He ran the NYSE, now he's putting it on a blockchain, with Michael Blaugrund, VP at ICE

0:00 [on-hold music] Welcome to another episode of 51 Insights, today with Michael Blaauwgrond. Michael, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here. Yeah.

0:15 Michael, it's a pleasure having you because a lot is happening on your side.

0:19 The New York Stock Exchange just announced it's building a 24/7 blockchain-powered trading venue, settle instantly against stablecoins, and the person leading that effort is you, Michael.

0:31 You are the former CEO of the New York Stock Exchange who ran all seven of its exchanges, and now you lead strategic projects at ICE, which is the parent company of New York Stock Exchange.

0:43 In this episode, we get into what the layer zero blockchain means for institutional infrastructure, why ICE is working with BNY and Citi on tokenized deposits, and what happens when the most trusted brand in capital markets goes fully on-chain.

0:59 Michael, you spent almost eight years at New York Stock Exchange during a time of big changes. This includes the pandemic, the switch to electronic-only trading, the meme stock saga.

1:11 Now you're building the next-gen market infrastructure on a blockchain. What's the biggest challenge in today's equity market that tokenization solves? Well, I think you, you sort of put it in good context.

1:26 Like, there's always evolution, there's always kind of the ability to further perfect the US equity markets, despite them being hyper liquid, hyper efficient, and I think, you know, broadly democratic and, and being able to support participation by retail and institutional investors around the world.

1:44 But

1:46 some of those, you know, sort of underpinning infrastructures have been built for a time when we always expected there to be system downtime, or we always expected that things would be traded, you know, in, in sort of full share quantities.

2:02 And for anybody who grew up as a crypto native investor, the idea of having markets down and unavailable, the inability to, like, enter funds or get your funds out at any given moment, it's just sort of like

2:18 a bug and not a feature of the marketplace.

2:21 And so I think what we're trying to do is think about, from first principles, how can we begin to replumb the infrastructure to support a market that's as critical to investors worldwide as the US equity market, and do that in a way that's not disruptive, so that we don't have any sort of turbulence in the sort of risk capital transfer or in the ability for listed companies to raise money through IPOs.

2:48 So we're trying to sort of simultaneously refactor but also preserve the market structure conventions and other components of the investor protections and issuer support that have become just the hallmarks of the US capital markets.

3:03 Yeah. And I wanna dive much deeper into that later on. But first, you testified before the US House of Financial Services Committee in 2021 about capital markets after the GameStop saga.

3:16 Did you view tokenization as a solution to the structural issues like settlement delays, plumbing agility, and, and access inequality at that time? Yeah, that's a really good question.

3:28 I think you have to be a, kind of an expert level market structure, you know, aficionado to, to see the, the correlation there. But at the time, stocks settled two days after the trade. So

3:42 clearing firms had an obligation to put up collateral to offset the potential risk of a failed settlement for those two days.

3:51 And in really kind of extreme circumstances, like we saw around the GameStop meme craze, some of those collateral obligations were really unprecedented in their scale.

4:00 Um, and, and obviously, it was kind of so significant that Hollywood made a movie, you know, about those, uh, those, those periods where certain brokers had to stop trading certain names and, and, you know, investors felt like things were really rigged against them.

4:15 I, I think that's probably a bit sensationalist, but nevertheless, like it, it exposed this real consequence of having somewhat archaic infrastructure.

4:26 So now with the NYSE's new tokenization platform, we're proposing instant settlement, which isn't a panacea.

4:32 There, there are reasons that having delayed settlement is attractive, things like the ability to net trades against one another so that you don't have to settle on a gross manner all of the trades individually.

4:47 But for a retail investor, for someone who's accustomed particularly to a crypto-style user interface, this will be a much more intuitive way to put money into the system, place a trade,

5:03 own an asset, and then when you're ready to sell it, sell it and instantly get access to your money.

5:09 So I think, you know, had we had those types of features available at scale in 2021, you might have had very, very different outcomes. Mm-hmm.

