Evolving Money: The Tokenization Tipping Point (Sponsored Content)

Since you're a subscriber to this Bloomberg podcast, we thought you'd be interested in a sponsored podcast called "Avolving Money." Produced by Coinbase and Bloomberg Media Studios, it explains how institutional investors are adopting the world's newest asset class, crypto. Here's a recent episode. There's been a lot of frustration in the crypto community over the past 15 years because the Wall Street and financial services industries have ignored crypto or outright been opposed to it. That's Rick Edelman, a long-time financial advisor and podcaster in the financial world and the perfect guess to kick off this episode of "Avolving Money." The reason that there has been such antipathy about crypto in its early years is because it didn't get invented by Wall Street and Wall Street doesn't like what it doesn't control and own. So better to quash it if you can, ignore it if you can't and they did that pretty successfully for 10 years. But eventually they began to realize it's here to stay and oh by the way the technology is in fact pretty cool. Welcome to "Avolving Money" I'm your host Angie Lau. I spent decades as a journalist covering the financial industry and wealth. This is the biggest story yet. This show is co-produced by Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency platforms in the world and Bloomberg Media Studios. In this series we are exploring how crypto is being adopted by traditional financial institutions as the next logical evolution of the monetary system. This episode is about tokenization. That's the process of representing a real-world asset or financial instrument on blockchain. Now in less than three years the amount of tokenized assets has grown eightfold to more than 30 billion US dollars across equities fixed income, private assets, real estate and a whole lot more and the tokenization revolution is still in its early stages. Now recently we've seen some of the largest traditional asset management companies embrace it in a big way. This is what I'm talking about. BlackRock. They've launched what they call the "Biddle Fund" on Ethereum. It's a tokenized money market fund they've made available to qualified investors. The total value of those tokens, around $2.8 billion and then we've got fidelity. They've ruled out their own tokenized money market fund currently valued at over $200 million. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have also made their tokenized assets available to their investors in various ways. But why are they doing it? Well, there are three main drivers. It's got liquidity, broader access and operational efficiency. We're going to touch on all three of those topics with our next two guests. Rick Adelman, who you've already heard from, he launched the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals. The first educational platform helping financial advisors responsibly navigate crypto blockchain and tokenized assets. He's uber bullish on the opportunities tokenization is bringing to the market. And Scott Lucas, head of market's Digital Assets with JP Morgan. He's actively integrating tokenization and blockchain technology into JP Morgan's operations. But he isn't in as much of a hurry as Rick is. And I think it's important to give them both a place to explain their approaches for you. We'll start with Rick. Now, just a few months ago, Rick, you said that by the end of the decade, tokenization will be the dominant investment platform in the industry far-equlipsing ETFs. ETFs, as we know them today, really won't exist in five years. That is quite the prediction, Rick. Why do you see that? Yeah, it does sound as momentous, but it really isn't. It's iterative. It's just the next logical step in technological generation of money management. Remember that ETFs have come on the marketplace of the last 20, 25 years, replacing mutual funds, which were themselves the dominant investment vehicle for Americans for decades and decades. Okay, but mutual funds still hold, I think, about $20 trillion here. That's a huge piece of the investment world. So why do you see ETFs and eventually tokenized products actually eating into that? They're simply technologically superior. ETFs trade throughout the day. Mutual funds are only priced once when the market closes. ETFs have better disclosure. ETFs are lower in taxation. They're lower in cost. They're higher in liquidity. So naturally, people love ETFs over mutual funds. The same thing's going to happen with tokenization. We're going to take those ETF shares and turn them into tokens, which will trade on blockchains. This will further reduce the costs, further increase the liquidity, further increase the broad array of assets available for you to invest in improving your diversification. So what's not to lose? So just as everybody graduated from mutual funds to ETFs, next we're going to go from ETFs to tokens. Do customers want it? Do they understand it? Because at the end of the day, if the customer doesn't want it, the bank is not going to create the product. Well, we all remember Steve Jobs, who famously said he never engaged in focus group testing because nobody understood the products he was inventing. So how could