It is the last panel of the day and arguably the best panel. So, let's amp it up, guys. RWAS. Woo. That's what I'm talking about. Thank you. All right. And that's the end of our panel. I am Jacqueline Melnik. I'm the founder and CEO of Strata Media and I have the honor of moderating this panel with a bunch of superstars today. Starting with Adeni Abuan, the co-founder and CPO at Mist Labs. We have Michael Blau, the strategic initiatives at ICE, and Carlos Domingo, the founder and CEO at Secure Ties, and Haider Rafique, the global managing partner at OKX. To start off, we have been talking about tokenization for years and it has been the hottest topic I would argue for 2026 and we're not even halfway through the year. At a high level for the panelists here, when we talk about the architecture in the context of RWAs, what does that actually include and what are at the core layers today that need to exist for these real world assets to actually succeed? I want to get each of your perspectives first because you come from different corners of the world and then we'll go into it. But we'll start there.
Who you want to start? Who wants to go first? I'm not going to pick favorites. Whoever wants to talk first.
It's your hometown. It's your hometown.
I'll start. So, there's many pieces. First, you need assets that you want to tokenize. That's the asset whether it's equities, bonds, ETFs, funds, etc. Then you need to have some agent let's say that tokenize that, that typically in most of the TradFi world is a transfer agent which is an SEC registered entity that basically manages the securities that represent the underlying asset. Then you need to have tokenization technology to be able to then issue these tokens that represent securities and manage those securities etc. And then you need to pick a chain where you are actually going to do that and then you need to figure out why are you tokenizing and what you're going to do with those assets. So you need venues where you can actually trade them. You need distribution. You need DeFi protocols to be able to borrow against them and the rest of the infrastructure that makes tokenized securities useful and RWA useful beyond putting them on a better ledger technology.
Yeah. From our side I think there's about five layers in RWAs and tokenizations. You look at the asset layer, you look at issuance layer, there's the compliance layer and then there's the liquidity and distribution. Now, of course, OKX focuses on four and five, the liquidity and distribution piece. And what we see is a lot of people today in the industry are focused on number one and number three, the assets and the compliance. But the question that we often ask is how can we help as one of the largest exchanges in the world in helping creating the right liquidity and distribution of these assets and creating the right demand. So a lot of the efforts on our side right now are making sure that we can educate people especially outside of the United States that this is value they should be considering in their portfolio along with the top assets in crypto and I think for Americans this is a great opportunity. You look at our stock market today just the equity side it's about 69 trillion worth, 18-20% is foreign-based investors. What happens when you open up the equities markets to the entire world? You might be sitting in Turkey and wondering, well, maybe I shouldn't just buy gold or crypto or Bitcoin. I can buy the anticipated OpenAI IPO or security or the other compelling securities. And I think when that starts to happen and people around the world, you don't have cost prohibitive measures that are stopping them from entering US equities market, I would argue that 69-70 trillion market maybe goes up to 100 trillion maybe 150 trillion and I think that's a really important thing for all of us here on this panel and I think it's also a great moment for crypto we finally get to do something that has a much bigger impact on the world and I think that's the part we think about at OKX.
I think our vantage point, and maybe it's coming from sort of the TradFi landscape is that, you're going to need to have a coherent connectivity layer across trading, clearing, settlement, data, capital formation. And all of those functions are going to need to have that compliance layer and live within the regulatory perimeter so that we can have institutions that we can really have the durability and the scale that the industry ought to achieve. So whether it's building or partnering our focus has been to try to find a way to begin to enable each of those different work streams.
Yeah, I think from our perspective, we are an infrastructure company and our pedigree background came from Facebook where we're building Libra. Our background is always building highly scalable fault tolerant systems. So, we envision a world where the means by which people access these assets are going to be new layers, right? We talk about blockchains being a layer by which you distribute assets themselves. But in a world where AI agents are going to transact majority of what users want to transact, the kind of scale you're looking for surpasses what exists today. We've always said you don't build blockchains like Uber or Airbnb. You build them like Google built search, right? Uber and Airbnb have fixed amount of houses, fixed amount of cars, fixed amount of drivers. So you have to raise prices when network is busy. We built it like search where you can scale horizontally. So to accompany all the amazing things we're going to do, you're going to want to have privacy, you're going to have compliance, but most importantly, you need infrastructure that can tailor to the demands of the market as more users enter the market. So that is what we do really, really well.
For the three panelists on the stage who derive from crypto companies, how do you kind of think about bringing in these traditional markets in a meaningful way, especially when maybe there's a bit of hesitation? And then Michael, from your side at ICE, what was it really like bringing equities to the digital asset world and really like tokenizing these things? Was there push back when you guys decided to start doing this?