5:20 And do you think events like GameStop accelerated the internal timelines at institutions like the New York Stock Exchange to think about infrastructure that can solve those issues?

5:33 Or how has the institutional attitude towards crypto and tokenization changed in the last 12 to 24, even 36 months? So I think, you know, you have to zoom out a, a, a fair distance before you can really see the progress.

5:48 But firms like Intercontinental Exchange were really interested in crypto assets and, and sort of blockchain infrastructure for over a decade at this point.

5:59 You know, our, our founder and CEO, Jeff Sprecher, and, you know, many of sort of the, the top brass at ICE, I think had a really clear vision

6:09 But certainly a, a deep interest in understanding how the sort of next generation of infrastructure was going to change the nature of competition, market access, liquidity, risk, you know, sort of all the sort of fundamental natures of, of operating markets.

6:25 And so whether it was investing in Coinbase, you know, back in kind of its, its early rounds, I think in Series C. Launching a digital custodian called Bakkt.

6:37 It was one of the first entities to receive a New York DFS license. Um, making a number of, you know, sort of other serious strategic investments, helping Bitcoin ETFs come to market through the NYSE Arca platform.

6:51 I mean, there's been a long sort of string of things we've done that I think have been quietly helping to propel the marketplace forward. But it wasn't really until, I think,

7:02 post-FTX, where you really saw that there was a need for kind of responsible innovation

7:13 to meet the moment of this technology maturing retail and institutional workflows coming to expect real-time settlement or the ability, um, to have composable investment options, you know, all the things that are sort of native to the, to the blockchain, um,

7:33 you know, sort of framework. I think you kind of needed to have that FTX washout before we could rebuild from a more stable position. And so,

7:45 you know, while we've been interested in it consistently, I think it really was in 2025 and now into 2026, where we could move those efforts from kind of auxiliary into the core of the business.

7:57 And so whether it's trading or clearing or settlement or capital formation, you know, all of the things that we do across the cash equities, options and derivatives markets, fixed income markets, data business, and even the mortgage technology business here at ICE, all of those are likely going to have some level of transformation or enablement with on-chain infrastructure.

8:17 And so I, I agree with your, your, you know, thought that the meme stock, you know, trade brought a lot of focus on some of the market plumbing that up to that point was really quite opaque.

8:31 But I think that was probably like one of many dominoes that's been falling.

8:35 And I think now we're, we're sort of fully in a, a moment where irrespective of where crypto asset prices are, the infrastructure momentum, I think at this point is unstoppable.

8:46 Michael, I wanna dive a little bit deeper into your recent announcement of New York Stock Exchange tokenizing all stock.

8:55 That headline went around the world, made huge waves a couple of weeks ago, and I just wanna untangle that a bit and understand what does that actually mean, and what's the timeline of this, and how do investors and market participants need to think about that?

9:14 So a-as you mentioned, we announced last month that NYSE is going to launch a new venue that will allow for tokenized equities to trade and instantly settle against stablecoins.

9:30 It's a pretty significant development for, uh, an institution like NYSE, but we have a lot of conviction that, you know, this is the direction of travel, and it's really important for

9:41 systemically important institutions like NYSE and like many of our members to begin to develop a, a really fundamental capability and facility with, with tokenized trading.

9:51 So what we've announced is to launch a, a new venue alongside the existing exchanges. We think, um,

10:01 you know, doing so is responsible because we don't wanna disrupt the, the sort of core of the existing US equity infrastructure while we're beginning to have the industry become acclimatized to this, this new type of interaction.

10:15 The way it's going to work is we will trade tokenized equities that are either

10:22 issued natively on chain through digital transfer agents like Securitize or Super State, or even more traditional transfer agents that have ambitions to become digital tokenization, uh, providers, firms like an Equinity, for example.

10:36 And in addition to the sort of digital native issuance, we will support tokens that are created through the DTC's tokenization service, which they've announced is going to initially allow for the Russell 1000 securities to move from book entry form into tokenized form for DTC participants.

