Blockchain Bonds & On-Chain Assets | Steve Wallace

Alex: Hello everybody and welcome to a new season of the Curiosity Code podcast. This season is going to be very, very hot and I already have a great lineup of guests to cover what's happening in fintech. And today I'm joined by Steve Wallace, CAIA Chartered Capital Markets veteran who now consults with Web3 protocols at the intersection of traditional finance and defi in Dubai. Steve advises sustainable infrastructure for blockchain and web3. And he's watching trillions of dollars of real world assets start their migration and to distributed ledgers. We're diving into whether a tokenization is the future of finance or just Blockchain's latest hype cycle. So we're going to talk a lot about tokenization this episode. Welcome to the show, Steve.

Steve: Great, thanks Alex. Pleasure to be here.

Alex: All right, let's dive in. So Steve, you moved from traditional capital markets to defi in Dubai. What's the one thing about tokenization that made you believe this isn't just another crypto narrative?

Steve: Yeah, so I guess that was during our role at Franklin Templeton. So I've been engaged in bitcoin, I guess back in 2014 when there's a lot of bitcoin, bitcoin hedge funds being launched, primarily long, only really chasing a 220 fee structure, but basically long bitcoin. And I was just waiting to see what was happening on the institutional side. There wasn't much movement I think in back in 2017 or I think it's 2017, BNP Paribas did a fund distribution process on Blockchain. I think it's called fundlink. And that was the first time that I'd seen an institution actually engage like a proper institution engage with, with blockchain. But then there was sort of, you know, it was ebbs and flows since then launch of Ethereum for example, around that time as well. And then it wasn't until I was at Franklin Templeton in 2020 that I saw what they were doing with. With blockchain, with crypto. So not just using it for internal processes and looking at how they can make things more efficient and cost effective internally, but also looking at various strategies and tokenization. So their money market fund that they tokenized a few years ago was one of the earlier signs of that. And once I saw a manager like Franklin Temple had been the size that they are at the time, I think they were about one and a half trillion dollars. When you see an organization like that really take it seriously, then, you know, there's basically no going back. It's just what some of the hurdles and challenges are going to be to that process. And that. That for me was. Was it. I knew it was all in. And once I left Franklin templeton in, in 2022, that I've been in basically crypto companies from then on.

Alex: What were your colleagues were saying when you made that move?

Steve: Well, yeah, but given it's. This is actually. This is kind of the other interesting thing, given I'm in the UAE in Dubai, but I've been in Abu Dhabi before then. Most of the people in my pod were already engaged with crypto. They'd already been looking at things like Polygon, which is where I moved to from Franklin. They were invested in Bitcoin. They were looking at other private placement investments to get access to the space. So. And when I joined Polygon, I mean, I'd really heard of them before at that point much. And my friends that my younger colleagues at the time said, yeah, yeah, they're a great organization. It's a good name to go to. So it was, you know, if anything, there was more encouragement. I think that would have been very different if I'd been in the uk, where I'd come from originally. And I think that market environment at that time was still very much cautious and critical around general web3 blockchain as it was. Whereas Dubai, UAE more broadly, is very open and progressive. So here you can't go by a day without hearing something in the space. Whereas that's, again, very different from other geographies where I've worked.

Alex: Steve, explain tokenization. Like, I'm a skeptical CFO at a Fortune 500 company. Why should I put my company's assets on a blockchain instead of using the systems that already work?

