The Breakdown - Lightspeed: Launching Crypto's Largest Tokenized Fund On Solana | Michael Sonnenshein

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

This week we're joined by Michael Sonnenshein to discuss the future of tokenization. We deep dive into the launch of BUIDL: crypto's largest tokenized fund, institutional demand to build on Solana, Ripple's $1.25b acquisition & more. Sponsored by: Crypto Tax Calculator Accurate Crypto Taxes. No Guesswork. Say goodbye to tax season headaches with Crypto Tax Calculator: Generate accurate, CPA-endorsed tax reports fully compliant with IRS rules. Seamlessly integrate with 3000+ wallets, exchanges, and on-chain platforms. Import reports directly into TurboTax or H&R Block, or securely share them with your accountant. Exclusive Offer: Use the code BW2025 to enjoy 30% off all paid plans. Don’t miss out - offer expires 15 April 2025! Ledger Ledger, the world leader in digital asset security, proudly sponsors The Breakdown podcast. Celebrating 10 years of protecting over 20% of the world’s crypto, Ledger ensures the security of your assets. For the best self-custody solution in the space, buy a LEDGER™ device and secure your crypto today. Buy now on Ledger.com. Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast: https://pod.link/1438693620 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/nathanielwhittemorecrypto Subscribe to the newsletter: https://breakdown.beehiiv.com/ Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8 Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownNLW

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Spring Break Week, and that means we are checking out a new Blockworks podcast. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it. Give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, as you know, this is spring break week here. We are down in Florida.

Bringing the kids to Disney for the first time. It's a grand old time, but it means that I am not sitting at my computer, changed to the tariff and crypto madness. And so what we're going to do instead this week is preview some other great Blockworks podcasts. Today we are checking out Lightspeed, and I actually really love the way that this show describes itself. The description reads, LightSpeed is a podcast for those interested in how crypto can solve

real problems and create products users love. It's a callback to the garage days of Silicon Valley, where builders push the limits of hardware and software. It is very easy in crypto to get lost in the big picture stuff, the macro, the Bitcoin buying, the big patterns of history, all the stuff that you know I love. But there is so much going on at the ground level of building as well, and that's really what light speed is all about. It's anchored in, but not exclusive to the Salana community and really embraces this whole other side of crypto, which I think will be really interesting to many of you. Again, check out Lightspeed wherever you listen to podcasts, and let's pop into an episode.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Lightspeed. I'm your host, Jack Kubeneck, joined today by Michael Sunnonshine, C-O of Securitize, and previously CEO of Grayscale. Michael, thanks so much for coming on the show. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Pretty excited to dig into some stuff because Securitize just had some interesting salon-related news with the Biddle launch on. Salana. But I guess, Michael, I just want to start with you and chat a little bit about your career trajectory because you were CEO at Grayscale for some years and notably helped bring

a Bitcoin ETF to market. I think it's the second or third largest, depending on if you combine the mini and the regular sized ETF. And I guess as I was reflecting on that career move, it's like you were at Grayscale for a decade, right? Yep. Yeah. And it was kind of like a decade-long narrative arc of just getting a Bitcoin ETF to market. And that sort of kicked off the current bull run, some might argue. So I'm just curious as you left Grayscale after that arc came to completion. Do you see some kind of similar narrative that might happen with tokenization? Or what's the next 10 years going to be characterized by?

Yeah. So, yeah, I got to say, I've been in crypto now since early 2014. I think back then a lot of folks were like, what is this kid doing? And I was just a kid, right? I was working on Wall Street. I had worked at, you know, three bullet-bracket banks. I was ready for a new challenge. And, you know, the work that the team, you know, and I did at Grayscale was, you know, super

pioneering work that I will always be very, very proud of. And essentially being employee number one and then eventually rising the ranks to become CEO for the last few years, I was at Grayscale. Again, just look back on it as a very, very, very important. very fond experience and thankful for the journey. But I think to your point, a lot of that culminated in our lawsuit with the SEC and ultimately unlocking Bitcoin ETFs here in the U.S., which is awesome and, you know, something that, you know, no one will ever be able to take away from me or the grayscale team.