I think the convergence right now of digital and TradFi, it feels a lot like where we were 25 years ago when you had floor-based traders who couldn't possibly imagine a world where you could have electronic trading that would be of the same quality. And it was very disruptive and there was a lot of inertia and it was hard to migrate initially. But S-curves are slow until they're fast. And so I think our perspective is, and I think it's probably thematic across the industry, is it's now when, not if. And so maybe it'll take some time. But we're not going to have 0% of the traditional markets tokenized. I don't know that it'll ever get to 100%. But we need to all be ready and have those fundamental capabilities so that as issuers and investors and this next generation of sort of crypto-native market participants want to have the type of user experience that they can that purely digital asset with a more traditional real world asset. We have to be able to facilitate that.
We can run a prediction market on it.
You don't need 100% by the way. Like if you move 2% of equity markets, it doubles the size of crypto, right? So because it's 100 trillion as you were saying. So move 2% to 2 trillion. Crypto is more or less 2 trillion today. You double the size of the assets on chain.
Carlos, you've been building on the tokenization front for a long time. I think since 2017, am I correct?
There we go. I was right. What do you think is a key aspect for RWA migration to succeed? And then from the OKX position too, how do you think about like bringing liquidity into the market on that side?
I think I'll tell you why it hasn't happened until now. And it's not just one reason, right? First, obviously, infrastructure was very immature when I started in the industry. Wallets were very difficult to use. There was only Ethereum pretty much. That's the only thing that existed. Stable coins didn't exist. That's something people don't remember that in 2017 I think USDC launched in 2018 tether was like a billion AUM. So and then there was no companies in the space including ourselves that actually had licenses to be able to go to the asset issuers and give them comfort that you can actually issue securities on a blockchain in a legal and compliant way. And then the final thing is like crypto people couldn't care less like they were looking at as far as removed as possible from anything regulated and RWAs for the most part are securities and they're regulated. So over the years I think all these things have been kind of been fixed like infrastructure is much better the stable coins now are huge and they're becoming legal tender through the Genius Act. You have now regulatory clarity since the new administration came. You have companies like us and others that have got SEC registered transfer agents operating at scale broker dealers etc. And I think that confluence of all those factors and the interest in the crypto to the real world assets which is a very interesting term because it means that whatever was happening before was not real was imaginary assets is I think this confluence is what has attracted then the institutional attention and people like Michael and others entering the space.
So I think from our side to complement what you just said, we're working with ICE as you know, bringing market makers along the journey I think is going to be very very important but I think there's enough demand for this and supply for this we just need to connect the two together and to do that you need a unified global order book so I think where it becomes a key challenge is when you have venues that are concentrated their liquidity is concentrated in one or two geographies. You look at OKX, I think in the last 3 years, we've heavily invested in getting licensed. We're in Australia, we're in Singapore, we're in UAE, we have the MiCA license and the MiFID license in Europe, and then we have MTLS here in the United States. And then we have a global unified order book. We have a unified order book also at the stable coin level. And I think those market structures are really important to be able to scale these things. Otherwise, they'd look like digital wallpapers in the future.
How do you guys think about building things the right way versus the easy way? Because there's a need for speed, right? And some people are just launching things and they're going for it. I'm not going to name any names. Everyone could think of who they want. But obviously based off the conversations I've had with all of you and from what I've picked up is that you do want to do this the right way and you don't want to just like launch something to get ahead, but you want to launch it for the right reason. So, how do you kind of like battle that when the crypto space moves so fast? And then from a product perspective, too, how do you build a good user experience when it comes to this? Because as we know, crypto companies aren't the best at building good user experiences.
I can talk about a product side. So, for me, I've always made the point that wallets are stupid. Like, I don't think wallets are the best user experience. Users are already accustomed to owning multiple ways of identifying themselves. One of the things we're working on at Facebook is something called unilateral payments. How do I give you an asset and not force you to log in or create some identity to use it? And we made it possible now where you can set up an account without ever creating wallets. You basically can log in with your Google account, Facebook account, JP Morgan account, whatever account supports OpenID, existing ID mechanisms, and you can send money and you can trade with it instantly. The other thing that we care about a lot is people underestimate the power of composability because what composability offers you is effectively the ability to create even more productive assets. So we talk about the supply side which I think not a problem getting the supply is ensuring that there's adequate demand to match that balance and that's making assets actually productive solving issues like DVP. We talked about compliance being one of them, but ensuring that customers can onboard KYC and do all the things that necessary to be able to have the rights to own and transfer those assets. But in addition to marrying that directly with protocols, that gives you the composability nature. I should be able to trade across any venue. I should be able to lend across any venue and do that without ever having to think about what protocol I'm using. I think crypto has done a really poor job in forcing to learn idioms and paradigms that don't exist in traditional technology stacks as well.