Steve: Yeah. So a lot of the time it's around more how you can get better efficiency of that capital. So it can be, for example, when you think of money market funds, so you think of a balance sheet of a Fortune 500 large corporate that could be really useful to have on chain. So one of the benefits of that is being able to use it for collateral for liquidity purposes. So again, rather than sell down, it's very easy and quick to tap lending markets through tokenized money market fund. Those sorts of things are relatively straightforward. You've got the other side, which I guess may or may not count as tokenization. But when you look at stable coins as well, which is a real world asset, that's another option in terms of having it in your arsenal. When you're looking at making cross border payments that can again be useful depending on the on the other side. But again making payments quick, efficiently and likewise getting that money back if needs to in a quick and efficient manner that you can track again is beneficial. You have other aspects as well. So there's also the capital raising side. So if you think of yourself as maybe you're a listed entity, you've already got equity issuance, that's already been done, but you may be issuing bonds. So being able to issue a bond on chain, that's sort of a newer area in terms of new issuance of a bond as opposed to a wrapper through an SPV type product. So you've. But you can do bond issuances, you could do go to the private market as well. So you could do private credit again, so you don't have to use a standard traditional exchange product, but you could use some sort of tokenized form in between those new issuances, just so you can get comfortable with the market and the space. And even the same with equity. Right. You don't have again, it doesn't have to be equity from that table. It can be, you can tap other sources of equity as well from tokenized structures. So there's a few different ways that you can run both your balance sheet in terms of making that more efficient, but also in terms of going to the market to look at equity or debt capital markets and what you can do there. I think tokenization of equity is one of those things that's obviously coming along. You've seen that in the US So that's starting to move. And I think Galaxy was one of the more recent IPOs. They didn't issue natively. They use an SPV from memory. But again you can start to see some of these sorts of techniques come in. So if you do a rights issue, the ability to do something like that on chain could be kind of interesting. And again, I mean, we'll probably get into it a bit later, but that tokenization in and of itself doesn't necessarily do a hell of a lot. But it's really some of the utility that you can get from having those assets on chain and some of the efficiencies and cost benefits of that as well that make it a better solution.

Alex: So you mentioned a couple players that already leveraged that mechanism. Can you walk me through one real tokenization deal that you personally seen close? What asset, what problem did it solve and what broke along the way?

Steve: Yeah, so one of the ones, because I know it goes quite reasonably well, I guess, which is Fasanara and their MF1 products. That's, that's a really interesting one. So what they've done there is they have Fasana. If you don't know them, they run, they're known more for their, their credit strategies. They run a lot of private credit strategies, receivables, your sports, sports lending, direct lending, SME lending. There's a load of things they, they do. I'm probably not giving them as much credit as I should, but they, they do a number of credit strategies. They run over, I think around 5 billion. But they also run a digital assets strategy division, which is a few hundred million dollars, I think it's 3,400 million dollars in assets under management that's been going for a number of years. They've got a good track record and what they've done basically is bring, bring the two together. So they've got a core, effectively private credit product, but it's diversified in terms of the number of strategies all off chain. So these are effectively rolled asset credit product, if you like credit strategy. And then they've coupled that with a, an opportunistic position in their digital assets strategy, which is crypto strategy. So they basically, you know, merged a traditional private credit strategy with a, a crypto strategy and they've tokenized that, which can tokenize through, through Midas. So Midas have run. They basically wrapped it into a tokenized certificate and then you can buy it. That's kind of really interesting. And it's interesting because, you know, that's one of the first ones where I've actually seen the combination of those two strategies in one product. So I don't think a lot broke along the way, but they were quite kind of careful about how they went about it. So for example, looping, right. So there's looping strategies where you could buy the certificate, for example, borrow against it on morph through Morpho and then buy back in more of it. So you have this sort of these looping strategies and then they capped things like that. They capped how much can be looped. So that was one of the things they were careful of. They didn't want the whole sort of product to sort of crater through issues in funding rates and so on. So that was so careful about how they put it together in terms of addressing, I guess, a problem. It was really a case of how do you get large investors comfortable with digital assets? And I think that was one of the things that they were probably interested in doing. And again, it was a bit of a first, actually. One of the things that I haven't, I haven't seen, I don't think I've seen ever, but where there was one of the board members of Texas Tech University System put out a LinkedIn post how they had, you know, engaged with this product and they had done so because it enabled them to basically dip their toe into digital assets. And that was kind of a big deal because you never see someone publicly say that on LinkedIn. That was a big deal. So I think it's. Things like that are really interesting in terms of how they're approaching it more from a institutional perspective. They've still got the same or similar, I should say, restrictions in terms of how much you can buy. So minimums to buy. There's also can be limits on redeeming. There's certain time frames in terms of you can't necessarily redeem out of the underlying fund, so unless you've got a secondary buyer. So there are still some of these restrictions there because again, at the end of the day, the majority of that certificate is underlying private credit. So there's still that, that's there. But I, I found that a really, a really interesting product to, to look at. And again, it was one of the first ones where it was a real hybrid between the two. So that was, that was super interesting for me.

