The $400 trillion tokenization migration, with Carlos Domingo, CEO Securitize

0:00 [on-hold music] Welcome to another episode of 51 Insights. Today with Carlos Domingo, co-founder and CEO at Securitize. Carlo, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's my pleasure.

0:18 Yeah, it's great to have you here, Carlos. You're a true OG when it comes to crypto and tokenization, and I'm really looking forward- Nice of you all. Yeah.

0:28 Uh, and I'm really looking forward to unpack all of this today with you. Uh, the first question I have for you, which is my introduction question, what is actually the tokenization opportunity?

0:40 I know there's a lot of talk about tokenization. Tokenization has been a buzzword for many years. You've said at some point that tokenization is a fi-- four hundred trillion market.

0:50 What exactly does that number include, and what is realistic in the next three to four years when it comes to tokenization?

0:59 The four hundred trillion dollar market is any asset that is recorded on an antiquated ledger, right?

1:04 'Cause tokenization is basically modernizing the ledger of record of assets, so that four hundred trillion dollars includes equities, bonds, real estate, uh, credit, alternative assets, et cetera.

1:15 So if you add everything globally, it's four hundred trillion dollars. That obviously is not realistic to think that everything will get tokenized.

1:22 I think that if you look at the, the projections from analysts, the projections for the next, let's say, five to 10 years, it's somewhere in the range between two to ten trillion dollars of actual assets tokenized, right?

1:33 So, but the total addressable market is conceivable, anything that you can actually, you know, improve the ledger of record of the asset.

1:39 So, but I think if, if we go to two trillion dollars in the next, you know, five or 10 years, that would be like a, a very good outcome for everybody.

1:47 Can you just unpack that a little bit for our listeners who might not be familiar with tokenization? What does tokenization actually mean?

1:55 So any- anything you own, any, you know, equities in a-- equity in a company, if you buy a bond, if you buy a money market fund, if like any, any financial instrument you own, or including, by the way, your house and everything, the record of ownership of that asset is in some type of ledger.

2:10 And then every time you transfer the ownership, you have to update the ledger to reflect that there's been a change of ownership, and then sometimes you also have to update another ledger, which reflects the cash that people pay for the asset for you to sell it.

2:22 So every single financial transaction that happens in capital markets every day, which are like trillions and trillions of dollars, involves updating a bunch of ledgers that are sitting in antiquated technology, that are siloed, they don't talk to each other, et cetera.

2:36 And the way today the industry solves for this is by either taking very long time to update the ledgers, [chuckles] like days or weeks, or by having a lot of intermediaries that intermediate the, the, the transfer of the ownership to make sure that these ownerships are properly recorded and that, you know, if the ledger that says, "I own this," gets updated saying, "I don't own it anymore," and the ledger that you own the asset gets updated, that those things happen simultaneously or, or at least are coordinated.

3:01 'Cause otherwise, if something fails, it could reflect that I own it and you own it at the same time, when on- only one of us own it.

3:06 So if you think about what Bitcoin is, Bitcoin is a blockchain, the first blockchain, the original blockchain design that solves for this problem of when you transfer something that makes sure that it, it gets updated properly, and does not kind of duplicate the asset, right?

3:19 That's called a double spending problem in crypto. So, so, so a blockchain actually solves this problem, uh, which has been a, like an open technical problem for many, many years.

3:27 And it creates these public ledgers where people can actually update their ledger without creating a double spending, like things are not reflected twice. And then also they are decentralized in the...

3:37 and not managed by anybody, but they are trustworthy, right? Like, you can actually rely on the information. They're making sure it hasn't been tampered by anybody.

3:43 So, so tokenization basically means move the ownership and the record of transfers, et cetera, of all these assets into this superior ledger technology that is public, everybody can read out of it, uh, it's, it's trustworthy because it's cryptographically secure, it doesn't have a double spend problem, et cetera.

4:00 So it's upgrading the ledger basically to provide, you know, more things that you can do with the assets that are hard to do in traditional finance, or that they have counterparty risk or takes time or exit.

4:12 And I mentioned at the beginning that you've been very early. I remember in 2019 when people started about tokenization for the first time, and I think that was one of the first hype waves.

4:24 You founded Securitize in 2017, so very, very early. What made you interested in tokenization, and what was your conviction back then that this is gonna be the next big thing? That's a good question.

4:40 So I started in crypto in 2016, and, [clears throat] and that is the time where a lot of people were doing the initial coin offerings, the ICOs, you probably remember that.