So it was very, very exciting. But, you know, when I think about career-wise after the SEC battle and bringing Bitcoin UTFs to market. I, you know, took some time off after Grayscale and was ready for kind of my next challenge. And I think for me, it was a couple of things. I think one, it was seeing the direction that the new administration here in the U.S. was going to be going with crypto. And I think having been involved in crypto for as long as I had, being as personally invested as I have been and continue to be and as professionally invested as I was and continue to be, it was time for me to kind of jump back in. So I am really excited. I've spent the last few months at Securitize, working very closely

with our CEO, Carlos Domingo, who's been running Securitize, you know, since its inception in 2017, largely with people thinking that, you know, tokenization was kind of a pipe dream, not something that would really ever take shape. And, you know, clearly it has. And I'm sure we'll get into all of that today. But if you take a big step back and you look at my career journey, I spent about a decade at grayscale trying to bring crypto assets into traditional wrappers like ETFs. And now being in a leadership role at Securitize, I'm actually taking traditional wrappers and trying to put them into crypto assets, right? We're bringing traditional funds onto public blockchain. So it's been a really interesting career move for me because it's a lot of the same frictions and acronyms and regulatory rules.

and players that are involved in each of these, but doing it in one direction at Grayscale and now doing in a different direction at Securitize. Let's get into the recent Solana news then. You launched, I guess you're the issuer for BlackRock Biddle, which is this sort of tokenized treasury fund that had been live on like six other blockchains, I want to say, before Solana. I was personally surprised it took quite this long to get it on Solana,

given a lot of the hype around the blockchain over the past year. But yeah, why bring BlackRock Biddle to Solana? And I don't know, do you foresee kind of fresh demand for the product coming post this launch? Yeah. So let's take a big step back. So the Biddle product is a tokenized treasury fund. And tokenized treasury funds are, you know, still in their, in basically almost their inception, right? This is like the beginning of their market penetration and they are growing very rapidly.

We launched Biddle with Black Rock about a year ago, and that product is now the largest tokenized treasury product on the market. It actually has more than $2 billion of AUM in just a little bit over a year, which is just unbelievable. What we have done collaborating with the Black Rock team is continued to integrate our platform with more and more public blockchains. And so we recently integrated with Solana, which we were really excited about, as was the Solana team because, you know, we obviously all see Solana as obviously a highly, you know,

performance blockchain, really fast, you know, settlement cycles, low gas fees, you know, in many ways people would look at Solana as something that's, you know, certainly purpose built for applications like RWA's. So when we were able to integrate with Solana, you know, some of the earliest things we did were to bring share classes of both our Apollo product, the Apollo diversified credit fund onto Salana, as well as bring Biddle onto Salana as well. And so what historically has been our experience when we do launch new blockchains into these products is there is fresh demand, right? There are generally people from these ecosystems that want to invest in RWAs.

And if they are going to invest in RWAs, they want to do so on the blockchain of their choice and whether that's because they're directly involved with it or have some kind of association with it, we certainly see the breadth, depth, and kind of robust nature of the Solana ecosystem. And so we do believe there's fresh demand already coming into both the Apollo product as well as, you know, the BlackRock product. And you also had this interesting launch with Athena, where you guys launched the Converge chain, I believe it's called. And sort of with this goal of, you know, Athena was seeing that it had a, a ton of distribution in demand and crypto. Securitize had sort of the ability to tokenize assets and came together and built this

chain that I guess I'm not super deep in the weeds on it, but the way it was pitched was this way to bridge defy and tradfi because if you just tokenize assets and tradfi but don't do it, the interesting things you can do in defy and plug into the morphos and so on of the world. Like it's only so interesting. Yeah. So what's the interplay between launching on Solano? launching on all these other chains and also being involved in a blockchain of your own,

which in some sense maybe competes with those other chains. Well, so I think as a business securitizes blockchain agnostic, right? So today, the securitized business is integrated with 10 public blockchains, including Solana. And so for us, we are kind of in this unique position where we sit between asset issuers like BlackRock, Apollo, KKR, Hamilton Lane, and public blockchains. And so we want to continue to develop share classes of all of these products on as many blockchains as we can because it opens up the ecosystem, the distribution capabilities for these products to a greater, greater base of users. I do think, though, that securitize has a unique position in the market in that we, I kind of think of it almost as like a burden, if you will.