Alex: Would that kind of deal have been impossible in traditional markets?

Steve: No, I mean, it's kind of an interesting, an interesting point at the moment because what, what we see. So, so to answer your question, and I'll get onto the other piece. No, because you'd have, you know, the, the private credit piece obviously is under. They've got that on a traditional structure as well, outside of on chain environment. And all it would have meant was then bridging the other way, so then saying, right, we. And I mean bridging not in sort of technical pilots, but you have A, you know, you have the crypto strategy and you can run that through a Cayman vehicle or some exchange product and then that would have a, effectively a traditional tradfi front end, but lead into a crypto strategy. So you could have done it the other way. And I think that's, that's kind of an interesting point because there's, it's something we've been seeing the past maybe 912 months, I think, where you know, there was a lot of firms that seem to be going down this crypto strategy route and wanting everything on chain and accessible via, you know, as if I was a crypto DJ basically. But then you've got another. But you've got, you're missing out this market where, you know, they don't really want to navigate using a wallet. They're not comfortable with the, or don't trust that this newer infrastructure. So their, their view is, look, I want to buy it through my Cayman, a Cayman fund, I want to buy it through, you know, an Eisen listed product. And that suits me. So what we have seen is sort of the view by some of these firms, some of these vault curators now where they'll offer product in an on chain environment, they'll also offer it in an off chain environment. At the end of the day that's, it's just all about access, right? It's how comfortable are you as investor investing through traditional means or through digital crypto wallets? Like what do you want to use? What's your preference? Okay, whichever is your preference, you can go down that mechanism rather than, I think traditionally there was this view by a lot of the sort of crypto natives that no, it's got to be all on chain, it's got to be all this. And you know, it's just at the end of the day the investor has what the investor wants and if they want to buy it through traditional means for them, who are you to say no? So, so I think people have been a bit more pragmatic around data side of things as well, Steve.

Alex: This year and last year I've read lots of posts in social media about regulatory changes and more clarity in this domain. What specifically changed that makes tokenization viable now versus let's say three years ago.

Steve: So I think it's really, to be honest, it's really just the environment. So if you think, I think three years ago you think of Gary Genso, you think of, you know, Chevy chokepoint 2.0, you think of Tornado Cash, there was a lot of regulatory issues that were really preventing and limiting innovation in Web3 in broad terms. So I think that was one of the big shifts that once that regulatory framework became more open, certainly over the last year, 18 months, then I think there's more of a, a comfort to innovation and to progressing matters. So, you know, there's, there's less of a concern or a worry that depending on what I build, you know, I might get tapped on the shoulder by the SEC and you know, thrown in jail or fined or have. There's all these sort of regulatory issues. This sort of regulation by enforcement process doesn't help innovation, certainly doesn't encourage builders to build in the space. So I think that it wasn't necessarily something specific. It was more, it was more an evolution, if you like, in terms of regulatory approach to the ecosystem and I think a desire certainly by the U.S. i think to be more open and that this is an opportunity and they shouldn't be shut out of it. So I think for them, they see themselves as with the largest capital market in the world. We're the ones that, you know, drive, drive capital flows, US Dollars, reserve currency. We are who we are and you know, why are we not part of this sort of huge movement? And so I think those sorts of things certainly, certainly shifted. But yeah, and then obviously things like the Genius act in terms of the stablecoin regulation, that was a big piece in terms of having that come on board. Clarity act coming in Europe with MICA as well. That was guess a couple of years ago now. But then there's a split with MICA for more crypto assets or digital assets and MiFID 2 for tokenized securities, basically taking the view that look, it's the securities are. Securities are security. So the fact that it's tokenized doesn't change the underlying law. So how they approach it is different. But again, having more clarity around regulation and having again less risk of prosecution and fines certainly enables again more innovation and more evolution from a tokenization perspective. And then the other thing, I guess, which is aside from regulation is really the size and number of the institutions that started to get involved. And that's where you can see the real sort of, I guess, impetus and catalysts coming when they start to get involved. The capital they represent is immense.