4:50 And then I, I just started participating in some of them, and I was actually fascinated about how easy it was to, you know, buy some crypto back in the days, and then you just basically send it with-- from your wallet, and then their smart contract mints a token, and then now you own a piece of that project, and then you can go and trade it, et cetera.

5:07 So it was, like, very simple because as part of my professional career, I've been investing in, in VC funds, in companies, et cetera, and those usually are like cumbersome paperwork, like a lot of things, takes for days to do it, they're not very accessible, they're illiquid, et cetera.

5:20 So kind of the view was if, if this technology is applied to actual real financial instruments, then it could revolutionize how people actually transfer things. And I, I had an example myself.

5:31 I, I used to work for a Fortune 500 company, and then when I left the company, I had shares in the company, and I decided that I wanted to sell them and, you know, transfer the shares from where I had the shares into a broker-dealer to be able to sell them.

5:42 It took me, like, weeks, and I couldn't understand why. It's like, i- isn't this like pushing a button on a computer and updating a ledger that my shares move from here to there, and then I sell them?

5:51 And it turns out that is not. [chuckles] That is a very complicated process.

5:53 And then I was, like, inspired by that, thinking, "Well, if you can take these utility tokens that people do on ICOs, but create tokenized securities," or security tokens we were called at that time, "that represent an actual real asset," as people call it now, real world asset, "and apply the same principles, then you can, you know, provide a lot of efficiencies to, to finance."

6:10 And I, I was not the only one, by the way.

6:12 Actually, interestingly enough, David Sacks, who is now the, the, the head of, you know, the crypto and AI czar at the Trump administration, he actually started a company as well in 2018 doing tokenization, and he had the same kind of insight.

6:24 So I was actually inspired by him. He used to post on Twitter a lot about how, you know, tokenized funds will be more efficient than non-tokenized funds and this and that, et cetera.

6:33 So there was a lot of people that started kind of identifying the problem. Some of us started companies. Most of the people that started companies back in the 2018, 2019, they're no longer around.

6:44 Uh, and we somehow managed to survive until kind of this next wave came, and it became a reality. So this was a very long and very rocky road.

6:54 What do you think has changed this year in 2025 versus five or six years back? I think the, the main change this year, to be honest with you, is the regulatory clarity

7:07 that is, is making institutions feel more comfortable with doing things in the space. Like a few years ago-- Th-those two things.

7:15 Like a few years ago, first, most of companies like us, we were just a tech provider, right? Like, we were building tokenization technology, but we didn't have any licenses, et cetera.

7:22 So over the years, we've basically created all this regulatory layer that we can actually act as a service provider for, let's say, an asset manager.

7:30 And then at the same time, you know, between 2024 and then now 2025 with the new, uh, you know, SEC administration and, and Chairman Atkins, the, the SEC has provided regulatory clarity saying it is fine.

7:43 So you can use this ledger technology as a regulated entity to represent your securities, and there is nothing wrong with it as far as you continue complying with your regulatory obligations, investor protections, and things like that.

7:53 And then the moment there is regulatory clarity, the large players start coming into the space.

7:57 'Cause keep in mind that if you are a very large asset manager, tokenization is very interesting, and it's probably the future, but at the beginning, it's not gonna move the needle, right?

8:04 'Cause everything starts small before it gets big. So if you're gonna take a regulatory risk that puts at risk your other traditional business, you're not gonna do it.

8:13 So that was one of the main barriers, I th- I guess, the last few years of adoption. And then also the, the industry has matured, right? Like, blockchains are easier to use.

8:20 Crypto is a bigger market, a few trillion dollars. Stablecoins didn't exist as well when I started. Now stablecoins are three hundred billion, and you need to have dollars and securities on the same ledger.

8:31 So there's been a kind of a, a confluence of a number of factors that have all started to happen. I would say 2024 is when it started, and 2025 is when it has consolidated.

8:40 And when you think about real-world adoption and when you think about that new phase that Securitize and the whole tokenization market is in right now, what are some flagship projects that come to mind or companies that started tokenizing things?

8:56 Obviously, I m- I mean, I have a biased opinion because it's my client, but I think that BlackRock entering the space, I think most people will agree, was a game changer, right?

9:06 Because BlackRock is the largest asset manager in the world. Um, and they actually did it in 2024 before we had this regulatory clarity.

9:13 They somehow got convinced themselves that it was okay to do it, and they're not gonna get in trouble.

