of the cftc, and he said something to me I hadn't really thought about. We were talking about the Clarity act, and he said, well, the banks need the Clarity act much more than the crypto industry, a hundred percent. I think, you know, that that's not the public perception. Everybody thinks the crypto industry needs clarity on what they can do, but they're doing everything and the banks can't participate because they don't have the clarity of
- [22:47]
Carlos Domingo
what they can do. I do agree with that statement. I think crypto people have been doing whatever they want, no matter how much they'd be complaining. And maybe they have to fight one or two lawsuits here and there. But crypto has been moving forward. Right? But. But institutions are very conservative. So. So without 100% regulatory clarity and making sure that they're not, you know, taking any risks, they're not going to do it. And it's understandable, right? Like it was kind of, we're talking about black before, but if you manage $12 trillion and you're going to make an asset that is few billion dollars, you're not going to risk your own business by this thing that you think that maybe 10 years from now is going to be 50% of my business, but today is not. Right. So I think for the banks and for everybody, it's kind of the same,
- [23:26]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
but it's going to force its way to those levels and then they're going to have to do it. So you're going to have this blockbuster. I always joke, but the blockbuster Netflix situation, where anyone who sees Netflix coming now, even if it's a few years away and adopts, will survive Visa, for example, right? The very heavy stablecoin volumes. They know exactly who's coming to eat their lunch. But if you wait until.
- [23:46]
Carlos Domingo
If you wait until it's too late, it's too late. But look, if you look at the banks with all the, you know, crypto, people always complain about Jamie Dimon because he doesn't like Bitcoin. But if you think about the bank that has historically always had the biggest team on blockchain, it's been actually JP Morgan from the very beginning. Actually, Oli Harris Will was there at the Quorum team before even Kinesis, which is their blockchain business existed. He's just a comeback to JP Morgan, which I think is a great thing for the industry and for him. But now Morgan Stanley invested in our company in 2021 and they've been in my board since 2021 and they didn't have anybody in charge of digital assets. That position didn't exist. And now recently they appointed Emmy Alderberg. She's great. She's now driving a ton of different initiatives across the business. She moved into the headquarters of course, very high. That's, that's what we need. Right. Like somebody with a top down mandate saying this is an important thing that we can no longer ignore that now has regulatory clarity and therefore the banks not to get into it.
- [24:42]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Jamie Dimon's so interesting to me because he's so dismissive of it, but you can see exactly what they're doing.
- [24:48]
Carlos Domingo
But he's great also the way he talks about everything.
- [24:50]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
He's trying to delay it until they can have, until they are completely built.
- [24:55]
Carlos Domingo
But I do believe he's starting to
- [24:56]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
speak very positively though outside of bitcoin.
- [24:59]
Carlos Domingo
Yeah. I think he's never been a fan of bitcoin because he's a traditional finance guy and doesn't see the value on a value on an asset that is not backed by anything. Right. But look, Morgan Stanley just released a bitcoin ETF that's very interesting because Morgan Stanley, arguably it's a better bank for a bitcoin ETF because they have a bigger wealth management arm.
- [25:18]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
There are 16,000 guys out there telling you buy my product instead of black market.
- [25:22]
Carlos Domingo
So I think that in terms if you want to drive your money to bitcoin, obviously like, or cute but Morgan Stanley pretty big in my opinions.
- [25:29]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Yeah. I thought that that was the biggest announcement we've seen in months that nobody understood Bitcoin related.
- [25:34]
Carlos Domingo
100%. Yeah, 100% agree.
- [25:36]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Because not only did they basically open, clearly they wanted to make money on the product. So they're going to be incentivized to have their advisors go out and sell it. They also came in at 10 bips under everybody else, which means they do want to compete in the, in the new business. And this is the most crowded space there is. Whether nine or ten Bitcoin spot ETFs.
- [25:56]
Carlos Domingo
I don't know how many are relevant. Probably blacker. Fidelity fuels that take 90% of the volume. So I think, and if you think about ETF space, there's, there's many ETFs that have 10 or 15 different versions.
- [26:08]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Well, you'll have tokenized versions of these
- [26:10]
Carlos Domingo
ETFs and we hopefully will have tokenized versions of ETFs.
- [26:13]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Yes, definitely something Tokono's Bitcoin Spot ETFs are going to crush it in the market.
- [26:19]
Carlos Domingo
The whole like full circle. You take bitcoin, put it on a traffic wrapper and then tokenize it back
- [26:23]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
into blockchain and the bitcoin Maxis will lose their minds. I thought they'll be so confused. So what do you think comes, comes next in the, in the process now so we maybe we get regulatory, legislative clarity. I have my doubts, to be quite honest. Doesn't matter for you. But we've seen the tokenized treasuries, we've seen the proliferation of stable coins. Is it the whole stock market next?