I know it's kind of a tough word to swallow, but like it is a burden we carry as an organization in that we, we, don't want to tokenize assets for the sake of tokenizing them. We want to tokenize assets because they are providing some additional value add to the end investor. And so that could take the form of just purely access, right? Accessing products that they wouldn't otherwise be able to access on traditional rails. It could be the opportunity for higher returns. And that may take the form of, you know, bringing RWAs into defy. It could be fractional owners. It could be more frequent access to capital, right? A good example of that is like in Biddle, you know, when you think about traditional money market funds,

they only pay their dividends out on a monthly or quarterly basis. In Biddle, they actually are paid out daily, right? So investors are actually getting access to their money much, much sooner and on more frequent basis. And so when we think about our positioning in the market and wanting to ensure that we are always kind of holding ourselves to that standard, we're always trying to. to push the boundaries of what's possible. And so working with a team like Athena, who's a very close partner of ours, the idea was

to bring together our expertise in tokenization and the types of products that we're able to bring to market with Athena's, you know, certainly depth and reach and expertise around Defi. And we think that there's a tremendous opportunity to bridge that gap between the RWA's coming on chain and their ability to be used for Defi applications, which really we think Converge can be that base or kind of settlement layer to, you know, support that thesis. Solana's been hot lately, but you can truly never fade Bitcoin. Are you a Solana user who wants to get exposure to Bitcoin? Mint is NBTC to get that Bitcoin exposure with yield and some rewards

to boot. ZenbTC is the first application launched on Zen Rock, a permission list to centralized custody network backed by one roundtable partners, 10T, Maven 11, and Spartan. Live on Jupiter, Rock is the native token for transactions within the Zenrock ecosystem and secure Zenrock's decentralized custody network. ZenbTC is secured by Zenrock decentralized custody and it ensures that Bitcoin holders can securely and seamlessly earn yield on their favorite chain, like Solana. Visit ZenbTC.io to learn about earning yield with Bitcoin on Solana. I want to ask a little bit about how that democratized access can look because I think that there's a spectrum of RWA's and how open and available they are and also what net new things

they, uh, opportunities they create for investors. So to my understanding, Biddle has a like a minimum investment of like five million or something. So retail investors maybe aren't buying Biddle. Yeah. It's not a, it's not a retail product. Yeah. It's an institutional product. But I think something I find interesting is like private equity, um, being tokenized because there's so much private wealth, especially in the U.S., that comes out of the SpaceX's and the stripes of the world, that all their shares are privately held. Investors can't get access to them on the public markets. Like, if you're not related to P.E., somehow, you can't get access to these things. Sure. I don't know. Are there, what routes do you see that democratization happening?

And I guess I tipped my hand, but I'm really curious to hear just what you think about, you know, tokenizing private equity. No, listen, I agree with you. I think, you know, typically, when you look at certain asset classes, they've historically, and maybe even still currently, are only reserved for a select group of investors. So if you don't have that direct access to the managers or perhaps don't have, you know, the right private banking relationship or something like that to get access to managers like Apollo or KKR, et cetera, when we're setting up these products at securitize, we actually are in many ways democratizing access to them because anybody can invest in them, right?

There's obviously going to be certain investment minimums or certain investor qualifications, whether you might have to be an accredited investor in certain product cases or a qualified purchaser in certain cases as well. But nonetheless, we are opening up a new channel of access, a new channel of distribution for the products as well. And where are the dominoes going to fall in your view

on, like, tokenized RWAs? Because I was surprised to learn if you go to like RWA.XYZ, which is kind of one of the better aggregators. It's not, it's not perfect, but it has, it does a pretty good job of capturing the market. The, the biggest category is private credit, which I thought it would have been treasuries. So like, because it's been pitched to me a bit, I guess, like you could view stable coins as basically tokenized U.S. treasuries, and then private credit is going to be the next thing that's tokenized. And then I guess something would come after that.

