The Next 100 Million RWA Holders Are Already Onchain - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2026

Transcript

Hello everyone. Uh Joe, you have been around Ethereum since it was a yellow paper. Uh and every year >> white paper >> white paper first. >> Before it was a yellow >> before it was yellow. >> Metallic was the white paper. Gav wrote the yellow. Yeah. >> And that was way back 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 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 I think um so if you look at uh uh where Bitcoin

came from, it was uh it was a bunch of people that uh had deep distrust uh in the system in centralization and uh they were very financially focused. Uh a lot of them were trying to protect their assets. Um the Ethereum builder community uh was a builder community. The Ethereum was about building a world computer. Uh it was about building a credibly neutral decentralized censorship resistant platform uh so that anybody could build um on it and uh they couldn't be deplatformed essentially.

And so we knew that we were building a very powerful technology that had the potential uh my opinion was almost certain to to transform the world. Um and we knew that um 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 uh into the actual systems of the world. And so, um, it's going to look different in the United States of America versus Europe versus the Middle East versus, um, more, um, tyrannical, um, political systems.

And so, um, it is going mind-blowingly well. um uh estimates were that uh uh it would be a few years before we had real traction versus this would take decades uh to uh integrate into society. And and when we integrate it into society as is happening right now with uh with the native community uh with institutionals moving onchain and with hybrid human machine intelligence making use of this this technology um that is all happening now and it's accelerating. So um it's yeah it's going very well >> with the advent of things like tokenized securities on chain. We have a

standardization problem. Uh, if I go into my MetaMask wallet or if I go onto unis swap on Robin Hood 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 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. uh there are different back end, different legal structure, different liquidity profile to your point and so little by little things are going to converge towards one standard. Uh obviously we think the stock tokens that Robin Hood is issuing is going to become this standard. Uh we have this unique distribution the 28 million uh funded account of Robin Hood that are going to be on the chain uh 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. Uh pretty sure that a lot of the announcement last year would have not happened. And so it's um 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 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. Uh to your point on on MetaMask or on Robin Hood wallet, uh 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 we need to keep working on as a community.

>> Yeah. So these are actually different products. Um uh there are different ways of holding a a tokenized equity there. Uh you can have a special purpose vehicle. Um and that's a tokenized entity that holds uh different uh equities inside it. you can have onetoone relationships between a real equity and a token and you can pass through uh voting and dividends and other corporate actions. Um DTC um there will be some announcements uh soon that that will be part of uh DTCC in the US um is going live pretty soon uh with tokenized equities and those are real equities uh that can be moved from traditional form uh to tokenized form

and back um and uh we'll have some regulation that uh enables those things to both operate inside decentralized finance inside protocols uh composably. Um but um you know, America has liquidity markets and uh it needs to preserve um what it is [snorts] um in terms of the the most capable uh financial infrastructure uh for turning, you know, um capital into companies. Um and so it needs to um regulate um prudently how uh tokenized equities of of like real major companies in the US

um take part in this global composable ecosystem. So we need uh 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 you're touching on uh something I I want to go into next that it 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 of people in the audience have purchased a tokenized stock or real world asset on chain? No, there's like there's like I'm going to give it 20% of the crowd. uh how many of those people who bought those tokenized uh securities, tokenized

reward 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 securitized platform that is truly a tokenized security as opposed something from like or uh Robin Hood tokenized stocks. The SEC recently gave an innovation exemption uh that is an attempt to bring onshore uh a lot of these offshore tokenized uh securities tokenized real world assets. Uh one of the cool things about the tokenized real world assets that we know and I see on chain today is that you can just take the ether in your wallet, the USC in your wallet, you can go to unis swap and you can buy tokenized Nvidia. It's not

truly the equity but it is effectively the economic onetoone of of this thing. The SEC doesn't like that and it wants KYCed whitelisted tokenized uh equities on chain. How many in the audience wants KYC tokenized onetoone equities uh in their Ethereum wallet? A few people. A few people. Uh I'm on the other side. I like the nonweight >> I want I want both. >> 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 Banklist and I think from the audience people here were more interested in the non-whit listed 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 you will have AMM that are uh arbitrageing between the two pools. But uh at the end of the day, like the stock token that we launch, for example, every time you mint a token, we buy a stock of that company. uh we pass you the the corporate action, we pass you the dividend, we're actually able to do it on X commission date. Um 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 we don't require that uh necessarily, but it's something what what have been stopped in the streets here and here and

in Korea last week was they want to be able to access US stocks and ETF without paying crazy fees, without having to wait for exchange being open, all these kind of things. You can get it with the stock tokens, the 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 in is a really good news for us. I think it's just a beginning right there's a lot of limit limit on volume limit on which stock you can tokenize. Um and so I think that's just showing you that this is going to still be a prototype or uh you know small uh 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 with clear disclosures of of what these things are, uh what you're exposed to, what your opportunities are. Um we um we have um the ability to um uh make American markets deep liquid American markets. Uh you can think of American markets um as providing to American citizens u best-in-class access to uh to public securities and to the extent that that can be shared exported um you know share rule of law share disclosure mechanisms

uh share the the the liquidity I think that's going to be great uh and so um again there I don't see a contradiction I think that um Um there will be a sort of nerfed um version of American DeFi. Uh and it needs to be simplified. It needs to be constrained for a while because it would be irresponsible uh for regulators to allow um the Wild West to suddenly invade American capital markets. Um but there is a recognition that there's a giant amount of global liquidity. the innovation uh will move so much faster in permissionless DeFi. Uh and so to the

extent that um that both of these things can run together and sort of interpenetrate and and inform each other um I I think that's the best way forward. I do think that um global permissionless DeFi wins uh because it moves faster. Um um and I I don't think if America decides to stay too constrained um there there's going to be a problem uh for for those markets. >> In the early days of blockchain and and especially in the early days of Ethereum, I think we all imagined a financial inversion where we had Trafi, we still have Trafi. Uh but now it's all on blockchain. The NASDAQ trades on a blockchain. Uh the New York Stock

