President & Chief Operating Officer, Wisdomtree
Search every verified Robert Lilien interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Robert Lilien, President and Chief Operating Officer at WisdomTree, has been involved in the firm's push into digital assets and blockchain-enabled financial services. In 2024, WisdomTree submitted a proposal to the MakerDAO community's Spark Tokenization Grand Prix, an RFP for tokenized Treasury and money market fund issuers. The company also announced the ability for users to spend directly from a money market fund on a debit card, a feature enabled by blockchain technology. WisdomTree has described its digital funds as registered mutual funds with share records held on chain, represented by tokens in wallets, and has noted that the immediate benefits of tokenized funds include liquidity, transparency, and standardization, with potential for 24/7 trading. In 2023, Lilien's colleague Jonathan Steinberg, WisdomTree's CEO, stated that the company is "trying to mainstream crypto, the asset class" and discussed the firm's blockchain-enabled financial service, WisdomTree Prime, which was in beta testing at the time. Steinberg described the platform as being built for "saving, investing, and payments" and said the company is "explicitly trying to diversify our revenue streams" through transaction revenue and net interest income, potentially moving away from traditional expense ratios. He also noted that WisdomTree is "trying to tokenize ETFs" to improve the investor experience with lower fees and faster settlement, and that Bitcoin and Ethereum can sit seamlessly with equities, bonds, and commodities within the WisdomTree Prime ecosystem.
“Wisdom Tree launched its first ETFs 20 years ago on the New York Stock Exchange with the idea of building both a better index, a fundamentally weighted index we call modern Alpha, and a better structure being ETFs, which are more tax efficient, more liquid, more transparent, and better standardized than mutual funds.”
“We came to think of the next evolution in the wrapper around financial products as something related to blockchain, like tokenized real world assets and tokenized securities that trade differently than traditional assets, enabling peer-to-peer exchange of value and a new way of thinking about financial services and cap...”
“Wisdom Tree Prime is a safe, spend, invest app that feels like any other neo-bank or neo-broker app, where all assets are tokenized underlying assets, including stablecoins, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a suite of digital funds that are all registered mutual funds with tokenized share records held on blockchain.”
“One of the things we recently announced was the ability to spend directly from your money market fund on your debit card, so you don't need to do two separate transactions; you can keep all your liquidity in a money market fund earning near 5% and just swipe that card directly, unlocked by modern infrastructure built o...”
Will Peck, Head of Digital Assets at WisdomTree, explains how the firm is building the future of finance through tokenization and ...
Jonathan Steinberg, WisdomTree CEO, joins 'TechCheck' to discuss the company's new blockchain-enabled financial service, ...
It's an ETF play that's growing like a weed. WisdomTree is up more than 60 percent this year, but can it keep sprouting gains?
Sign in to search the full transcript archive, filter by topic, and access every quote from Robert Lilien.