So where are the dominoes going to fall in your view of like, is private credit still mostly untapped? And then if private credit comes on chain, what comes next? So let's take a step back. Like the world of RWAs or even just like the acronym RWA, like that's still a relatively new acronym. And I'm not even sure that like RWA is going to be the acronym that ends up getting used. To be honest, I'm not even sure that like I love it. Thank you. Yeah.

And maybe some folks listening. to this episode will have, you know, come up with some other great acronym or some term that we can use. But what we are seeing, just generally speaking, is this idea of investments coming on chain, right? And so I think historically over the past decade plus, the crypto asset class has mostly been rooted in speculation of, you know, bearer assets, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Salana, you know, etc. And so all of those assets are held or kind of custodied in wallets as opposed to accounts, like a brokerage account, right? And so we're at this crossroads where our investor is going to start thinking about their wallet as a home for not just crypto assets, but also things that they historically

would think about as investments that may be held in a Schwab, a Fidelity or J.P. Morgan account, right? and I'll be going to start to see those two worlds kind of blend together? And so this idea of tokenizing investment opportunities is still relatively new. I mean, the RWA space, not to keep using the acronym that I'm not even sure is going to stick, it doubled in size in the last year. And within that, tokenized treasuries is probably the fastest growing segment. It's grown like over 500% in the last year.

And it's probably now growing at like 20 times the risk. that stable coins grew in their earliest incarnation. And, like, that is an important metric to keep an eye on. Because when you think about stable coins, and I'm not here to, you know, say anything bad about stable coins, they've been played a massive role. They still play a massive role within the crypto ecosystem. They're going to continue to play a massive role in the crypto ecosystem. They've allowed users in every shape and size keep value in a stable place on crypto rail.

but we are starting to see the winds shift and investors start to think about these tokenized treasury products like Biddle begin to displace or replace, for that matter, the role that stable coins play. And if you can start using a tokenized treasury product to collateralize a trade with an OTC desk or posted as collateral on an exchange, the idea of collateralizing your investment activities with a yield-bearing asset, like tokenized treasuries that, again, have the backing of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, as opposed to collateralizing them with a stable coin that's non-interest-bearing, well, suddenly that becomes, you know, an interesting trade-off and something that folks need to consider. So in our view, we see massive growth potential for tokenized treasuries. And, you know, again, you know, Biddle is bigger than $2 billion now in just a little over a year. That number's going to continue to grow very, very rapidly.

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view, it's that easy. Hello, friends. I am thrilled to share that Ledger is once again partnering and sponsoring with the breakdown. Many of you know, but for those of you who don't, Ledger is the most secure hardware wallet for your crypto and logins. It's trusted by 7 million users and secures 20% of the world's digital assets. What's more, Ledger is a lot more than wallets. Over the recent years, they've built a comprehensive ecosystem of products and services, all of which are designed to make digital ownership more secure and accessible. You can buy your Bitcoin with Ledger and Ledger Live, so much more. Basically, not only did they want to keep your assets secure, they want you to be able to do more with them. Ledger's newest devices, the Ledger Stacks, and Ledger Flex, introduced the

world's first secure touchscreens, making it easier and safer to manage your transactions and assets. Alongside Ledger Stacks and Ledger Flex, the company also launched the Ledger Security Key app, offering a safer alternative to traditional passwords and enhancing your digital security. If you are in this space, you owe it to yourself to at least check out Ledger and their ecosystem what they have available to you. So thanks, once again, to Letger. for sponsoring the show. I don't know exactly what your day job entails, Michael, but I would think that you are talking to lots of these traditional financial firms

that are newer to crypto and trying to sell them on it and answer questions and so forth. So I'm just curious, like, what the suits really think of Solana? You know, it's fast and cheap, which is easy to grok, but it also has this whole meme coin thing that's had some, you know, bad PR in recent months. So when you're in these rooms with the big asset managers of the world, like, what do they really think about Solana? So first of all, my day job is, I almost think of it as like a carousel, right? Like I'll spend some part of the day talking to asset issuers like an Apollo or a BlackRock. I'll spend other parts of the day talking to public blockchains, foundations, like talking to the Salana Foundation, for example, right?