I can speak about the easy versus right because I've been in this industry long enough to know that there is unfortunately a lot of people in crypto that take the easy route and especially in our industry which is all regulated heavily regulated because securities are very regulated. Taking the easy route sometimes means that they're basically not following regulations, taking shortcuts, finding some bizarre offshore jurisdiction where they can do something and do it from there and claim that they are not touching the US but obviously things flow back here especially with permissionless assets. So that's actually really not true etc. And those things in my opinion end up bad at some point in time because regulations are I know people don't like it but they are there for a reason right they are to protect investors to have transparency disclosures and things like that and the fact that when these assets that are out there they are completely opaque and they have a lot of hidden counterparty risks at some point they go wrong and I think it's an unfortunate situation that we have now an administration that is amazing that is super pro crypto that is trying to help with regulatory clarity but at the same time they're not going to be as aggressive enforcing things like the previous administration which means that a lot of people are taking advantage in the wrong way of those things and I think that that's just not long-term sustainable. In our company, we've always stuck to let's try to move fast from a product perspective build as many things as possible but complying with regulations and if not try and influence change but never take shortcuts from a regulatory perspective because that's a recipe for a disaster in my opinion.
Yeah. I think we probably are one of the few companies that hasn't launched a synthetic version of a tokenized system.
And you shouldn't. It's a terrible idea.
It's a terrible idea because if you try to buy something on OKX and we can't match you to an order, it goes back to your point. The user experience is broken. So I think we've been really looking at the pure definition from SEC about what classifies an issuer-based tokenized security and there's really two. It's either coming from NYSE or it's coming from the direct issuer itself if they have their own DTC. So I think when we look at this productization of this, we're very fortunate. We're working with ICE and New York Stock Exchange. We're going to wait. We're going to do this the right way. So we have proper supply in place. So when you go and you place an order as a retail investor, we know we can match and give you the best price and order execution. Kind of like what Fidelity does today, but in the tokenized world, onchain world. And I think that that is going to be fundamentally important in making sure we don't have a broken user experience. And we're not selling a promissory note. We're actually selling the underlying asset.
I don't know if you'll realize how bad it is. Like the other day one of these, so for some stocks there's like five different tokenized versions of Coinbase for instance. None of them actually representing equity on Coinbase. None of them done with Coinbase using their name without their permission etc. But the other day, one of these providers of offshore wrappers, they actually had one of the stocks that they tokenized actually had a split on the traditional markets and because they issued this permissionless token, they couldn't track it and it was trading at five times different price in one market versus another. So how is this possible? Because best price execution is one thing but trading at five different prices is just you're basically completely misleading markets. That company and any regulatory regime would have been shut down immediately for not complying with regulations and not doing things the right way. So this is very unfortunate and it's very misleading for retail people because retail people they just don't know what they're buying. If you go to a website and say buy tokenized Tesla they think they're buying tokenized Tesla. So why is it allowed to exist today? Just because the regulatory environment doesn't have standards in place to prevent it?
No. I don't think it's a regulatory problem. It's a regulatory arbitrage problem. These guys go to an offshore jurisdiction. They do something in a niche jurisdiction that allows you to do whatever you want and then they issue those wrappers and they claim that they are not touching Europe, they're not touching US, etc. But because they become permissionless, they flow back. So there's a lot of things we've done to hurt ourselves in the crypto industry. This seems to be another area and I hope companies like yours and what ICE is doing, we can provide other solutions for companies who are eager to get ahead of this. But I think this creates market risk and we got to be careful because we have several examples where we've moved too fast. We've broken things which is good because you build the right engineering infrastructure but then you create regulatory problems that companies like ours have to pay for years to come.
I think with that as context I think it's also important that now the more traditional players are not dismissing the user experiences and the demand side for the tokenized interactions. It is hard to do it correctly and to do it within the lines. And it's slower, but it's going to be more durable. And so, I think what you see with this panel is a group that's working very, very hard to ensure they're building things the right way that will withstand the test of time and are going to have the investor protections and the issuer expectations that more traditional markets have been able to achieve over decades. We've got to do that work in a matter of quarters.
I think that durable is the right word. These founders that are doing these things, they'll probably make a lot of money short term. They'll buy a house in Hawaii. They'll do whatever they want. But two years, we're two years away from an election potential government change. And you have to build something that is going to last across any government because it's legal and it's regulatory solid, right? You can't just take advantage of a particular regulatory situation to do regulatory arbitrage and then fool people and this is exactly what's happening now but it's not going to be durable. Our company is already 8 years old and I want it to be 16 years old and 32 years old and if we do stupid things then we might actually die and that's not what I want for the company.