- [26:47]
Carlos Domingo
I think tokenized stocks and stocks and ETFs, if you think about it from a size perspective, is probably the biggest opportunity because just the New York Stock Exchange that we recently announced the partnership for, they're going to be trading tokenized stocks 247 in a digital ATS. And we're going to be the record dealer, the transfer agent work very involved in that project. Just if 1% of that moves, it's $4 trillion. It just kind of triples the size of the crypto industry today. And 1%, I know 1% is nothing. Now these things always the hardest are the first ones. Like which one is going to be the first mega company that is going to go and say I'm going to tokenize. It's going to be Tesla, it's going to be Nvidia, a couple of them. Then when you get the first, then getting the second is easier. The third and the tenth and the hundredth and then that's when it explodes. Right. So I think that the announcements of, you know, transfer agents coming to space computer shares with us now, affinity with, with Woolies, I think, you know, New York Stock Exchange announcing that they're going to be trading those things, which is obviously the most legit, you know, trading venue that's going to be on chain. Other projects like the one where, you know, we jump, et cetera, I think that is getting the issuers more interested in doing native tokenization to start coming on chain. So and then when that happens, I think that's when this explodes.
- [28:05]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
So I don't even understand how markets can go 24 7, 365 for these stock traders and hedge fund guys. And they're, they're going to die or
- [28:18]
Carlos Domingo
they have AI agents.
- [28:19]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Welcome. Welcome to being one of us. But I mean these guys are used to working you know, seven to eight hour days. I know going to the Hamptons.
- [28:25]
Carlos Domingo
But keep in mind there's people sitting in different parts of the world. Right. So there's people in Asia, I mean if this is.
- [28:30]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
But they're going to have to hire, I mean they're going to have to hire three to four times more staff.
- [28:34]
Carlos Domingo
I don't know. But doesn't crypto trade 24 7?
- [28:36]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Yeah.
- [28:36]
Carlos Domingo
And it's not a problem. Right. It's always liquidity because when the liquidity is not here in the US it's coming from Europe or it's coming from Asia. So liquidity is always there because it's a 24 cent market and it trades on the news as well. Whenever happens something on the weekend, stock markets are closed but cryptos are open. So crypto always reacts to news faster than the traditional markets. I think there is no question that traditional markets will move 24. 7. I think they'll move on chain first. But I'm pretty sure that the rest of the market infrastructure, the VTCCs overall, they will eventually do 24. 7 in the next coming years. Of course it will take them longer to upgrade the technology. But we live in a 24.7world is going to be automated. It's all algo trading, AI agents, etc.
- [29:19]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Is there anything that stops this? Any big obstacles? You see any black swan?
- [29:24]
Carlos Domingo
To be honest we do haven't been in crypto already for many years. I think my main concern is some regulatory blow up with somebody doing something stupid.
- [29:32]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Yeah, that's what we do. The kings of the own goals.
- [29:36]
Carlos Domingo
Exactly. So I think the fact that I keep seeing crypto people, crypto companies, I'm not obviously not going to mention anybody that do things that are questionable from a regulatory perspective. The same way that in 2021 you could tell Celsius, BlockFi, FTX is something obviously some of them like they were fined by the sec so they're clearly doing something illegal. But like you know, like seeing all these people that take regulatory risk just because now there is a more friendly SEC that is going to be less aggressive going after them. But that those regulatory risks means that they can blow up at some point or they can do something that happens. The same thing happened on DeFi in the last few weeks which has really damaged DEFI in my opinion. If the same thing happened on the token institution space it's going to scare the Top five people. Because the top five people are going to be very, very careful. I do remember, like as I mentioned to you, in 2021, Morgan Stanley invested in our company and at that time we did the first tokenized fund with a large asset manager, which kkr. Front page of the Wall Street Journal. I still have a copy of the physical page of the Wall Street Journal with a picture of me. I've never been in the Wall Street Journal. It was my first time. Now I've been many times, but. And I was like, well, that's it, we've made it. KKR comes and then I have like everybody called me, like, we want to do tokenized funds. And then FTX happened. Yeah, I lost all the business overnight. Every, every symbol company on the pipeline said like, we don't want to do. It was not just Sam, it was Sam. And it was this and that and Celsius and Terra.
- [31:02]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
They were the straw that broke a very correct.
- [31:04]
Carlos Domingo
But the whole industry was very frozen and there was a lot of people doing the all sort of shenanigans and it was going to blow up one way or another, one place another. So, so, and I tokenize assets. If something like that happens, then it's pretty bad because it's going to scare the TRADFI people that we need coming here together with the crypto people to grow the pies.
- [31:25]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Let's not let that happen, man. Thank you so much. I'm glad we finally got a chance to sit down. Really appreciate the conversation.
- [31:30]
Carlos Domingo
It's been fun for a very, very long time. Awesome.
- [31:32]
Co-host or Secondary Interviewer
Me too.
- [31:33]
Interviewer
This podcast is sponsored by Weeks and was recorded live at Consensus 2026. You can find out more about what they have to offer by clicking on the link down below in the description. Thanks to Weeks for sponsoring.