9:19 And the fact that, you know, the largest asset manager in the world decides to tokenize a, a, a product and very successfully became the largest product in the industry, uh, in a very short period of time, I think is what has made everybody open their eyes and realize about the, the opportunity.

9:35 So I think that's one of the key moments in the industry, and, and I would li- argue is the most known product in the tokenization industry. And what exactly did BlackRock do with Securitize, and what did they tokenize?

9:49 Just to unpack that a little bit for our listeners. So what we did with BlackRock is very simple. The largest tokenized asset actually is the dollar, right? [chuckles] If you think about stablecoins.

10:00 So stablecoins are dollars.

10:01 They give you a token that represents a dollar, and then BlackRock has been heavily involved with Circle because they manage their reserve, they're a shareholder there, so, so they know the stablecoin market very well.

10:12 Mm, and they-- If you think about what's the adjacent thing to a dollar, these are US Treasuries, right?

10:18 And in traditional markets, you have more US Treasuries than dollars because most institutions don't use dollar, they use Treasuries.

10:24 Treasuries are basically, you know, the counterparty is the same entity, which is the US government, so you're taking the same counterparty risk, if you want, by holding dollars or holding Treasuries, but Treasuries give you a yield because they give you the, the fed rate, which is now close to four percent.

10:37 So why would you hold dollars that don't give you any money if you can hold Treasuries that are more or less the same instrument and are very liquid as well, and they give you a yield?

10:44 So most people in traditional finance will use Treasuries for everything.

10:47 But in crypto, because tokenized Treasuries didn't exist, tokenized dollars is what people were using, which is an inferior thing than a tokenized Treasury from, from a return perspective.

10:55 So the view was if we create a tokenized Treasury fund that is managed by, you know, the largest asset manager and a company that I think it manages more than two trillion dollars in, in cash products, and at the same time, we make it as useful as possible for the crypto people, like stablecoins, that it can move on chain, that is supported in peer-to-peer transactions, twenty-four seven liquidity, uh, you know, available across multiple different blockchains, et cetera, then that will become a lot of those tokenized dollars will m-move to tokenized Treasuries, which is the natural thing to expect.

11:24 So, so that was the insight, and that's exactly the product that we did.

11:27 So we created a product called BUIDL, which means BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity fund, [chuckles] which is basically a fund that contains Treasuries, that is liquid, contains US Treasuries.

11:37 And that's the, the tokenized product that we did with BlackRock, um, 18 months ago. And if I'm correct, it now has about two point five billion dollars asset under management. Correct? That's correct.

11:49 It's around two point five billion. Yeah. Yeah. So that's obviously very interesting and a great story.

11:55 Uh, what I'm wondering is can you take us a little bit inside those boardrooms and meetings where you meet with those traditional financial companies, the biggest asset managers in the world, and you talk with them about tokenization, and you're conceiving a product like that.

12:13 What is their feedback, and what are maybe some of the biggest also misconceptions that you still see when you have those conversations?

12:22 I think those conversations today versus a few years ago are very different [chuckles] because today I think there is a lot more knowledge about it.

12:29 Most people have already heard the term Most people have seen some of the products that are already in the market that are successful.

12:36 Uh, actually today we had the, the chairman of the SEC in Fox News for 10 minutes talking about tokenization, and a few days ago we had Larry Fink and the, the CEO of BlackRock, and Rob Goldstein, their chief operating officer, writing an op-ed in The Economist about tokenization.

12:51 Tokenization is becoming a, a, a term that most people in finance today understand. So the conversations today are very different than the ones t-two, three years ago, where you have to start from the basics.

13:00 It's like, what is tokenization? Why you need to do it, why it's important, et cetera. Today it's more about what do we tokenize, what assets I have.

13:07 If I tokenize them, how they're gonna get consumed, you know, the, their risk appetite in terms of, uh, you know, making sure like all compliance things are, as I mentioned, that also is going away a little bit, but make sure that everything is legal, the legal contracts between us and them, et cetera.

13:22 So the conversation has really evolved from what is tokenization, why should I do it, to what do I need to do now? [chuckles] Like, what do I tokenize?

13:29 Which is a great thing, by the way, 'cause it simplifies the conversation greatly. Yeah. Yeah, and I remember for years, people were trying to figure out what's the first asset class that's gonna be tokenized at scale.

13:41 And in my opinion, we had stablecoins exploding in 2025, and they were almost kind of the Trojan horse of tokenization.