Alex: What's still missing from a regulatory perspective?

Steve: I guess harmonization, standardization. It's always a difficult thing. Remember for years, when you think about compliance, having harmonized, global compliance has always been a challenge. So that's the real issue is sort of standardization around market structure, taxonomies. Yeah. How Things are settled on chain privacy. So privacy is obviously a big one when you think about institutional flows and what people can see. So great, you have it on a public blockchain, but now your institutional trading partners, when they trade on chain, they're visible, their wallets are visible, the flows are visible, they can be front run. So those sorts of things need to think about as well in terms of privacy and I'm talking privacy not being anonymous. Right. So obviously two very different concepts there but privacy. So you've got the ability to report as needed to regulators so you're not restricting a view from them, but it's really making sure that you've got the same sort of privacy screen, if you like, that you would have in traditional markets for being seeing what's going on. So I think those are the main points, but it really is around a harmonization of structure and standardized process and standardization of token structure as well.

Alex: All right, so Steve, you are in Dubai and Dubai is positioning itself as the tokenization capital. In your opinion, what's the UIE doing that for example New York or London aren't doing?

Steve: Yes, that's good and thanks for changing that to UAE because I know people think of Dubai as just the way people say London and not uk but it's important because ADGM obviously were one of the first regulator here to issue some digital assets regulation in 2018. So and I remember because I was there when they did that, so but anyway, yeah, that aside, yeah, I think the, the thing is with the, with the UAE they've got a very pragmatic and forward thinking view of approach from, and it's not just tokenization, I mean it's across, across Web3, but more broadly across technology. I mean when you have government not just from a regulatory perspective but from a capital perspective and an encouragement of the population into, you know, around technology, around innovation. I think that's one of the benefits that you have of being here that, you know, it was pretty easy to talk to any one of the regulators. I've spoken to Tavara, been into adgm, the Central bank difc, the cma, Capital Markets Authority, which was previously the securities and Commodities Authority. So the ability to be able to have all these conversations and access, there's a lot of dialogue between the industry and regulators as well. So I think it's just very, very open, consultative and progressive. So I think that's one of the real benefits from here which I think is being in London. It was always more difficult to get proper access to the bank of England. Or the FCA in the same, in the same way. I mean, here, you just can't. Yeah. When I've been working at a stablecoin issuer before, I mean it was the, the amount of engagement you could have with, with ADGM with the fsra, the Financial Services Regulatory Authority was. Yeah. Was just outstanding. So again, for me that's, that's the real thing is that you have this access and you don't have to be a Franklin Temples and JP Morgan, a BlackRock to have this access. Right, that's, that's the other thing. It's more, more open than that.

Alex: Sounds like a great place to be for what you're doing.

Steve: Yeah, I mean it's, it's, it's one of those things. I mean it is a great place to be. It is, it's. Again, it's one of those things because you, you're constantly hearing about what's, what's going on or something new the UAE's come out with. I mean every day there's. You literally cannot, you cannot avoid crypto and crypto and being, being here. There's something coming out which is again, as I mentioned before, is very, very different from other parts around the world where again, it's still more restrictive. Capital's here. I mean, the capital market obviously isn't as deep as the US and some of the other traditional markets, but again, it's punched above its weight and it's starting to attract more and more capital. And I think being very on the front foot when it comes to regulation and trying to be pioneers in that, I think really it's great to encourage firms to be based here and to bring business here. So, yeah, long may it last.

