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Michael Sonnenshein

Former CEO, Grayscale Investments

Search every verified Michael Sonnenshein interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Michael Sonnenshein, formerly CEO of Grayscale Investments and now President of Securitize, has been discussing the evolution of tokenized securities and the growth of real-world assets (RWAs) on blockchain. He described his career move as a shift from putting crypto assets into traditional financial wrappers at Grayscale to now taking traditional financial products onto public blockchains at Securitize. Sonnenshein stated that the RWA market has more than doubled in size in the last year, with tokenized treasuries growing 500-600% in the same period, and he attributed this growth to the involvement of large institutions like BlackRock and Apollo. He noted that Securitize's BUIDL tokenized treasury fund has surpassed $2 billion in assets under management in just over a year, and he highlighted features such as instant redemptions, daily dividend payments, and the ability to use these assets as collateral in DeFi as key advantages over traditional counterparts. Reflecting on his time at Grayscale, Sonnenshein said that suing the SEC to convert GBTC into a spot Bitcoin ETF was "bold" but necessary, and he described the eventual approval as the culmination of 10 years of work. He expressed regret that he was not "bolder" in personally investing more in Bitcoin earlier in his career. Regarding tokenization, Sonnenshein emphasized the importance of native tokenization models over wrapped versions, citing counterparty risk and lack of direct investor rights as concerns with wrappers. He also discussed Securitize's Converge blockchain initiative, developed in partnership with Athena, which he said aims to combine Securitize's RWA expertise with Athena's DeFi capabilities to create a settlement layer for institutional DeFi with appropriate compliance guardrails.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“I think it's becoming quite a bit of a political issue. There hasn't really been one regulator that has raised their hand and said, 'As this asset class grows, we're going to fold this into the domain that we oversee,' and instead, because of the ever-evolving nature of crypto, it's getting bits and pieces from various governmental authorities and regulators.”

“It forces investors who are waiting for the familiarity and the protections of an ETF to use the Bitcoin futures ETF simply because that's the only one that exists when really investors should have that choice.”

“We actually are having a lot of engagement around Bitcoin, especially in the wake of quantitative easing. It sets a very valuable stage for decentralized currencies that are void of government intervention, that do have a finite cap on their supply and are really not going to be subject to the policy decisions of that central authority.”

“I think our regulators have done a really good job in terms of keeping pace with the industry... An ETF will be a matter of when, not so much a matter of if.”

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