10:57 So from either the sort of digital native or the traditional origination, tokenized securities can be moved into our platform to prefund the sale and will allow for Genius Act compliant stablecoins

11:15 to be moved to the platform to prefund the purchase of securities.

11:20 Those operations will be twenty-four hours, seven days a week, and unlike traditional exchanges, you'll be able to place orders in dollar-based terms, or, you know, what we sometimes call fractional share quantities, which I think is a much more intuitive way for retail to participate, and it's basically sort of the table stakes, you know, interaction that we see from most, you know, kind of modern retail implementations.

11:46 Frankly, you know, a lot of workflows, you know, I think inspired that design. That platform, you know, uses pretty novel technology with respect to post-trade, the, the, the instant atomic settlement.

11:58 We're gonna begin with off-chain matching using NYSE's existing technology, which we call NYSE Pillar. So for all of the broker-dealers who currently connect to NYSE,

12:10 whether it's to our equities markets or to our options markets You'll be able to use that same technology investment, those same, you know, sort of order entry protocols on this new venue.

12:21 So we think it'll be a very sort of easy glide path for, you know, all of the broker-dealers that currently interact with NYSE to have the ability to begin to trade in a tokenized fashion.

12:32 With respect to moving inventory back and forth, that is going to require some new work by those market participants. They're going to have to begin to understand how to manage wallets.

12:43 They're going to have to begin to understand some of the other sort of technical infrastructure that's, that's attendant to trading on-chain.

12:50 But we think that we're gonna offer, you know, some sort of out-of-the-box solutions which they can adopt.

12:56 So we're hopeful that we'll have, you know, pretty broad participation, particularly from the retail brokerage community and the market-making community. I think it's realistic that institutional participation will lag.

13:08 A lot of this workflow and, and sort of usability and user experience innovation has come from retail. Mm-hmm.

13:16 And to unpack that a little bit more, what part of a life cycle of a stock that's currently being traded at the New York Stock Exchange is being put on-chain, and what part will not be on-chain? So

13:33 today, order entry, market data, trade execution, risk controls, really, you know, the totality of everything today happens off-chain.

13:44 We're gonna try to preserve as much of the regulatory convention as possible so that we can get started quickly without requiring the SEC or FINRA or, frankly, the US Congress to have to do anything significant in order for us to begin.

14:00 But what we are gonna change for this new platform is that once a trade occurs,

14:06 all of the post-trade activity, which today would involve, you know, clearing at DTC, it would involve settlement T+ one, it would involve potentially margin calls occurring at some point over the intervening period.

14:21 All of that instead will be replaced by an on-chain ledger that we'll manage on a private permission basis within the Mahwah data center.

14:30 So it's employing blockchain technology without really having a very significant regulatory policy requirement. We think that's a good place to start.

14:41 Over time, we're gonna, you know, anticipate that the industry, the regulatory perimeter, and our own capabilities will allow for much more exotic implementations.

14:53 But we think this is a really important place to start, both for the regulators as well as the members of the exchange.

14:59 LayerZero just announced Zero, a new Layer 1 blockchain similar to how Ethereum would be a Layer 1, how Canton would be a Layer 1, how Solana would be a Layer 1.

15:10 They announced that together with Citadel Securities, DTCC, ICE, Google Cloud, Ark Invest, Tether. Now, you just mentioned the DTCC. They chose Canton for their tokenization pilot.

15:26 You just announced that partnership with LayerZero Labs. H-how do you think that will turn out? Where will the settlement layer and the trading lay-layer run? Will that be on one blockchain, on different blockchains?

15:38 How, how do you think about that? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think

15:43 the reality that's most likely, I mean, th-there are a lot of possibles, but I think the reality that's most likely is one where, you know, firms like ICE, firms like NYSE are going to require different technology for different use cases.