And everything in between and also, you know, helping to run a company day to day, right? So when we think about the asset issuers and the share classes that they want to deploy their products onto, Solana is certainly one that I think is generally received as having household name recognition, along with the likes of Ethereum and things like that. So there's never really in my interactions like hesitation or anything like that. If anything, Solana is one of the areas that they're excited to be deploying RWA's on. on to, and also one that I believe they all come to those conversations with more than a working knowledge that the Solana ecosystem is robust and has a very large, you know, base of enthusiasts and active participants. So the meme coins aren't a concern for people?

It's not really something that I think comes up. Interesting. To be honest, I really can't think of a conversation in which, like, that's, you know, been something that we've discussed. Do people talk about security? Because I do think if you compare Ethereum with Solana, I don't think this is in fact true, but I think that there's a narrative out there that Solana is the fast and cheap chain that's more scalable than Ethereum, but Ethereum is more secure somehow than Solana.

And so if you want to do institutional finance on chain, you should use Ethereum because it's more secure. So have you seen that narrative come up? Not really. And I think it's not as applicable to kind of securitize because what we're doing by issuing tokenized securities on public blockchains like Solana, we ultimately are only issuing these assets to KYC, you know, individuals or entities, whitelisted addresses, et cetera. We also maintain a digital, our own digital ledger because we have a digital transfer agent as well. So to the extent that it's necessary, we can always, you know, burn or reissue tokens to the extent that there are,

you know, any discrepancies or any instances of security issues, things. of that nature, but that historically hasn't really come up. I guess I'll set the table for this next bit with just what are some of the benefits, like, or, yeah, what are the chief ways you try to sell tokenized assets? Like, there's lots of ways that people kind of try to sell these things, but what's the best thing about it to you? Well, so generally speaking, where we are in the adoption curve around RWAs or tokenized securities, it's mostly being bought by crypto-native individuals and firms.

So it could be DAOs, it could be treasures, you know, for foundations, it could be individuals, it could be hedge funds. It's generally people that have that working knowledge of crypto because I'll be honest, the experience of subscribing and getting into these products isn't, you know, perhaps always easier than it is to subscribe or be invested in their traditional counterparts. And so, again, it comes back to that burden that we share. And so they're looking for other opportunities. around these RWA's versus just kind of passively buying and holding them. So it could be that access to capital like daily dividend payouts. It could be wanting to keep value on chains so that they have readily, you know, liquidity, you know, whether it's the weekend or 2 a.m. on a Saturday, doesn't matter.

That type of liquidity exists there for them. And then I think more recently the biggest wave of adoption has really centered around bringing these assets into the world of defy. So one construct that I know we had securitize are really proud of is really starting to bridge that gap. So today, investors can, in certain instances, buy RWAs through securitize or, for instance, the Biddle product. And they're actually able to vault their asset in a way that then allows them to mint another tracking asset on top of it to then go use in defy. So I know that doesn't sound terribly specific because it kind of is better explained with a flowchart and all that kind of stuff. But essentially, it's allowing investors to think about and utilize their RWA's on chain as collateral to then unlock value to go use in DFI strategies, whether that's looping or other DFI strategies.

So it actually allows them to continue to earn the yield on the RWA that they've bought, but then also use that value, use that collateral to then go unlock a defy strategy. and go unlock additional yield opportunities. And, you know, if folks listening to this are excited about that, please, you know, come talk to the securitized team about that. There are, I think, some really interesting ways in which the defy ecosystem is being incredibly embracing of RWAs and really thinking about them as a great entree to get more and more users into what we're referring to as, like, institutional-grade defy. Yeah, I think the defy integration is really key because, like, I think there's a version of all this tokenization trend that looks a little bit like enterprise blockchain, maybe in like 2017, where you get a little bit the worst of both worlds, where you get worse, you get worse liquidity because these assets aren't natively issued on chain.