13:51 Because when you think about tokenization, you think about real assets and shares and things like that, but you not necessarily think about the US dollar. However, this year, stablecoins exploded $300 billion in supply.

14:06 That's tokenized US dollar on the blockchain. Do you agree with that view? And what do you think will be the next big asset class that is gonna be tokenized, and how do you see that unfold?

14:21 So this, this is very interesting 'cause when I started in 2017, '18, '19, the perception was that we should tokenize, um, illiquid assets because tokenization makes an asset liquid.

14:35 I think over the years we've realized tokenization, what it makes is the asset to be easier to trade, easier to move it, um, but that doesn't necessarily make it liquid unless the asset is liquid itself, because the liquidity is, is intrinsic to the asset, right?

14:47 So if you have real estate,

14:50 which is very illiquid, it only changes price once in a while and has very few holders of the asset, et cetera, then the asset is intrinsically illiquid, and even though I could actually trade them easily in tokenized form, there's not gonna be anybody buying and selling it.

15:02 While if you have things like dollars, like, et cetera, then those are ill- liquid assets already that you can actually make them better, right?

15:09 Like, make them move better, faster, 24/7, you know, reach out to places where it's hard to get the asset itself, like, uh, you know, emerging markets, which is where a lot of the stablecoins are, et cetera.

15:19 So from that perspective, the, the natural next as- big asset that is gonna be, which is already the largest one anyway, is treasuries, right? As we discussed before, which was what we decided to do with BlackRock.

15:29 Um, I think when we started with BlackRock in, in 2024, the whole tokenized treasury space was, like, $300 million, and now I think it's, like, $8 billion.

15:39 So, so we're the largest asset, but the, the space itself has grown and there's a lot of other players now, uh, that are doing the same thing and competing with us and making the space bigger for everybody, right?

15:49 I think if you look at-- If you continue down the spectrum, you know, we recently released a triple A CLO product.

15:55 These are like bonds, like high-quality bonds, uh, contained in a, in a product that are also very liquid.

16:00 Uh, so that's another very interesting asset because it gives you a higher yield than treasuries, and you can continue kind of, kind of going down the scale of, you know, higher yield, higher duration, higher risk.

16:09 Uh, and there's many, many products on that spectrum, which I think the ones that are going to be tokenized.

16:14 And then the other spectrum of things are things that are, if you think what's the most liquid assets in the US besides like treasuries and dollars and bonds, are equities, right?

16:23 So public equities is probably another area where we're gonna see. We've started doing some work and some other companies as well, but it's very small today.

16:31 But I think that we're gonna see an explosion of, you know, tokenized public equities in the coming, you know, 12 to 18 months. Interesting that you mentioned real estate.

16:40 I think that's one of the things that you hear most when you talk with people about tokenization. The first thing is always, "Yeah, r- let's tokenize real estate."

16:49 But as you mentioned, the big problem is still that you have an illiquid market. Do you think we'll ever solve the liquidity or illiquidity problem with tokenization, or does that take a whole different approach?

17:05 So that's a good question. So I, I do st- I think that, you know, as markets get deeper and more market participants are there, then liquidity somehow emerges, right?

17:15 And then as you get market makers participate, et cetera. So I think that illiquid assets

17:21 will be more liquid if they are tokenized than if they are not tokenized for sure, because tokenization makes it easier to settle a trade, it makes it easier to participate, it, uh, then it leads to like price discovery because there's more trades happening, et cetera.

17:33 So now is an illiquid asset-- And then there's other technologies in crypto like automated market making, et cetera, that for illiquid assets, long-tail illiquid assets, maybe they can bring more.

17:42 So I think that we will see

17:45 that tokenized assets are definitely more liquid than their counterparts, but we'll still need to wait until markets become deeper and more broadly accessible for very illiquid assets to be liquids.

17:56 Let's assume for a moment that this future that you just described pans out. So 12 to 18 months, we'll have tokenization of equities at scale. And what we've seen this year is that, uh, we have an infrastructure war.

18:12 So we have the public blockchains with the leader Ethereum has the most tokenized assets on chain, and then we have private blockchains built by banks. JPMorgan is probably the most prominent example.

18:25 How do you see that playing out? Will there be a mix of open public permissionless blockchains and private chains, or do you see that moving towards private chains mostly?

18:39 The first to clarify, because I think I have a lot of respect for the blockchain team at JPMorgan.