15:59 And so we certainly think about something like Zero as, you know, having the potential to enable on-chain high performance, you know, low latency, massive throughput operations that we currently have to perform off-chain.

16:15 You know, NYSE systems today process literally over a trillion messages a day sometimes. You know, it's just something that's totally sort of,

16:24 you know, sort of unbelievable and sort of, like, improbable [chuckles] with respect to existing blockchain technology. Yeah.

16:31 But as we've seen with LayerZero, as we see with other, you know, projects, there's a lot of innovation and there's so much, you know, sort of like brilliant engineering that's being applied to the space.

16:41 So we're really excited for the prospect of, of Zero. I think it's most likely, to come back to your question, that you're gonna see interoperability. The most probable future is one in which there's, you know,

16:54 low friction, low cost interoperability, and you're going to see, you know, different technologies and different techniques applied for, for different parts of the problem. For our part with the NYSE project initially,

17:05 ensuring we have interoperability so that we can get inventory in and out of different transfer agents, out of DTC, working with different Genius Act compliant stable coins, working with different wallet providers.

17:17 You know, we're, we're going to have, you know, some, some diversity in terms of the infrastructure with which we integrate.

17:24 And so I suspect that, you know, organizations like us are, are often going to have to sort of create a mosaic of different tech in order to be most effective. ICE, broadly as

17:39 clearinghouse businesses, we have exchanges, we have mortgage technology, we have data.

17:43 I think it's, you know, highly likely that you would see us use, you know, a range of different technologies across those different businesses. Yeah.

17:50 And just to put that into perspective for our listeners, LayerZero claims Zero can handle two million transactions per second, and that's about 100,000 times as much as Ethereum and about 500 times as much as Solana.

18:02 So a lot of transactions, and that was my, my, my next question, whether that actually matters for ICE to fulfill your needs or whether deterministic finality And credible neutrality is more important, or as you just said, whether it would be a mix of different solutions playing together.

18:24 Yeah, I think, I think it's the latter. Yeah.

18:26 You can think about our clearing houses where we have six global clearing houses around the world that, you know, on any given day might have, you know, between $100 and $200 billion

18:37 of collateral that's being held to ensure that when derivatives contracts settle, that, that everyone's made whole.

18:44 We're moving assets and our, our clearing members of those clearing firm-- of those clearing houses are moving assets, you know, all day every day, but they're doing it today in local banking hours, on local banking calendars, using sort of local conventions.

19:00 If we're able to begin to do 24/7 global collateral mobility, you're gonna free up capital. It can be put to a much more productive use.

19:08 I think you're gonna see, you know, sort of the attendant benefit to investors of getting, you know, better return on those assets. But those types of money movements, those types of asset movements,

19:20 those are very infrequent but very high value. And so that's gonna have a totally different performance consideration than,

19:29 you know, the real-time order book for a active equity or, you know, even more like an active options series, for example. So something like, you know, a more, a more sort of battle tested, um,

19:46 you know, bulletproof, um, but, but maybe, you know, higher cost, lower throughput solution might work for the clearinghouse,

19:56 but it would be totally incompatible with the need if we're going to do something on chain with matching.

20:02 So yeah, I think you'll see diversity from us, and I think working with partners who are building towards that sort of interoperable high performance but sort of built-for-purpose solution like that, that's where I, I think you'll see a lot of industry focus over the next, you know, several quarters.

20:19 Yeah. Canton is a new kid on the block. It's a new layer one blockchain. It's a permissioned and privacy first chain. Zero is permissionless and claims institutional-grade performance.

20:31 We have other big chains, obviously Ethereum, Solana, both of them are permissionless chains.

20:39 Uh, regardless of performance, when we look at permissioned versus permissionless or what crypto people like to call decentralization,

20:50 uh, decentralization has been a core thesis of this space since the beginning, and I would love to understand, is this even a topic for you internally when you, uh, talk about those technologies?