And then they also are trading in two places. So it's a little more complex, I guess, for the, for the issuer. So like, but if you can move things into defy, you get the benefits of that, like, these assets that aren't very liquid, like, I don't know, treasuries. And you get to like create additional yield on them. So I think that's like the almost to me the key part of the whole equation. Well, yeah, I think we're, this is just like one unlock. And actually these assets are quite liquid, right? Not only are the assets themselves liquid, but like the underlying treasuries themselves are liquid as well. So I view this as like some of the earliest incarnations and how we as a company and we as a broader crypto ecosystem are creating utility around RWAs that just doesn't exist.

You know, you're not buying an Apollo product on traditional rails and then linking it to the world of defy to unlock additional yield opportunities. That's just not happening, right? And so I think we're in the earliest stages of unlocking additional utility around these assets. and as an ecosystem have been in crypto a long time. I've been through many cycles. I feel like this is just the beginning of kind of unlocking what some of those use cases can be.

One thing we haven't talked about is cost. And I want to read out a tweet basically because I can't put it better. But for a long time, when I think about stable coins on Solana, I think a narrative I bought into a lot is like, well, something like Stripe takes 3% plus 30 cents of payments or something like that.

And, you know, Solana takes a fraction of a cent per transaction. But Robbie, who's, I think, a new guy at Dragonfly, I hadn't seen him before, had a quote tweet about, like, how cheap Salana payments are, where he basically said, traditional payment fees are primarily a function of risk, i.e. fraud production and compliance, not necessarily antiquated and expensive rails. salana payments are far cheaper today because these costs haven't been baked in yet. I just want to get your take on that. Is it going to be the case where on-chain tokenized finance isn't necessarily going to be

cheaper? It'll just be more composable, more efficient in some way. Definitely more composable, definitely more efficient. And I think when we talk about efficiency, we are also talking about being cheaper, right? So, you know, I think that there's no question that the light is. being shine directly on some of those speed bumps and costs that exist on traditional rails. And I think that light is increasingly spotlighted on what some of those are. Users are going to demand greater control and lower costs for everything they do when it comes to their finances.

Like I think that's just undeniably the direction we're going. Does that mean ultimately that users are not going to be willing to pay for, you know, certain products or certain features, no. I think people understand that like, generally speaking, there are for-profit businesses set up around this and there are definitively reasons why costs, you know, need to be incurred and, you know, in crypto networks that's generally around security, right? But there's no question that it's going to be a kind of a law of diminishing cost for users as I think we go deeper and deeper into it. Okay, gotcha. But would you say that, in the current iteration that blockchains exist, like the risk of moving money around hasn't

been properly priced in yet as it has in traditional markets? Well, I think it depends. I think that's an abstract question, right? If we're talking about, you know, purely peer-to-peer, you know, transfer, sure, I think if you're doing anything that's crypto-related that involves traditional rails as well, there there's still way too many frictions and you're not seeing. real true like delivery versus payment, composability between traditional rails and crypto rails.

And maybe over time, those two can converge in a way that's simpler and less expensive. Interesting. Is there anything you're not bullish on tokenizing? At the moment, thinking about investor demand, I'm less excited about tokenizing assets that are highly illiquid. And so I recently was at Paris blockchain. week and I don't know, I kind of got maybe some flack for it. I'm not sure, but I kind of said I'm not that bullish on tokenizing real estate at the moment.

Personally, as someone that has bought and sold real estate, I have seen firsthand the frictions and the speed bumps that exist in a real estate transaction here in the United States. There's escrow. There's lawyers. There's contracts. There's wet signatures. There's, you know, there's so many things involved and there's so many middle, so many middlemen and costs. and time delays and all kinds of efficiencies that probably some version of blockchain technology can unlock efficiencies and savings, but I don't necessarily know that it needs to be, like, tokenized in the here and now. It doesn't mean we won't forever take that position, but the things today that are good for tokenization

or good candidates for adoption and tokenization are things that are liquid, things that have very frequent pricing. So real estate values don't. fluctuate minute to minute day to day, week to week, month to month, but things like, you know, tokenized treasuries can, you know, be priced on a daily basis or very frequent. Like, so it's, it's things that have that more liquid attributes that I think are the best tokenization candidates in the short to medium term.