18:43 I'm not sure that building a private blockchain was done by design, but because they couldn't do anything else with the regulatory situation that they had, like the OCC, which is the regulator for the banks in the US, made it very clear that banks couldn't touch public blockchains.

18:57 So assuming now there's no regulatory issues and anybody can do public or private, I have-- I don't know any industry where the private ecosystem has actually win, because open innovation is, is where interesting things happen, right?

19:10 Because it's permissionless innovation. Anybody can participate, anybody can build things. So there's no way to compete with a closed ecosystem against an open ecosystem.

19:17 So, so naturally, I do not think that private blockchains, once they've become, there's no regulatory restriction towards using them, are, are ever going to be long-term successfully.

19:26 'Cause this just-- This has never happened in the history of technology.

19:30 [chuckles] Open ecosystems is where the interesting thing happens and, and if you remember-- You know, you're, you're too young, but I remember how internet started, and you had the same thing.

19:39 You have the open internet, and you had Yahoo and other people there, and you have the closed internet. You have American Online and you have MSM, MSM, and those were like closed internets.

19:47 And there were people saying, "No, closed internet is like curated content. We know who is there, like it's safe," and this and that.

19:53 And then the open internet is there were open protocols, anybody could participate, and people started building things and improving standards and creating more technology.

20:00 And ultimately, everybody uses the open internet. There's nobody using-- There was even these concepts in companies called intranets and things like that, which I don't think they exist anymore, right?

20:08 [chuckles] So I think that public blockchains is definitely the future. It is the present, but it's definitely the future.

20:14 And private blockchains will completely disappear as, um, you know, the, the companies using them don't have a, a, a regulatory problem using a public blockchain.

20:23 It's, it's also cheaper for a-- Like, imagine like, I don't know the numbers, but I'm, I'm assuming for JPMorgan to maintain their own blockchain is expensive value proposition.

20:31 They have data centers, and they have nodes they need to manage and stuff like that. Using Ethereum, just pay the gas for transactions and that's it. [chuckles] There's no infrastructure that you need to build.

20:40 [chuckles] Yeah, agree. Carlos, let's talk about going public. You've taken Securitize public at one point two five billion US dollar valuation via Cantor's SPAC.

20:53 Why now, and what is so interesting in taking Securitize public? I mean, why now is a combination of things, right? One is we have the size to be able to go public, which we didn't have before.

21:06 And obviously, you need to have a certain size. Uh, you know, the, the, the valuation of the company is one point, uh, twenty-five billion dollars.

21:12 But if you add the, the trust of the SPAC, uh, and the pipe that we raised, which was the, the largest pipes in twenty twenty-one, plus the SPAC that trades around like a ten percent premium, we're probably gonna go public at two-plus billion valuation, right?

21:24 Like the market cap. So that's, that's a good size to be public, and that's above the medium size of companies going public, and then you take it from there. So, so obviously having the right size was important.

21:33 Having a favorable regulator that will let you go public is also important.

21:37 Like Coinbase went public five years ago, but in between, literally almost no operating businesses in the space have gone public, and now everybody's trying to go public. And then there is this perception that,

21:48 of course, going public has also n-non-- I wouldn't say problems, but restrictions. You have to audit your numbers according to a very strict audit, uh, criteria. You have to disclose all your financials.

21:57 But I think for a company like us, that's actually a positive, right? I was actually this morning talking to, having breakfast with a friend.

22:04 He's a partner at a very large US bank, and he's been talking to a very large asset manager.

22:08 And he told me that these guys, now that you go public, will be more inclined to work with you because now they know, you know, how much money you have, you're not gonna go out of business, that you're profitable, that your books are completely clean and things like that.

22:20 So for us, that we work with very large institutions, going public increases kind of like the credibility of the company and the, the, the trust which will have, uh, in us.

22:29 And then, you know, I, I grew up in a time at the beginning, in the dot-com time, where companies used to go public as soon as possible.

22:36 Everybody wanted to be public because then you tap capital markets, your equity is liquid, it's ver-better for employees, better for everybody.

22:42 Like when, when Amazon went public, Amazon was worth two hundred million dollars, something like that. It was a very small company.

22:48 And somehow throughout all these years, because going public has become so difficult and complicated, companies have st-stayed private longer and longer and longer and longer.

22:57 And I think now, especially with the new SEC, Chair Atkins the other day was saying that she's gonna kind of like, uh, review all the disclosure requirements for companies, etc., to facilitate that companies go public.