21:04 Or is decentralization and permissionless more of an afterthought when choosing the right technology stack for those kinds of applications? Yeah, that's a great question, and I think the philosophy of decentralization,

21:22 um, you know, it, it is so like deeply intertwined in blockchain that it, it's really relevant, you know, for, for

21:29 those more traditional institutions that are moving into the space to like, have some sort of reconciliation with that.

21:36 Our view, and I think it actually was well put, put slightly differently, but, but well put by, by Joe Lubin when you spoke with him recently- Mm-hmm... is, you know, markets arc toward, you know, democratization.

21:48 They arc towards participation, they arc towards transparency, they arc towards the, the sort of freedom for people to act.

21:56 And so there's going to be a tension during this period of trying to adapt well-regulated markets that depend on intermediation or sort of based on rules that give people comfort and protection, but are built to sort of

22:15 ensure that there's permissioned activity with the promise of something that's, you know, more decentralized and, and allows for, you know, sort of permissionless creativity and, and, and interactions.

22:29 So we do talk about it quite a bit.

22:32 I don't know exactly how we get from here to there, but we're now in a world where you have particularly offshore some like very, very interesting, very, very dynamic markets that are operating in a permissionless way.

22:45 And you have, you know, kind of a, a regulatory environment that's open to experimentation, and I think a consumer base that's really interested in doing things that are going to be innovative.

22:59 And so there, there's a really like fertile environment to try to pursue that. We're still

23:06 going to operate in a very well-regulated way, where we're going to ensure that we comply with, with the rules and with the law, but we're looking at the innovations that are occurring over the globe and looking at ways that we can participate.

23:18 Uh, Michael, now we talked a lot about tokenizing equities, but DTCC's latest announcement with, with Canton was actually about tokenizing U.S. Treasuries. How do you think about that? Will tokenization of U.S.

23:32 Treasuries come first? Will it be bigger than equities? Will equities come first? What are your thoughts on that? So I think DTC has, has publicly said that their ambition is to ultimately tokenize everything

23:47 that's held, you know, at, at DTC, which, you know, I don't know the exact number, but let's, let's call it 100 trillion, you know, in assets.

23:55 It's, it's a very significant, you know, it's probably the most significant single repository of, of, of, you know, assets in the world.

24:03 They've announced that with respect to their program, that they're gonna likely start with Treasuries, then move to equities, and then begin to look at other instruments. Treasuries are hyper liquid today.

24:16 Uh, equities are generally, uh, very, very liquid. So the amount of efficiency that you can find from tokenized trading of those, I think will be pretty modest.

24:27 But in terms of improving their value as collateral, in terms of improving the ability for,

24:34 you know, investors to have more sort of personal agency in how they are using their assets versus, you know, kind of ceding that to intermediaries, I think there's a ton of potential.

24:45 But we have to get these fundamental building blocks in place in order to really see that experimentation and creativity begin to be expressed. So, you know, DTC

24:56 is important, and it's a huge unlock, I think, for regulated businesses to be able to participate with the existing assets in the ecosystem. We're trying to build in a way that's, you know, in parallel.

25:09 So if DTC, um, is on time with their deliveries, that'll be amazing. If they're not on time with their deliveries, that's okay. We'll work with other digital native issuers to get started.

25:21 Um, and I think it's really good that there's this, you know, kind of

25:26 collective effort with a bunch of us working shoulder to shoulder to try to bring, you know, new things to market and then let the marketplace help pick the winners and losers so that we can find the best ideas for our investors and issuers.

25:38 If, if the DTCC mints tokenized treasuries and New York Stock Exchange tokenized equities, let's assume fast-forward a couple of years, we arrive in that future. How do you think about DeFi plugging into all of this?

25:55 Is this something that's already on your roadmap, or is this still very far away?

26:01 I think that transition is the most interesting and the most unclear, you know, sort of medium to sort of middle distance horizon issue that's out there. Mm-hmm.