Exchange trades on a blockchain. Every the world has become tokenized. uh and all of a sudden the centralized databases are just turned off because everything runs on a blockchain. Uh 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 the databases will turn off and everything will be an internet ledger? Is that a vision you still have? >> Yeah, it's obvious. Um, you know, in the 70s, uh, everything was on paper and and couriers were were riding their their bikes around Wall Street. Um, uh, that got overwhelming for that system and they there's something called the paper crisis and so they they had to change the way the system worked. They had to

incorporate uh, computers and so this is just a a natural evolution of of how systems work on the planet. >> Yeah. And and I think you know we are seeing that transition happening. Change is hard for institution to suddenly integrate with blockchain to understand how to monitor transaction to to even understand how to manage their wallet. Um a lot of institution are are struggling a bit with this and for a long time also we are missing the right regulation for them to even invest in these projects. Right now what we are seeing is all these big companies are already starting to push forward and it's going to become a a given that one you need to adapt this kind of uh distributed ledger and you also need to

adapt to tokenization or you're just going to be left behind. >> Yeah. So a lot of things are cyclical including this. So the paper crisis that that was a very decentralized system um uh where you actually had your name on your stock certificates um they had to centralize that system uh under the DTCC and a company called SED company uh owns basically all the equities the public equities in the United States and there's an IOU that uh goes to your broker dealer and then to you but now with decentralized protocols and these decentralized databases we're actually going to own [snorts] our own equities again. Uh we're going to uh have a

direct relationship potentially with the companies that that we own shares in. They're going to be able to send us messages. Uh they right right now what they have to do in order to to send out a communication is they go through Broadridge. Uh and so they they don't uh have the ability to to communicate to offer perks um to their shareholders. And so, uh, I think tokenized equities, um, and even stable coins are going to change the nature of e-commerce because there's going to be a direct connection to who's been paying you and and who owns your equity.

>> 32 million transactions on Robin Hood chain. A lot of that has been downstream of the tokenized uh, real world asset boom. Uh, Robin Hood has made $45 million of gross revenue from chain fees. Arbitum made 5% of that because that was their cut. Uh Ethereum collected about $69,000 in revenue from the Robin Hood chain in contrast to Robin Hood's $45 million. Uh and so a lot of the value being captured by the growth of real world assets seemingly is happening on the execution layer which is Robin Hood chain. Joe, as one of the world's largest holders of Ether, how do you feel about that $69,000 number?

>> Um really good actually. Uh I feel probably the same way Jeff Bezos felt. uh when he was reinvesting all of his profits and trying to keep um prices low. >> You do look like Jeff Bezos. Yeah. >> Thank [laughter] you. Thank you. So So he he was focused for many many years on on just growing his company. Um and the so early early in um the first year or so of development of the Ethereum project, we really felt like we're going to have to make transactions as cheap as air. Uh because if you've looked at the internet and the web recently, they're

really really big. Um and with machine [clears throat] intelligence, they're going to get bigger and bigger. Um, and all of this activity is going to move onto layer twos and private permission corpo chains. And via a technology called synchronous composability, which uh we're building, we're going to unify that whole ecosystem. You'll hear a huge amount about that in 2027. Uh, and so scale Ethereum layer 1. Um, have lots of chains uh settle onto layer 1. Um and so uh as much as we scale Ethereum layer 1, um the demand for Ether is going to far outstrip the supply. Uh and so it's

really about enabling layer twos and and private chains to uh be part of the Ethereum ecosystem to make use of the Ether token and uh um and contention and staking and uh all sorts of mechanisms will drive the value of Ether um much higher over time. >> Yeah. And I think, you know, on on my side, I'm not going to put on the gloves either, but um I I think the math is actually not exactly right. So maybe that's my only dig. Um but overall, you know, there's two things to to think about. Um one is that there's always different ways of making revenue. If you think about this pure revenue, you also

have the wallets that are making a lot of revenue from the swap. Um if you think about uh FOMO for example which is one of the the largest provider on on the chain uh we are seeing a lot of revenue coming to to them. The second part is that all our engineers that are working on the chain on stock tokens and on other things are also contributing to the Ethereum ecosystem. Uh the stock token that we build are not just using RC20s. We're actually using an extension that we've contributed to to roll out. Um and it's something that benefit everybody not just you know the the Robin ecosystem and finally I think you know if you think about companies that have contributed to the to blockchain expansion and integration towards institution towards retail uh Robinood

is one of these top companies and we've been reinvesting a lot of this revenue into expanding the the stock token not just to US public stocks but also to exchange across the world also to private equity and there's a lot more that we are we're working on. >> I'm on stage with a bunch of pacifists, it seems like. All right, this is my last attempt. This is going to be our last question. Robin Hood recently announced that it b $25 million of Bitcoin for its balance sheet. Uh Johan, when will you be buying $25 million of ETH for the Robin Hood balance sheet? >> Well, there's a thing that we are doing right now is that we have this chain that is bringing a lot of ETH and so we're also working on that. I think for us, you know, it's important to align the Robin Hood with the community. Uh we

are a platform that has a ton of Bitcoin maximalist. We have a platform that has a ton of Ethereum maximalis and so we we want to make sure that we are really working towards a world where people uh realize that Robinood is all about ownership and we also want to contribute to that part with with crypto. So >> so becoming a digital asset treasury company >> a little bit we still have to work to to get to your stage [laughter] some Bitcoin. >> That's all the time that we have uh for today. Thank you everyone.