they have a valid opinion? And it's the same thing with blockchain technology. People don't understand it. And so how can they like it? In other words, all we're going to do is develop the technology, introduce the products on that platform and consumers will quickly discover its faster, cheaper, safer with greater transparency and inclusion. So they will move and adopt to this because it's simply going to offer them tremendous benefits that they currently lack. Right now, we can only trade stocks, Monday through Friday, excluding holidays and weekends from 930 to 4 in the afternoon. That's silly. Why aren't we able to do this 24, 7365? Why aren't we able to do it instantaneously? Like when you go to a supermarket to buy a loaf of bread, you walk out with a bread as soon as you pay for it. Why can't we do that with chairs of IBM? You remember back in 2019, we were both in the space then, but one of the world's first real estate tokenization ideas came to light. And it was an aspen. It was St. Regis. They were fractionalizing the sale of their big resort. And I think a fifth of it went for, I think was it 18 million Rick, do you remember? Yeah, and there were 10 bucks a piece. Yeah, each of the tokens. And that was actually the second transaction. The first one was a year earlier, a condo building in Manhattan tokenized. And just think about the wonder of this. See, the big problem with real estate, as we all know, is that it's very expensive to buy. And it's highly illiquid. I mean, we all know how hard it is to buy in cellar house compared to buying and selling shares of Nvidia. So along comes the tokenization process where they could take this multi million dollar asset and split it into tokens of $10 a piece. All of a sudden, people who never were able to buy commercial or investible real estate now can because the price of the token is cheap. And it trades with great liquidity. This opens up the commercial real estate sector to retail investors in a scale never before seen. This is a big deal because the real estate market globally is three times bigger than the global stock market. So Rick, I get it that tokenization makes transactions more straightforward. It makes them quicker. It reduces overhead, all of that. But realistically, I mean, actually how much money will using crypto rails save the banks in overhead? So you look at Kinesis, which is a blockchain created by JP Morgan that does $2 billion a day in cross-border transmitters. They've moved over $4 trillion worldwide since it was conceived four years ago because they recognize they can move money for their institutional clients faster, cheaper and easier than they can using the federal systems that we use in money management such as the Swift system. So everybody's beginning to recognize that this is better technology than the technology we've been using to date. It offers big business benefits saving lots of money. JP Morgan says that blockchain will save banks $120 billion a year. So you're now at the stage where nine out of ten banks are developing blockchain technology. Two out of three Fortune 500 companies are developing the technology. And over the next 12 to 24 months, you're going to see all of them begin to deploy. And it's going to be an exponential growth curve, a traditional hockey stick. And people are going to be shocked at the speed of adoption and implementation in the marketplace. It's going to appear to have come out of nowhere. But it's going to be like the Beatles where they spent, you know, six years becoming an overnight success. Rick, what's next? We have the institutionals coming in. We have the Black Rock, the Franklin Templeton, JPM. All of these folks are coming into this space. How will this look in five years? Well, everything's going to be tokenized, just financial assets such as stocks bonds real estate and and other, but everything is going to be tokenized. For example, your driver's license and passport, why are we carrying a piece of plastic in our wallet or purse? That's ridiculous. Your employment records, your academic records, your health records will all be tokens making it easier for you to deal with the medical industry or when you're applying for a job or trying to run an apartment. You're going to be able to tokenize your home. We all know that homes are the number one asset for most Americans, but they don't want to sell their house when they're retired to generate income. They want to keep living there. So by tokenizing your house, you can take that million dollar home, create one million tokens of a dollar each. And now you can sell them off one at a time as you wish to generate income for yourself. Investors will want to buy it because they're going to want to own a piece of your home because you live in a great community without an appreciating asset. So we're also going to tokenize salaries. For example, you can already buy into a token that is a contract of a professional athlete, your favorite quarterback or your favorite Hollywood celebrity or your favorite recording artist. You can buy a token of their music catalog. So instead of being a fan of Taylor Swift, you'll be able to be an owner of her music along with her so that you're earning money by enjoying your