26:14 There's clearly some portion of the investor community that is deeply interested in having the ability to lend their own assets, uh, to have the ability to compose, you know, kind of

26:32 bespoke investable products. You know, otherwise kind of make use of the like user-generated kind of, um, kind of infinite possibilities that come with something that's like purely decentralized. At the same time,

26:49 you know, there's, there's a massive and I would say larger proportion of the investor community and the issuer community that

26:58 wants to ensure that they have, you know, protections and want to ensure that they're not going to unintentionally, you know, participate in some sort of, you know, problematic, you know, AML situation or, you know, otherwise, you know, sort of find themselves afoul of, of some sort of, you know, legal or, or ethical issue.

27:19 So how we get from a world where everything is very carefully intermediated and that, that sort of meets that policy goal to a world where you have decentralization but also meet those policy goals,

27:33 like that pathway is, is I think relatively uncharted right now. And there are people working on the problem.

27:39 There, there are really interesting technologies and really interesting companies that are developing solutions that could become part of that answer.

27:46 But yeah, for our part, I think we, we think it's sort of in the middle distance.

27:49 We expect it'll be a part of what we do, but we've got to make sure that we're not sort of giving up on the policy objectives, even though we're embracing the technology that's going to, I think, enable a lot of really creative, really productive uses.

28:04 ICE is, uh, working with BNY and Citi to su-support tokenized deposits across six clearing houses, uh, to help clear members transfer funds outside of banking hours, meet margin obligations, and operate across jurisdictions.

28:19 This sounds like it could be even more transformative than the trading platform itself. Can you unpack that for us a little bit, and, and what's the timeline on this, and how, how close this is actually to production?

28:31 Sure. So as you said, you know, we operate six global clearing houses.

28:36 You know, places like the United States and Europe and Singapore, and generally we have the same or very similar members in each of those clearing houses.

28:46 So, you know, a major FCM might be, you know, active in Singapore and Europe and in ICE clear US. But because they operate on, you know, generally, you know, sort of local banking hours,

29:01 if there's a margin call in Singapore, they're unable to take their collateral, which might be in excess in New York, and move it over to Singapore in order to meet that call. So as a result,

29:14 what these people will generally do is over-collateralize each of those different clearing obligations to ensure that they won't be caught short in the case of a margin call in any given clearing house.

29:31 The result is a lot of drag on capital that's not otherwise being put to more productive uses. So our expectation is that, you know, on-chain infrastructure and tokenized collateral

29:47 can immediately begin to help reduce that drag and improve returns for investors.

29:52 Tokenized deposits are, you know, effectively cash, cash deposits that are held at a bank, and what we see is these FCMs will often have one settlement bank across, let's say again, Singapore and New York Clearing House obligations.

30:09 Working with BNY and Citi, um, a-as sort of the first settlement banks in this program, will allow for twenty-four/seven cash movements so that someone can move their intra bank Deposits from one geography to another in order to meet an obligation.

30:29 That is, um, a very important innovation,

30:33 but it's a relatively modest innovation with respect to tokenized collateral 'cause you're still just talking about cash, and you're really talking about sort of intra-bank movements.

30:42 I think the next dimension, which is really, you know, I think where we'll see a lot of focus, but also a lot of friction because these are very, you know, sort of conservative organizations and, and very crucial, well-regulated activities,

30:57 is the expansion beyond cash, beyond treasuries into tokenized collateral, such as tokenized money market funds, stable coins, tokenized securities, and potentially even crypto assets themselves serving as good collateral in the clearing houses.

31:16 I think that, to your point, that has the potential to be much more impactful in many respects, particularly for institutional investors than tokenized trading itself might be.

31:27 We'd expect the tokenized deposits solution to be adopted by our clients this year.

31:32 I'd expect it's going to be, you know, a multi-year process for major clearing houses like ours to both change their operations to support twenty-four/seven, but then also support the broader menu of collateral. Yeah.

31:45 And then what's needed to make all those other assets collateral is we first have to bring them on chain, right? That's right. I think in some respects, um, I mean, that's important work.