Alex: We spoke about great use cases for tokenization and I'm wondering if there are quite dumb cases. So in your opinion, what's the dumbest thing you've seen tokenized that has absolutely no business being on a blockchain?

Steve: I think it's all these sort of like these influencer tokens and celebrity tokens, all that sort of stuff. So effectively all the meme coins, I mean, it's like, yeah, that stuff is just such a distraction and it draws pulls liquidity away from all these projects that are trying to get funding and pulls liquidity away from responsible property, you know, proper tokens. So, you know, again, it's. People want to do what they want to do and people buy what they want to buy. But yeah, that sort of stuff, it's just, it's was such a time suck and it, it seemed to just drag attention and liquidity away from, from, from proper businesses that were really trying to do something special. And so that's. Yeah, for me that's, it's, it's not one or two that I can point to. It's just, you know, a lot of this. Yeah. These sort of meme tokens and influencer tokens and things that are just. Yeah. Not great.

Alex: So for someone who is trying to figure out tokenization and understand the difference between real use cases and grift, how do you spot that difference? What would be your marker?

Steve: Yeah, so it's like, so what does it change? So what, what is the tokenization of whatever it is you're tokenizing? What does that, what does that do? So does that help the issuer company issuing that from some sort of efficiency perspective? Cost per, so it affects their P and L in some way. Maybe it becomes more efficient. Maybe it opens up the ability to do something with that asset that they didn't have before. So is it an extra utility that's, that's there. So you know, is there a friction? So is it better having on chain because there's less friction in terms of being able to move that asset, for example. And then there's also who's on the other side. So who's actually a potential buyer of this? Is a real market participant actually going to buy it? Are they actually going to use it? So those, the sort of things. So I guess going back to the meme coin piece. So grift shows up in memes. Right. So that's, that's, that's basically how it works. So the real, the real side shows basically real sideshows off on the balance sheet and in trading and how it's, and the, the acceptance of it by, by market participants. Grift is just all memes as far as I'm concerned. Yeah.

Alex: Let's talk more about real life use cases, securities, real estate, commodities. If you had to bet which asset class gets fully tokenized first, what are you picking and why?

Steve: So basically all the near cash equivalents of all the money market funds, short duration credit. Those are the things that I would think in terms of fully because I know a lot of this is already on chain anyway, especially when people think of money market funds. But if you think of it being fully on chain, the credit markets are probably the easier one. I shouldn't say easy, but it's the, it's the nearer, nearer one in terms of being fully, fully on chain. So I think it's just that you Know they're, they're kind of, I mean when you think about some of these credits, they're already, a lot of them are already digital or electronic I should say. They're, you know they're, when you trade in them, you know they're, they're very sensitive to very small movements. So that's why people use, know traders tend to use a bit of leverage when they're trading credit fixed income markets because you know, minute changes in value are sort of very powerful. Right. They've really felt so you know, having it electronic, having it, you know a lot of these markets already are. I guess again they're sensitive to small movements so it doesn't have to be a big change or big efficiency or a big cost savings for it to have material impact. And I think you know, when you look at equities, yeah there's more, there's a lot more involved. Right. When you think of especially native, talk about token, native to tokenization so native issuance on chain of, of equity. When you think about everything that's got to work in the background around all the corporate actions, registries and following the owner to be able to pay dividends and so on, there's a lot of things that's got to come on around that. There's also pricing. So you know we same within, within credit markets but I think there's, there's still this pricing issue of, of 247 pricing. So it's one thing for you to be able to buy and sell it 247 but how can you actually price it? That becomes something difficult where, where you've gone from a domestic market like a US market, uk, Italian, French, German, what have you. And then you say right, we're making this available 247 now. So someone in Asia wants to buy it in their time zone rather than have to have a trading desk operating in European US hours for example. But that's great. But how does that work from a price discovery mechanism and how do I manage risk? So there's a lot of things involved around that. I think it's a bit different on the credit side. There's still movement when you look at short duration but maybe it's a little bit simpler to manage. Commodities are definitely one that's already started obviously so they will come on. But I think the credit markets just because what you can do with them through repo again through all the finance and options you can have across them having interest rate swaps between fixed and variable interest rates, that's interesting when there's A proper structure for that, that. So I think that's, yeah, it's a, it's a much, much bigger market.