23:07 You'll see a lot more companies doing what I'm doing, which is when you have a certain size, you go public and take it from there, which I think is a, is a better thing for everybody, so.

23:15 You- The opportunity was there, we did it. You, you recently also announced together with another OG in the space, Maja Wojciechowicz, who believed in your work from the early days, that you'll tokenize FGNX shares.

23:28 FGNX is one of the bigger Ethereum treasury companies. What does that mean, and, and how does it work exactly?

23:35 Yeah, I've known Maja for many, many years, [chuckles] so I was very glad to get together for, for this project.

23:40 So as I mentioned, tokenizing public equities is something that I think that is gonna be a, a pretty big thing, and you're gonna start somewhere.

23:47 And because they are the Ethereum treasury company, obviously they are very keen on adding value to the Ethereum ecosystem by putting their shares there.

23:53 Um, so what it means is that, you know, you take the shares that sit today on a central securities depository. So everything that trades in the US through any broker-dealer, Robinhood, you know,

24:03 Schwab or, uh, Fidelity, whatever, it sits on one database which o-is owned by the central securities deposit, by DTC. And the shares are trapped there. There's nothing you can do with them. You don't even own them.

24:14 They're not in your, under your name, et cetera. So there is a way to free the shares from there and put them on a blockchain in tokenized form to be able to do all the things with it.

24:21 Trade in different places, be able to distribute them internationally better, be able to, you know, place them as collateral and borrow against them, et cetera.

24:28 So, so tokenizing public equities basically means taking these shares out of these TradFi closed ecosystems and centralized databases and putting them on a blockchain.

24:38 So we're very keen on doing this project with, uh, FG Nexus. We also announced we're gonna tokenize our own, our own eq-equity.

24:44 I mean, we're gonna have both the traditional markets version and the tokenized version, of course, [chuckles] as it should be.

24:50 Uh, and I'm very excited about the, the opportunities of, uh, what we can do once shares, uh, of public companies are on a blockchain. Yeah.

24:59 And let's talk a little bit about that opportunity because I think that's extremely important for people to understand. So once a share is on the blockchain, you can basically do anything with it.

25:10 And one of the great examples I always bring in the last couple of weeks is Aave.

25:16 Aave, the biggest DeFi lending protocol that launched a consumer app in the Apple App Store, where everyone, including my grandmother, can deposit cash and then participate in the Aave protocol with one click and earn an annual yield of up to nine percent.

25:34 And for me, that's such a great example because it's a glimpse of how, in my opinion, the future of finance will pan out.

25:42 We'll have those DeFi protocols in the back end, we'll have many, many different front ends, and we'll be able to do all kinds of things with those assets on-chain. Can you unpack that a little bit?

25:55 What is possible once a stock or a security or an asset is on-chain? I mean, the first thing is, besides what you can do with them, is that the shares will be under your name.

26:06 Like, most people don't realize that their shares, when you buy them through Robinhood or through Schwab, they're not under your name. They're under somebody else's name. You have a claim towards those shares.

26:16 People can borrow them to short the stock without your permission, et cetera. So I think there is a...

26:21 Especially the, the younger, more n-native digital generations, that they have a sense of like, "I wanna own my own things. I don't wanna have things in an intermediary."

26:30 Uh, and this is why people buy Bitcoin or people buy other digital assets, right? So you'll be able to do the same thing with, with, uh, equity in companies and, and public equity.

26:39 Now, the second thing is that there is a lot of things that are complicated to the international market. If you wanna transfer the shares, not simple to do it.

26:46 So here you can just send them peer to peer to another whitelisted wallet, and you transfer them. If you wanna trade them twenty-four/seven, not simple to do. Markets are closed, and it's very illiquid, et cetera.

26:57 If you're in a jurisdiction where you don't have access to a US brokerage, then you can't buy the shares.

27:03 But here, because, you know, you will have other type of intermediaries that are more open to international exposure, then you'll be able to buy shares of US companies.

27:11 They-- You can deposit them on, on Aave in the, the, the RW version of Aave. It's called Horizon. And then borrow against them. And I say, "Okay, I own, you know, a thousand shares of the, of this company.

27:20 Own, and then maybe this loan, I'll use it for, you know, something else and earn a yield with, uh, with the, with the loan that I'm taking from the, from the shares."

27:29 So I think the, the possibilities are endless in terms of the things that we can do once we free the shares from these centralized closed ecosystems and put them on a blockchain.

