Bringing Stocks Onchain to Billions: ConsenSys CEO Joe Lubin & Ondo President Ian De Bode

It's a game changer. It's self-custodied access to instruments that most people around the world haven't normally had access to. So what you've been doing is tokenizing real world assets, and tokenized real world assets are now added to the natively tokenized assets and all accessible through MetaMask. The way that you've been doing it is essentially a harbinger of how global finance is going to be moving. You've done some great things. Normally accessing equities involves T+1, T+2 settlement. You've done real-time settlement. That's a game changer for the velocity of an economy and for the ability of an individual to create some value in some sort of trade with their asset and then have it instantly available to do something else that's of value rather than losing access to your asset for a day or two. Enabling access to trade 24/5 for the full work week. Enabling permissionless access to move the tokens around anywhere 24/7/365. Again, a game changer. It represents real freedom and agency, financial agency for people. Ability to use these tokens as collateral to borrow against or in other kinds of situations to provide liquidity into DEXes, to participate in vaults or other sorts of portfolio constructions, participate with full composability in DeFi. So congratulations to you, and we are absolutely delighted to be able to offer this to people around the world through MetaMask.

So it's part of the direction that we've been going in for quite a while. Again, it's about empowering users and communities to have permissionless access to and control over their own assets. I don't know about you, but I've walked into a bank and I've been denied access to my money at times when I asked for maybe more than $3,000. It was a few years ago. Maybe they've gotten a little better and $3,000 isn't what it used to be. But MetaMask has been releasing features and capabilities at a rapid pace recently. So we've provided access to Hyperliquid perpetual futures, to equity perpetuals, to Polymarket prediction markets. All of these instruments are accessible within the safe confines of your MetaMask. You don't need to move tokens to a centralized exchange or explicitly bridge to some network to access those exciting instruments. We've been rolling out our MetaMask debit card globally. And that's a game changer also in the sense that instead of taking your paycheck and moving it into your bank account so that you can make use of your debit card to pay for things in your life, you can actually move your capital into an account on Linea and then you can move all your capital into DeFi. And if you're going out and paying for dinner on a Tuesday, right at that time, you're paying on the global Mastercard network and some of your capital moves out of DeFi to essentially pay. And so instead of the bank earning yield on your back, you're earning yield on your money. And so MetaMask USD, our stablecoin, is also rolling out globally. We're very excited about that. We've got a rewards program which has just kicked off to bring people into our world in more diverse ways. So MetaMask is firing on all cylinders and now it's firing on the global markets.

Yeah, so MetaMask is moving towards being a full-service, essentially a neobank in your pocket or on your mobile or on your laptop. It's a different kind of neobank. It's a neobank that enables you to be fully in control of your assets. And why is it important to have self-custody of your assets in a country like this? You don't really need that except when the shit hits the fan and some sort of crisis happens. Maybe that doesn't happen in the United States. Let's hope it doesn't happen in the United States or major Western countries. But a few years ago in Greece, for instance, there was a bit of a financial crisis there and austerity was implemented and essentially a lot of people had their bank accounts haircut by a very significant percent. So you wake up one morning and you have a lot less money than you thought you did and that's it. It's a very civilized country and it can happen anywhere in the world. And so having full control of your assets in a way that you don't have to ask for permission, in a way that a government can't simply by fiat just destroy value or extract value from you, that is incredibly important. There are a lot more challenged nations in the world. There's a lot of crazy stuff going on currently. There are situations where women's rights aren't well protected and a woman can earn money and take it home and that money isn't necessarily safe from family members or community members. It is safe if that money is stored in a MetaMask and the family members don't have access to that MetaMask. In nations run by tyrants who financially exploit their citizens and financially repress their citizens when the debt gets too large and inflation gets very high, having access to stablecoins or even better having access to financial instruments available to Americans or citizens in Western nations that don't just hold their value as a good store of value but represent the potential to grow over time as the American economy grows, that's a total game changer. So you can be protected from your tyrant. Your tyrant can be weakened because the tyrant isn't able to exploit you anymore and you can potentially access aspects of the American dream. You can buy some Apple stock or some Google stock and ideally that grows and ideally that gives you the ability to do something more empowering with your life.