Alex: Large players like blackrock, Goldman, JP Morgan, they are all building tokenization infrastructure. Now, are they going to dominate the space or are they too late?

Steve: So definitely not too late. I mean, I think the end of the day they've got all the, the distribution, so they've, they've got the customer base, they've got the distribution channels and they've been, been doing this for decades, so. Decades, I should say. So from their point of view, I think they've got a lot of what they need. So it's not a matter of their being late. So I think that definitely they've still got the opportunity and for them entering now, it's certainly not too late. It's a challenge, I guess, for the sort of the crypto incumbents, but again, I guess there's some pluses and minuses. Right. So I think for the, for these larger institutional players that are coming in, it's again, as I say, they own the distribution channels. They've been doing this for a long, long time, but they have very large organizational structures to move. So to be as agile as you need to be, I think in this space, I think that's more difficult for them to do. So from that point of view, you know, the large players, it doesn't matter that they come in late because of the legacy that they come with in terms of all this distribution power. But on the flip side of that, they're not as agile, they can't move as quick, can't innovate as quick as a Web3 protocol, for example, Web3 side is okay, yeah, they can move quick, they can innovate, but for them it's about how can they tap distribution channels on chain, how they can sort of integrate with them much more efficiently and can they do actually, can they end up doing some joint ventures with some of these larger players? So it's a loss, it's not too late. It's not that the whole business is now wiped out for the people they've been building for years, but there's just some nuance there. And I think there's still going to be this permissionless versus institutionalized sort of approach. Right. So you see it already played playing out now where some, some groups, some investors obviously require very robust and sort of this institutionalized structure and way of doing things, whereas others in the market are much more used to this sort of permissionless approach about going about, about it. So it's yeah, again different approaches, different customer bases and I think there's, it's, it's all to play for.

Alex: So it sounds like their biggest leverage is distribution and like can cryptonative firms actually compete with that scale of distribution? Or more looking at like a best marriage where they would partner with the crypto native firms and leverage their attack while giving access to the distribution?

Steve: Yeah, I mean I think the, from the, the tokenization perspective, I think there's, yeah, for the, for the people that are bits of the crypto sides, I mean I think they've definitely got the ability to, and they've shown that in terms of tapping distribution. So when you've seen a lot of these like vault curators come on, so the, you know, the RE7 labs, Semi V Capital, you know, all these sort of people come on and, and look at creating strategies, whether they're more in depth strategies or protocol related strategies and tapping lending calls, tapping like Morpho Eula Aave as a distribution source. So I mean they've done that, they've been doing that for a while already and they've been successful at that. And I think, yeah, the other thing is partnering with others. So when you think of vault curators, which I think of as, I mean it's factoring asset manager. So when people think of, you know, these risk creators, risk managers and they think that that is something separate, I think that's, that's not entirely correct. I mean risk manager is, is an asset manager. That's what you're doing, you're managing risk unless you're managing an index product in which case you've got a different, a different angle. But again risk manager is an asset manager. So, so I think there, you know, you've got more if you like an emerging group of crypto native asset managers used to dealing with assets on chain, used to sourcing distribution on chain. And yeah, I think partnerships are kind of a natural solution. And then you also see these tie ups or tie ups, these new developments. So I think Franklin Templeton, I think it was about two weeks ago now, maybe a little bit more, launched this new business as part of a takeover called Franklin Templeton Crypto. So you know, having these new entities stood up so that they can innovate, they can act quicker I think is an interesting thing as well. So yeah, I think this is going to be an interesting space. But again I don't think it's all for one and the crypto firms have lost it. And likewise, I don't think that it's a shoe in for the institutional players because I don't think they haven't been operating in this ecosystem for as long. And there's this nuance to it. So I think that's the, that's the trade off.