27:37 And, and as we, we discussed b- uh, before, this is an, an open permissionless innovation environment, right?

27:44 So I'm sure people will then come up with other ideas of other things that you can do with those shares once they are on a blockchain. As opposed to today, there's nothing you can do about it.

27:51 Like, it's only, you know, whoever they approve market participants can access them, and that's it.

27:56 So when you put things on an, on an open ecosystem, innovation happens, and we'll see more things done with tokenized, uh, you know, shares that we haven't seen with traditional shares.

28:06 What do you think will be the biggest catalysts to unlock that future? I think we need to see, like, one company that is like a marquee company that everybody re-- um, knows, that is very famous, that decides to do that.

28:23 And the moment that happens, I think that then everybody will want to do it. [chuckles] Um, right now, Carlos, you support about fifteen blockchains, if I'm correct.

28:32 Bitl, that you launched with BlackRock, launched on Ethereum, then expanded to Avalanche, Aptos, Arbitrum, Optimism and Polygon. What's your view on different layer ones? Are you generally chain-agnostic? Yeah, yeah.

28:45 We're, we're chain-agnostic. Look, we're, we're a service provider for, for the asset managers, right?

28:50 Like, we bring their assets on-chain, so we cannot-- We should not, and we cannot force them to say, "Okay, you have to be here or you have to be there."

28:57 It's, it's their choice, and sometimes they want to be on Ethereum because they want to be on Aave, but sometimes they want to be on, uh, on Solana because, uh, they want to be on a different protocol in Solana, in Camino or some other one.

29:10 So, so for us, you know, we're here to provide the best experience to people. We also have the ability, through the Wormhole integration, to move the shares from one chain to another, and that's always been our strategy.

29:20 So we're a service provider, and we wanna provide choice for our customers for them to do what they think is best.

29:26 Do you have a view on how corporates and asset managers and banks need to think about a multi-chain world? So how is that gonna unfold?

29:37 Will that consolidate around a few winner chains, or will we have a plethora of different chains, and you're just gonna provide assets on all of those chains? What's your view on that? I don't know.

29:50 Like, I, I've been asked this question over the years,

29:53 and I always tend to think this is at some point going to consolidate and we're gonna have less chains because somehow it feels like that's the natural outcome of this.

30:02 But [chuckles] it feels the market is moving in the opposite direction. Every day we have more chains. Now we have now Tempo and Arc and this and that. So maybe I don't have the right intuition here.

30:10 We're gonna have a lot of chains.

30:12 It definitely feels that the next few years, this is a multi-chain world because there's so many that are big enough that are not gonna disappear, that there is no way that, you know, three years from now everything is on Solana or everything is on Ethereum.

30:22 That's definitely not happening. So, so for the time being, I think we're gonna be multi-chain, and I think what we need to work in, is in kind of abstracting out this complexity for the consumers, right?

30:31 As you said, Aave did this very good job with the app of abstracting out the fact that you're connected on a blockchain and you have things like now Polymarket, which is in Polygon that, but they've abstracted out the fact that they are there, uh, through the UI and gasless transactions and stuff like that.

30:42 I think the industry

30:44 Needs to work on abstracting the end user from this complexity because if we wanna go from crypto-native people to TradFi people consuming tokenized assets, we need to, uh, you know, all this complexity needs to go away.

30:56 Otherwise, normal normies will not invest [laughs] on this asset.

31:00 We also have a lot of investors in our audience, and those investors are wondering, okay, if that future pans out, tokenization is the next big wave, what am I gonna invest in to profit from that uptrend and tokenization wave?

31:16 What would be your answer to that? We're going public, so obviously this is not investment advice, but we're going public, so you'll be able- Except Securitize.

31:22 [laughs] You'll be able to buy-- You can buy Cantor Equity Partners too. It's called CPT, the ticker, and then soon the SEC ticker, which is the Securitize stickers.

31:33 But I guess if you wanna benefit from it, there's kind of two ways to do it, right? One, buy the token of the infra layer.

31:40 If you think Ethereum is gonna be the winner, or if you think Solana is gonna be the winner or Avalanche, I don't wanna pick 'cause I work with all of them. That's one way to get exposure, right?

31:47 But by doing that, you also get exposure on everything else that happens on that chain, right? The other one is to invest on the tokenization service providers like us, and I don't...

31:57 Like, most of the other ones are private, so I, I don't think you can invest in, in any other publicly traded one.