And over time, maybe that does extend to less liquid assets like real estate. But that, that kind of be my, my quick and dirty answer. What about tokenized commodities? like gold or silver? Well, so I think it really depends. I mean, these are generally speaking already deep, liquid, globally connected markets that have spot markets, derivatives markets, fund markets. So, like, you know, is there an opportunity?

Sure. And what is the ability to unlock there? I don't know. Is it better loan to value against tokenized gold, versus the loan to value you can get against physical gold or a gold ETF. I'm not quite sure. But it wouldn't surprise me to see tokenization efforts around certain commodities. It's certainly not something on the very, very near-term roadmap from my team at Securitize,

but I could see reasons why people may want to think about tokenizing assets like that. I'm also just curious, like when you mentioned real estate and not being as bullish on it, the version I've seen of tokenized real estate has been you like create an NFT of the deed of a home or something and then you can buy like fractionalized chairs of it. That's not crazy, right? Like let's say you, myself and three other folks wanted to all invest in some piece of real estate, right? In today's world, if we just put blockchain technology and tokenization aside,

it'd kind of be a pain in the butt, right? we'd all need to enter into some kind of a partnership or LLC agreement and all kinds of paperwork and lawyers and fees and set up, you know, who owns how many shares of the LLC, you know, whatever it would be, right, in order to properly do that. So are there perhaps ways to bring that type of ownership model on chain? Sure. Solana's been hot lately, but you can truly never fade Bitcoin. Are you a Solana user who wants to get exposure to Bitcoin?

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and it ensures that Bitcoin holders can securely and seamlessly earn yield on their favorite chain, like Solana. visit ZenbTC.io to learn about earning yield with Bitcoin on Salon. One piece of interesting news this week, I believe it was this week, the second largest crypto acquisition ever came from Ripple when it acquired the Prime Brokerage Hidden Road, which I was surprised when that news came across. I guess what's your quick take on Ripple buying up Hidden Road?

Well, listen, I think it's a super exciting time in the crypto ecosystem, certainly here in the U.S., given the shifting landscape we've seen from, you know, regulatory agencies and even the executive branch of government and the positions that have been filled now to focus on making the U.S. a hub of crypto innovation, I think set against that backdrop, you are starting to see some real M&A activity. And so there are opportunities, I think, that are continuing to materialize for firms to onboard or kind of attach as a pendent. to their existing products and services, other real players, right? So if somebody like a ripple didn't have that functionality internally to provide prime

brokerage services, I could see why for where they're building towards with payments and a lot of the other elements that they're working on, why that may fit within their broader model. And I do think that you're going to start to see increased M&A activity, which generally speaking I think is great for the crypto ecosystem, right? by and large, there haven't been a ton of exits in crypto, and there's been a tremendous amount of VC capital that's poured into the space. So until we see some more exits, some more roll-ups, et cetera,

I think as an industry, we're going to maybe not have the easiest time getting more VC investment to kind of build this next wave of products and services and businesses in the ecosystem. So I think it's a strong signal. And last question for you here, Michael. Over the next year... Oh, don't ask me for like a price prediction, please. I'm not going to. Don't worry about that.

Okay, good. Is Bitcoin going to go to 200K? Yeah, no. Over the next year, I'm just curious what the path is, I guess. Is it more of a multiplication of the kinds of assets that are tokenized, or is it just deepening integrations that currently exist? So basically, like, do we need to see more tokenized treasuries come on chain, or is it creating some of these new private credit, private equity type products? It's both.

I think you're going to see unlocks around utility of the RWAs that we've already created, right? So today you're not really yet seeing a ton of, you know, acceptance just yet on using these assets on exchanges or using these assets with OTC desks or market makers. And I think, you know, generally speaking, liquidity begets liquidity. and so the more places these assets show up, right? There was a time when stable coins weren't, you know, everywhere, right? And so you're going to see the existing assets pervade more and more parts of the crypto ecosystem.

But I also think you're going to see from the likes of securitize, deepening relationships with our existing clients to bring more funds, more structures, more exposures on chain. And for that, I'm super excited about it. Great. Well, Michael Sunnishine, everyone, securitize. Michael, thank you so much for coming in and being on the show today. Thanks for having me.