Alex: Let's talk about vaults. So you've seen vaults emerging as potential disruptors in asset management. How are tokenized vaults changing the game compared to traditional fund structures?

Steve: So I think there's this whole democratization of access. So I think one of the sort of the mantra from tokenization was all around, well, you know, you could access, you know, these assets without such high minimums, so it becomes accessible for everyone. But you also democratize access to various strategies. So, for example, private credit strategies was the big one, private equity, where you'd need a higher minimum ticket. So I think things like that, that, that would have been the focus of tokenization. That was the mantra from the start. And I think what Volts vaults have done, I mean, that's, that's going to change. I think that's, that's basically the way forward. Right? So now we've got. If you've seen all these assets coming on chain, then those assets are going to be. Need to be managed on chain as well. And I think managing them natively makes a lot of sense. And I think this is where you get this more permissionless approach. So again, maybe it's not for every institution that wants to access it via that mechanism so much, but we see a lot of players and I've been going through them as well myself personally in defaults. So I just see it as a good, a great way actually of you and access a lot more diversified strategies without the minimums. I can borrow against it if I so desire. So I got some utility there, the secondary markets, some of this stuff as well. So for me it just gives it a much more open structure and a wider universe of options, so much more optionality. The flip side of that obviously is that comes with responsibility because that responsibility sits on me in terms of if I'm going to go into this, if I'm an individual looking at this, then I've got to get into this. I've got to understand what's going on, where the risks are. And I think that's the sort of challenge is to bring on, you know, those investors into those products and to get real growth. A lot of it's got to be made, I think, much easier for the sort of person on the street who normally invests in traditional funds through traditional mechanisms to come on and try and do this through vaults because again, it's a whole different ecosystem and governance structure and risk management structure in terms of how it all works. So again, I definitely think they're, they're a disruptor. I think it's, yeah, it's super easy to do. I mean I've, I've done, I bought into some of these things, gone through the KYC process which is, which is quick bought into it and it's. Yeah, for me I really like it.

Alex: It's.

Steve: It gives me very good access and it doesn't feel as slow and as clunky and as traditional as some of the old fund management access. So I, for me, I love it.

Alex: All right, let's wrap it up with a question. Question about. Question. So what's the question about tokenization? Nobody's asking that.

Steve: They should be who controls it? So I think that's. Which is, I don't mean to be flippant when I say that. I mean it's who, who controls all of these rails that tokenization's been on. So again, in sort of this traditional defi puritan world, then everything's decentralized. No one owns everything. You remove a lot of the intermediaries so you have this massive disintermediation and that's all great. You don't have sort of a global standard necessarily. You don't have this harmonization. But without that, you know, it's difficult to see things evolving. So I think the thing is as of this harmonization of token formats, of market infrastructure, pricing, who's actually controlling all that? Because in traditional assets, traditional capital markets, those are regulators in various jurisdictions that control that control taxonomy, control how those trading roles work. Now when you come to tokenization, how do you do that globally as it becomes more and more institutional, who owns that, which regulators own that, which drive it. And I think, you know, it looks like it will go to same way traditional markets, the largest capital markets will have, you know, the structure and standard that you have to basically harmonize with. So it's basically depends where the, where the capital's coming from, where the source of capital is. Then you've got to have standards wrapped around those capital providers in that jurisdiction. And I think that's probably where it's going to go. But that's the question I think is who's going to own all of this? And so. And how do you bring those parties to a table? That's best difficult question.

Alex: Awesome, Steve, thank you very much for this conversation. That's been a pleasure.

Steve: Yeah, thanks, Alex. Appreciate that. And, yeah, look forward to the next one.

Alex: Absolutely. Absolutely. And for the listeners, thanks for listening for another episode. And. And don't forget to subscribe and hit the like button and see you in the next episodes of this season. All right. Bye. Bye.