32:02 But if you're a private investor, then go and talk to my competitors, and that's another option because the value will accrue. It will accrue in the infrastructure, but will accrue on the service providers like us.

32:11 Then you could also think of, like, I'm gonna buy, you know, shares of BlackRock, right? Because it's doing tokenization.

32:17 I think that the problem there is you're also buying the normal TradFi BlackRock business, which is much bigger, right? So, so it's the same as buying the, the infra layer.

32:25 So as an investor, I think that the, the best bet, if you wanna kind of like narrow down your bet, is to invest either public or privately, not to single them out to- towards me, in, in the service providers of the industry.

32:37 Just to unpack that a little bit, how does value accrue back to Securitize? What's your business model? Where do you make money?

32:45 So we are a transfer agent, so we act as an SEC-registered transfer agent for our customers and then issue securities and manage them, and that is a service provider role that we get paid for, like traditional transfer agents like State Street or BNY or others.

33:00 So, and then we're also a broker-dealer, so we get paid for distribution to bring AUM to, to the products. That's again, traditional, uh, business of distributing securities.

33:09 We just do it on the, on tokenized form or on the chain. We also have, um, a fund admin business, which we use for all our tokenized asset, but we also do fund administration business for digital assets in general.

33:21 It's called Securitize for, um, uh, for our advisors. Sorry, sorry. Securitize for, for, uh, funds. And then we basically, um, you know, provide, uh, a fund admin business for, for all the companies.

33:38 Those are kind of like the ways we, we

33:41 make money, and we're now trying to get more integrated with, um, you know, things like DeFi and figure out how we can monetize the, the, the DeFi participation, so beyond just supplying the assets.

33:53 All right, Carlos, we're almost at the end of the show. Last question from my side.

33:58 If you spoke to interested parties, whether it's banks or asset managers or family offices who wanna understand tokenization, wanna build with tokenized products, what is one thing that they need to know?

34:14 What is one thing they need to know? I think they need to get familiar with the, the, the space. We, we have a lot of content in our website, educational content.

34:22 I think they need to talk to service providers like us because we can probably give them like a crash course in a, in a very quick call, and we have really good, you know, salespeople that are very savvy about it.

34:32 Um, and then they need to understand why is it they want to tokenize. Like, what, what is it that they're bringing? They wanna tokenize for what? Like, there's a...

34:38 You're trying to raise money, you're trying to improve or eliminate friction, you're trying to make your asset, uh, more tradable, uh, et cetera, just to, to make sure you're understanding what's-- that you're getting out of it.

34:48 Most people come to the space for the wrong reasons because they have bad assets that they want to tokenize to raise money, thinking that just tokenizing magically attracts investors, and that's not the case, by the way.

34:57 [laughs] Yeah. All right, uh, Carlos, that's great. Before we end, we do a quick lightning round. Those are very short questions with very short answers. Oh, okay. [laughs] The first one is

35:10 tokenization in one word, what is it really? Democratization of investments. Then most overrated asset class to tokenize. Real estate. And the most underrated asset class to tokenize. Probably bonds.

35:27 One asset you're dying to tokenize, but you can't do it yet. Tesla shares. And last one. What keeps you up at night? Competition, regulation, or execution? Execution, 100%. Carlos, it was great to have you.

35:42 We're the leader of the industry, so it is up to us to continue being the leader of the industry. Carlos, it was great to have you. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

35:49 Where can people learn more about you, about Securitize? Securitize, you can go to securitize.io. That's our website. You have our contact there.

35:57 We are very active in social media, myself and, uh, and the company with, with my, my team. So if you go to X, and that's primarily where we, where we post.

36:05 You can find-- in x.com/securitize or /carlosdomingo, and you can get all the, all the news and all the progress that we, we're announcing there. That's great. Carlos, I wish you all the best.

36:16 I hope we can redo that conversation in five years down the road and look back and laugh at what we talked about today because everything is gonna be completely different, and I wish you all the best and best of success with Securitize.

36:30 We'll do it in five years when we hit the trillion-dollar of tokenized assets. [laughs] Exactly. All right. All right. Very nice. Uh, thanks for everything. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Bye-bye.

36:39 You obviously like this video enough that you got to the end. Listen, do me a favor. Hit that like and subscribe button because I think you'll like it.

36:48 And if you want even more, with more I mean incredible alpha research and digital asset market updates, subscribe to our newsletter on 51, that's the number 51, insights.xyz, and get the most actionable insights on digital assets.

37:04 See you next time.