31:59 I don't mean to, to minimize it, but I, I think we, we know how to do that now. There's still a lot to do, but, but we know how to do it.

32:05 I think with respect to using them as collateral, there's, there's still legal questions, there's still regulatory questions, there's still a lot of like liquidity risk and operational questions, but it's the direction of travel.

32:17 Like, we have a lot of conviction that this is what's going to become commonplace, if not the majority of collateral. So that's why we're moving with full speed to begin to develop those capabilities.

32:29 Uh, one thing I wanna talk about as well is your investment in Polymarket. You invested two billion US dollars in Polymarket, valuing Polymarket at eight billion.

32:40 This makes it one of the largest investments by any traditional exchange in the crypto space. What does ICE see in Polymarket, and what's the data play or technology bet?

32:54 So I think there's three different themes that really are all expressed within, within the Polymarket investment. The first is just simply prediction markets as an investable asset class are really interesting.

33:05 It's explosive growth. It's bringing kind of a new generation of, I won't say investors, but let's say like quantitatively-minded traders into the broader financial ecosystem.

33:18 And so the idea that you can sort of have markets on everything is just fascinating to us.

33:23 And, and so we're really excited to have this, you know, investment and, and partnership with the world's leading prediction market. Second,

33:33 you know, the data, as you mentioned, the data that is produced from the wisdom of the crowd predicting what may happen in a election, a geopolitical event,

33:47 a economic event, a cultural event, like all of those have potential impact into more traditional financial markets.

33:57 So, you know, certainly the, the, the, the obvious example of an election, you know, could have dramatic impact on a range of different traditional markets like FX or rates or equity indices or individual names.

34:13 The signal that can pr- be produced from prediction markets is tremendously valuable to traditional finance. And so

34:19 ICE has an exclusive relationship with Polymarket now to distribute that data into the institutional capital market space.

34:27 The third theme, and I think this will probably be intuitive for you and, and most of the listeners, is Polymarket is simply one of the most successful DeFi projects on the planet.

34:41 And so as we're trying to get smarter about how to operate in a world with non-custodial, smart contract-based markets, in many ways, they've already solved a lot of those problems from first principles.

34:54 So working with Shane and his team, we're learning a lot, and I'd like to think that as they're moving into the United States, we're also helping them a bit with some of our expertise.

35:04 So I think across those three themes, you know, Polymarket was a perfect fit. Um, we're really excited about what's been achieved and what's ahead. Yeah. What's ahead, Michael? Let's look a little bit into the future.

35:15 First of all, what, what's on your agenda in the next twelve to twenty-four months? What are you excited about? Um, what are you looking at? Sure. So,

35:26 you know, the, the sort of three major parts of the program that, that we've talked about today are, are definitely, you know, front and center and executing against all of the NYSE tokenization efforts, the ICE clearinghouse, uh, tokenized collateral efforts, and then, you know, supporting Polymarket as they reenter the United States and as we help distribute their data.

35:48 Like, those are all really important projects for us, and I think they'll, they'll take a lot of our focus. But it's really important that we keep our eyes sort of deeper on the horizon as well.

35:58 And so projects like zero, other sort of distribution of our tradable assets and potentially our data assets on chain is something that's really interesting to us. And we watch with, you know,

36:12 a lot of interest the sort of offshore innovations that we see and a lot of the explosive growth we see in some of the offshore DeFi apparatus. So I think we're gonna continue to be, um- Moving with a lot of urgency.

36:27 We're gonna continue to sort of feel, um, a lot of conviction that this is something that's-- it's not a question. Like, it's, it's, it's when, not if.

36:37 Um, so we're gonna ensure that we're ready and that we're going to be leaders. If you look at this from a perspective of a market participant, the bank and asset manager, what are the things those people need to know?

36:54 What are the realities that they need to prepare for?

36:57 And what, what will this new infrastructure that you're building right now unlock for them on the operational side, and h-how does it impact their day-to-day business that they've been used to for the last two to three decades since the start of electronic trading?

