Hello everyone. Joe, you have been around Ethereum since it was a yellow paper, and every year...
White paper first. Before it was a yellow paper. The white paper came first. Gavin wrote the yellow one. Yeah.
And that was way back in 2013, 2014. It's now 2026, and we have tokenized equities, real-world assets on chain. That was what you were talking about day one. I'm sure before the blockchain was even live, you were like, 'Okay, this stuff, we can settle assets, real-world assets with this.' Now we're finally here. Talk to me about that journey and how it finally actually feels to be here.
So yes, I think if you look at where Bitcoin came from, it was a bunch of people that had deep distrust in the system, in centralization, and they were very financially focused. A lot of them were trying to protect their assets. The Ethereum builder community was a builder community. Ethereum was about building a world computer. It was about building a credibly neutral, decentralized, censorship-resistant platform so that anybody could build on it and they couldn't be deplatformed, essentially. And so we knew that we were building a very powerful technology that had the potential — my opinion was almost certain — to transform the world. And we knew that there were a lot of different political philosophies and political systems, and that we'd have to mature our technology and over time figure out how to integrate our technology into the actual systems of the world. And so it's going to look different in the United States of America versus Europe versus the Middle East versus more tyrannical political systems. And so it is going mind-blowingly well. Estimates were that it would be a few years before we had real traction, versus this would take decades to integrate into society. And when we integrate it into society, as is happening right now with the native community, with institutionals moving on-chain, and with hybrid human-machine intelligence making use of this technology, that is all happening now and it's accelerating. So it's, yeah, it's going very well.
With the advent of things like tokenized securities on chain, we have a standardization problem. If I go into my MetaMask wallet or if I go onto Uniswap on Robinhood chain and I type in like Apple or Nvidia, it's amazing that there are options there. That's incredible. Unfortunately, there are 17 options and they all have terrible liquidity profiles and they all have just like a different backend structure that allows them to be on chain in the first place. So it's great that we're solving this problem, but we really haven't found a common standard solution to create these things. Johan, how do you think this plays out where we get single liquidity, high liquidity tokenized assets that are just obviously the correct product, rather than me as an individual user having to go and kick the tires of seven different products to understand which one I want to buy?
Yeah, I think it's something that we have to keep working on as a community. You know, if you think about all this profile, it's really good that we have the choice. There are different backends, different legal structures, different liquidity profiles, to your point, and so little by little things are going to converge towards one standard. Obviously, we think the stock tokens that Robinhood is issuing is going to become this standard. We have this unique distribution — the 28 million funded accounts of Robinhood that are going to be on the chain, that are going to interact with this type of tokens. But you know, change is hard, and we also have to push the boundaries of things. If we were not doing the first steps with our first stock tokens, I'm pretty sure that a lot of the announcements last year would not have happened. And so it's for the community to start thinking about what is next, and we're looking a lot at liquidity. We want to make sure that the spreads are super tight no matter the time of the day or if it's a weekend or not. And we also want to make sure that the experience is really good. To your point, on MetaMask or on Robinhood wallet, you should not have to wonder which token to use. It should be fairly simple for you, and so that's the stuff that we need to keep working on as a community.
Yeah. So these are actually different products. There are different ways of holding a tokenized equity there. You can have a special-purpose vehicle, and that's a tokenized entity that holds different equities inside it. You can have one-to-one relationships between a real equity and a token, and you can pass through voting and dividends and other corporate actions. DTC — there will be some announcements soon that will be part of DTCC in the US — is going live pretty soon with tokenized equities, and those are real equities that can be moved from traditional form to tokenized form and back. And we'll have some regulation that enables those things to both operate inside decentralized finance, inside protocols, composable. But you know, America has liquidity markets, and it needs to preserve what it is in terms of the most capable financial infrastructure for turning, you know, capital into companies. And so it needs to regulate prudently how tokenized equities of like real major companies in the US take part in this global composable ecosystem. So we need proper disclosures. We need really good user interfaces so that we understand that this thing that looks like an Apple equity is different from this thing is different from this thing.