favorite radio show or Hollywood movie or Broadway play. This is going to be the tokenization of everything. We're going to be able to take all these real world assets and create digital representations of them that you'll be able to own and trade and enjoy as a hobby. That's Rick Edelman and what he sees makes him highly enthusiastic about the potential of tokenization. My next guest, however, has a more measured perspective. Scott Lucas is the head of markets, digital assets for JP Morgan, the world's largest bank, and a leader in blockchain usage amongst trad-fi firms. Scott is an expert and a leader in this space and he recently oversaw a very large transaction that caught my attention. In late 2025, JP Morgan served as an arranger for $50 million US dollar commercial paper issuance on Salinas public blockchain. Galaxy Digital, which is a global crypto-focused financial services and infrastructure firm, issued the tokenized commercial papers. Those tokens were purchased by Coinbase and Franklin Templeton with settlement occurring in stablecoin. Now, this was a short-term corporate debt deal done in a traditional finance structure but issued, traded, and settled directly on a public blockchain instead of through legacy banking rails. No doubt it was a landmark deal, but my question is, why did JP Morgan do it? I guess the key thing for us is really trying to understand what their market option is. There's a lot of talk about doing things on public blockchain. There's a lot of talk about the potential. There's a lot of talk about the appetite. I feel actually the only way that we can really pressure test that and prove it and adjust the thesis to kind of where the market needs to go is to do something. But Scott, now that you are using both blockchain and legacy rails for transactions, have you chosen a winner a preferred way forward? Quite often in the blockchain space, it gets really emotional really quickly about what technology you use. It's either this or it's that. You can do it this way or you can do it that way. And really a market, an efficient market does end. So there'll be a whole bunch of products that stay as they work today in a very deep and liquid capital markets footprint in the United States. And there'll be some stuff that we add to that market, whether it be similar products or new products that work on blockchain. And at some point, the market will decide whether blockchain is a better answer or not. And whether it becomes an all blockchain or a no blockchain or a regular technology and blockchain outcome. And to be honest, like that's not our decision. There's Jupin Morgan. I think that's the market's decision. I mean, that's the journey we're on. And I think it's reasonable to say that there's a good thesis to suggest that blockchain is a better technology for a bunch of different instruments in the market. There's no evidence yet. So let's build that body of evidence and make sure that our thesis is correct. And if it's not quite correct in one way, can it go another way and perhaps answer the question separately? So that's really the point of this exercise. If we were to take a 10,000 foot view, and I'm going to ask you to take that pilot's view, if you will, Scott, the amount of money being moved in traditional market channels really dwarves what's moving on chain. If that ratio changes, could those massive amounts of capital be tokenized and handled on blockchain? I think we need to figure out, like, for what purpose those changes would happen. You notice it's already has the most deep and liquid capital markets on the planet. To make those more efficient, you need to kind of say, well, first of all, where are the inefficiencies that we think could be addressed? And second of all, how do those inefficiencies positively impact the market in a way that's worth making the investment to get there? There has been a lot of supply and experimentation with tokenized securities over a range of years. There hasn't been a lot of success in bringing sort of broader market products into production because there hasn't been a broad set of usable cash sources. And when it is much more stable, when it's a growing opportunity exists for stable points to continue to grow, there still aren't an enormous set of scalable cash sources. And so tomorrow, maybe there's cash, maybe there's stable coins, maybe there's tokenized deposits, maybe there's central bank digital currencies and some jurisdictions, maybe there's other means of settling that transaction. And so I think that the question really is, like, how can you match those up? If you've got a sophisticated methodology of choosing the security on a particular platform and they've got multiple choices of the settlement mechanism for that. Like, how does that then get built and how does that work? And again, that's very much a client-driven conversation. You know, it's what are the clients wanna do, where they wanna operate? Do we think we can help them with that? And if we can help them with that, like what's our risk footprint work if they're to take in that sort of, in that area? And that's the same as every other product. If I just on blockchain or not, almost doesn't matter, like we are, ourselves are saying questions