37:14 Yeah, I, I, I think that's the right frame. I think markets evolved from manual, floor-based, paper-based trading, uh, you know, kind of around the turn of the century,

37:28 and now we're in kind of the next evolutionary step.

37:31 And so the same kind of level of creativity and, and kind of like creative disruption that was caused by the electronification of markets, I think you're gonna see with, like, moving markets on chain.

37:44 For our part, we're looking to make that transition as smooth and low friction and, you know, kind of responsible as possible with respect to, to projects like the NYSE's tokenized settlement.

37:58 But I think you're gonna find projects that will be sort of built for the early adopters as well. And so, you know, we, we have a very broad range of stakeholders in our ecosystem.

38:09 Some of them are gonna be, you know, able to take advantage of twenty-four/seven collateral mobility. And when that happens, all of a sudden the economics of being a clearing member change.

38:20 And if one clearing member becomes dominant because they're able to operate more efficiently, well, I'm pretty confident that everybody else is going to rush to have that same level of efficiency.

38:29 So I think it's gonna be,

38:32 you know, kind of slow until it's fast, but I would think over the next two to three years, everybody who has a significant traditional business is going to either need to invest their own resources into building capabilities to work on tokenized collateral or tokenized trading, or consider partnerships or acquisitions in order to be ready.

38:54 So- Mm-hmm... I think that there may have been a little bit of, like, ostrich head-in-the-sand behavior during the Gensler administration. But when I look across the street now, you know, everybody's sort of

39:06 wide awake that this is happening. Yeah, and speaking about the Gensler administration, uh, the CLARITY Act hasn't passed yet.

39:14 Are there any regulatory catalysts that you're looking at or hurdles that you think we need to pass to make this a reality? I don't know that there's any specific, you know,

39:28 regulatory or legislative requirement for our immediate plans. But we certainly think that the US markets will be more competitive and move faster and lead if we get a bill.

39:42 So we'd really like to see, you know, a statute pass. Um, a good bill is, is better than a bad bill, but we think, you know, having a bill would be, would be, um, you know, better than not having a bill.

39:56 I think we're close, and hopefully we'll, we'll see that come t-come to pass. And firms like ours will adapt. We always do.

40:04 But I think, you know, having, having certainty will allow for, for firms that want to be good actors and wanna be well-regulated to move with a pace that, that they really can't when there's ambiguity. All right.

40:17 Michael, we're almost at the end of the show. I wanna do a short lightning round with you. Very short questions, very brief answers. I'll try.

40:26 The, the first one is, what's the most overrated narrative in institutional crypto right now? It's over. What's the most underrated use case for blockchain in capital markets that nobody's talking about?

40:44 I mean, people are talking about everything, but I, I think, you know, there's a tremendous amount of opportunity in rethinking prime brokerage.

40:52 If you had to bet, will more equities trade on-chain or off-chain by two thousand and thirty? US equities, um, I'm gonna bet off-chain twenty-thirty, on-chain twenty-thirty-five.

41:07 And last one, one piece of advice for a TradFi executive who still thinks blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. You better find another industry. It's just not gonna be a sustainable [chuckles] worldview.

41:21 All right. Thank you, Michael. It was a pleasure having you on the show. Where can people learn more about you, more about Ice?

41:29 Ice.com is a great place to learn more about, uh, the sort of very, very broad range of things that we do. And we have, you know, a lot of interesting projects still to announce this year, so stay tuned.

41:42 Yeah, stay tuned, folks. Uh, Michael, thanks for coming. I wish you all the best, and see you soon. Thanks, Marc. Great to see you. You obviously like this video enough that you got to the end.

41:52 Listen, do me a favor, hit that like and subscribe button because I think you'll like it.

41:58 And if you want even more, with more I mean incredible alpha research and digital asset market updates, subscribe to our newsletter on fifty-one, that's the number five one, insights.xyz and get the most actionable insights on digital assets.

42:15 See you next time.