Yeah. Yeah. You're touching on something I want to go into next that really illustrates a tension that I see with some of the original cyberpunk ethos of blockchains and the adoption that we want in the future. How many people in the audience have purchased a tokenized stock or real-world asset on chain? No, there's like — I'm going to give it 20% of the crowd. How many of those people who bought those tokenized securities, tokenized real-world assets, whatever, did KYC before you bought it because that was what was required of you? Zero people. Well, one or two people. Like I'm sure, I'm assuming you're buying something from the Securitize platform that is truly a tokenized security as opposed to something from like Robinhood tokenized stocks. The SEC recently gave an innovation exemption that is an attempt to bring onshore a lot of these offshore tokenized securities, tokenized real-world assets. One of the cool things about the tokenized real-world assets that we know and see on chain today is that you can just take the ether in your wallet, the USDC in your wallet, you can go to Uniswap and you can buy tokenized Nvidia. It's not truly the equity, but it is effectively the economic one-to-one of this thing. The SEC doesn't like that, and it wants KYCed, whitelisted tokenized equities on chain. How many in the audience want KYC tokenized one-to-one equities in their Ethereum wallet? A few people. A few people. I'm on the other side. I like the non-whitelisted...
You want both. You want both. Doesn't that kind of lend itself to the standardization problem that I was talking about? And also, at least from my listeners at Bankless, and I think from the audience, people here were more interested in the non-whitelisted versions of these. So that puts us at a little bit of a tension with the United States regulators. How do we resolve that?
Well, you know, I think both are going to coexist, and you're going to have different pools, and you will have AMMs that are arbitraging between the two pools. But at the end of the day, like the stock token that we launched, for example, every time you mint a token, we buy a stock of that company. We pass you the corporate action, we pass you the dividend, we're actually able to do it on ex-commission date. All of these things are like the innovation that people are interested in. And actually, the KYC point — I haven't really heard anyone complaining about it. We don't require that necessarily, but it's something. What we've been hearing in the streets here and here and in Korea last week was they want to be able to access US stocks and ETFs without paying crazy fees, without having to wait for the exchange being open, all these kind of things. You can get it with the stock tokens. The SEC exemption, I think it's super interesting. You know, for five, six years, we've been waiting for regulations. So finally having a framework that we can work with is really good news for us. I think it's just a beginning, right? There's a lot of limits on volume, limits on which stock you can tokenize. And so I think that's just showing you that this is going to still be a prototype or, you know, a small playing ground, but it's not going to be the final version of it.
Yeah. So again, these are different instruments. We need good user interfaces with clear disclosures of what these things are, what you're exposed to, what your opportunities are. We have the ability to make American markets deep, liquid American markets. You can think of American markets as providing to American citizens best-in-class access to public securities, and to the extent that that can be shared, exported — you know, share rule of law, share disclosure mechanisms, share the liquidity — I think that's going to be great. And so again, there I don't see a contradiction. I think that there will be a sort of nerfed version of American DeFi, and it needs to be simplified. It needs to be constrained for a while because it would be irresponsible for regulators to allow the Wild West to suddenly invade American capital markets. But there is a recognition that there's a giant amount of global liquidity. The innovation will move so much faster in permissionless DeFi. And so to the extent that both of these things can run together and sort of interpenetrate and inform each other, I think that's the best way forward. I do think that global permissionless DeFi wins because it moves faster. And I don't think if America decides to stay too constrained, there's going to be a problem for those markets.
In the early days of blockchain, and especially in the early days of Ethereum, I think we all imagined a financial inversion where we had TradFi — we still have TradFi — but now it's all on blockchain. The NASDAQ trades on a blockchain. The New York Stock Exchange trades on a blockchain. Everything in the world has become tokenized, and all of a sudden the centralized databases are just turned off because everything runs on a blockchain. And we're not quite there yet. We're starting to see the merging of these parallel financial systems. Joe, do you believe in this idea of just like one day the databases will turn off and everything will be an internet ledger? Is that a vision you still have?