every time. How do you support clients? How do we think about our risk footprint? Are we prepared to operate them at space? What are the resources we're gonna put against that? I think there is a fair bit to learn there. And I think that potentially exists, but, you know, we still need to prove the thesis in the market and then, you know, see where the reality takes us. And I think that horizon's pretty open. Scott, the commercial paper transaction we talked about off at the top, that was a really great proof of concept in that specific domain. What other opportunities do you see tokenization bringing to other asset classes besides money markets? If you put something on a distributed ledger with a single record that entitled users can see, it's impossible to disagree. And if impossible to disagree, that yours mind becomes ours. And if it's our record of that instrument, then the way that you think about, and we often talk about this for most of a fixed income standpoint, the way you think about coupon is there's one record. Well, if there's only one record, today we pay coupon on a six monthly or annual basis because there's a lot of overhead around managing that process and checking that process at scale. Well, this is only one record. Why wouldn't you calculate coupon to the millisecond? And then when you trade that instrument, that clean and dirty price associated with the trade at that particular moment is very, very clear. Even if you settle it later, like, that's the rule set. And there's no debate around what that looks like. You can change the frequency of the coupon payment. You could pay daily, weekly, monthly. You could provide optionality around whether you wanted to keep all of the coupon at the same frequency or you wanted a different frequency. And that could be the best of the investor if they want a different credit risk profile. You could be the best of the issue if they want a different liquidity profile. You could embed a smart contract in to manage the interest swap. So the issue is steps out of the equation. And now you've got the bank managing the cash flows directly to the investor, the one who is managing that swap. And then you don't need a very sophisticated finance department who can manage the swap on your behalf because you don't have all the accounting rules and processing, et cetera, around those cash flows. If that's the case, then companies that aren't as mature, aren't as big, et cetera, might be able to access debt capital markets in a way they can't access today. And so when you really think about what tokenization can do, it's not just about faster mobilization and bring more collateral to the table. It's also about like changing the potential for the instruments themselves in a way that enables more utility and enables capital markets to do what capital markets should do, which is get themselves wider and deeper to service the wider economy and economic growth. Like that's the point. We had a conversation with Rick Edelman. He said the tokenization will revolutionize the entire industry. He said that within 10 years, everything will be tokenized and traded on chain. Do you agree? - Possibly bit improbable. And that doesn't mean it shouldn't. It's not a view on whether it's the right choice or not. But I don't think this changes as easy as everyone thinks. There's a big difference between technological readiness. legal readiness, regulatory understanding, then taking risk, then upgrading internal systems. So that just takes a while and I don't care if it takes three years, five years, ten years, 15 years. I don't mind if the whole market changes or some of the market changes. But what we do believe in is there is absolute value in deploying this technology into specific areas of the market. We do believe that there will be scalable market change over time. But to be deterministic around how long that takes or how long that should take, I don't think that's our job. I think that's the market to figure that out. And we'll hopefully help figure it out with the market. Both our guests today agree that tokenized assets are emerging as a powerful tool for investors and investment companies. But where they differ is in the timeline. Rick talks about tokenization taking over within five to ten years, while Scott is monitoring client demand and letting that dictate the pace of adoption. So I want to wrap this episode by going back to Rick Edelman to get his opinion of what it will take to accelerate the rate of institutional adoption and make his bullish prediction come true. A big impediment to adoption has been the lack of clarity by Congress. We don't know what the rules are. We don't know how to engage. We don't have rules for custody. We don't know a taxation is going to be yet. So we're waiting for Congress to create the laws. Once we have the rules of the road and the brokerage industry, the banking industry, the insurance industry, all know how they're allowed to engage. You'll begin to see the massive levels of adoption. I'm Angie Lau and this is Evolving Money, a co-production between Coinbase and Bloomberg Media Studios. Thanks for listening. Be sure to follow the show on your app choice, so you'll always be in the loop when we post a new episode.