How $100 Billion of Crypto Investing is Coming to the Blockchain
all right everybody welcome back we got another amazing guest here on the crypto 101 podcast I’m your host Bryce um as always joined by my notorious Compadre Mr Brendan vman Brendan how are you doing today Bryce I am doing fantastic we are in a post having environment and I could not be more stoked about it IM good it’s like when you hit 18 you feel like a grown up you’re in that next stage of life well that’s how we are in the post Bitcoin having environment over here we are in the next stage of bitcoin’s evolution and thus the next stage of cryptocurrency’s evolution as a whole yeah you are spot on man uh it is a whole new world I mean it’s been four years um obviously we’re recording this just you know a couple days after uh the having that occurred um it was a big big you know hoopla me and Bron live streamed on YouTube um I think there’s been something like four or 5,000 people that have have watched that live stream now at this point and I popped a bottle of Vu we had a lot of fun it was uh a really exciting moment because it was really the light at the end of the tunnel after what was really a a long bare Market all throughout 2022 kind of the first half of 2023 people always pointed to the Beacon of Hope kind of the light at the end of the tunnel it was always the having right the having always gets us out of the worst bare markets um and sure enough here we are we hit a new all-time high before the having which now this is the the fourth having and it’s the first time that we’ve ever hit a new all-time high uh before the having so people are really excited I think that that fact right there is evidence of just kind of the demand that’s coming into the market that the market can’t even contain itself the Market’s tripping over itself to get exposure to this new asset class and it’s primarily the big money it’s primarily the folks that haven’t had the opportunity to enter the crypto space at scale with ease uh the institutions right and these institutions uh right now they their flows are you know being you know primarily coming in through these Bitcoin ETFs which just launched and you you saw I mean there was uh you know hundreds of millions of dollars a day for for weeks on ends uh of inflows and inflows into this this uh this new asset class right digital currency um Wisdom Tree was was one of the uh issuers of one of these Bitcoin ETFs that has just been wildly successful um we’re bringing actually on uh a gentleman from Wisdom Tree today not to talk about the ETFs particularly but to talk about all of the other stuff that Wisdom Tree is doing here in the crypto space they are a you know billion you know multi-billion dollar asset manager um and trafi sort of institution uh they’re making waves in the crypto space so there is gonna be a lot to talk about clearly I’m really excited about Jason Guthrie who’s the head of digital asset products at Wisdom Tree Prime um Jason thanks for joining us how are you doing today I’m I’m really well guys thanks so much for having me on the show yeah man uh there’s a lot going on how did you celebrate the having let me just start things off there did you a bottle of V not a bottle of V but I uh I had a beer and then got back to work there you go there you go somebody’s got to do it right um no cool so so look you you uh as we were catching up before the show I mean your your background um is expansive uh in finance in digital assets uh you are the guy for the job so before we talk about actually what Wisdom Tree is what you guys are doing we we actually want to get to know you um tell us a little bit about your background and what got you to uh being the head of products for digital assets which is I think you know the the coolest job at any traditional Financial firm um how did you land this and and kind of what got you into it yeah sure so uh my background is look I come from traditional Finance I’ve worked in uh sort of Banks and asset managers my whole career um primarily in in ETFs right that’s wisdom Tre is a big ETF sponsor and that’s how I came here I used to be heading Capital markets for their European operations I did something similar at Deutsche Bank uh kind of prior to that um I was lucky enough to have a a close friend of mine that was really into Bitcoin early on um a guy with like technology cyber security background and you know I think this is a similar story to a lot of people I used to be a skeptic uh of blockchain of Bitcoin of of kind of the whole space and as I say I was lucky enough to have this friend that you know just persist with me until I eventually you know read the white paper and dug into things thinking I was going to like prove him wrong and then became a complete convert to it um and I think a lot of people have a very similar story to that so you know I started getting really interested in it personally doing a lot of research into as you say starting with Bitcoin but very quickly going down the rabbit hole of um ethereum smart contracts and and kind of seeing the potential for what this could do for financial markets we’re moving intermediaries driving efficiencies you know an internet for Value transfer as opposed to information transfer is a really really exciting thing if you’re a nerd about you know Financial Logistics like I am um from there you know I was lucky enough that wisdom trees an Innovative forward-looking company we still founder L um despite the fact where you know publicly listed and been around a long time and we’re always trying to push the edges on Innovation so I was lucky enough that there were a handful of projects that were relating to the space that I got to be involved in helped structure a range of tracker products uh for the European business like you know similar to the uh ETFs that have launched in the US but you know looking at Bitcoin ethereum we built a few indices launched a few baskets um as well as made a few strategic investments in the space and from there sort of the ambition and appetite at Wisdom Tree to do more and more just grew and you know I was lucky enough to being on the ground floor and help them structure and drive these early projects which we’ve now turned into a whole new division at the company and I’m lucky enough to lead the product outfit for them yeah I think that’s the best way to get started in crypto is to come in from the lenses of a skeptic because then you really get to understand the technology and why you believe what you believe and why you put your your hard-earned money behind it right you know a lot of people come in with Blind Faith and they’re like oh I’ve heard about this Bitcoin thing it seems good maybe I’ll put money into it but really understanding the thesis behind like why this is now one of the fastest growing trillion dollar asset classes in history and so you know one of the things I took note of is that you said uh prior to your current position you know you are one of the the head guys that was spearheading crypto etps over in Europe so did you come across anything that like really stood out to you during that time maybe it’s like a cool metric or or different kinds of adoption that stood out to you like what was some of your favorite findings during that time period I think one of the the most interesting things that that we kind of realized when we were doing this was you know a lot of the questions and skepticism that you get from um investors when it comes to this focus on like it’s it’s about the security or about you know what bitcoin’s getting used for is it nefarious purposes on the internet those sort of things but a lot of that ends up I think being a lot of quite a big red herring in terms of like what people’s like real objections are I think most of it comes down to like either they just haven’t had exposure and don’t want to look at it or I think more fundamentally there’s an access problem for these type of things every time something new comes along it might be great but if they don’t know how to go about getting into it and how to do you know like even the basic things with the uh with the asset class itself people you know don’t put the effort in to kind of do it and I think that was one of the big initial problems or hurdles to adoption that we sort of solved by launching these tractor products is it enabled people to get exposure with their like completely existing process right so the same you know trading flow the same like Risk Management reporting things that are really important to like that institutional space it let them take exposure to the asset class that way and we found that it was like a really good Gateway for okay well I can get exposure it’s been well performing now I have a little bit of a grasp of the technology like what else can we do with it and I think that that was a really powerful kind of realization for me is like making these things accessible and understandable is kind of the key to getting it out there into the world totally no and and I think um you know Wisdom Tree I mean as an as an ETF business it’s really the perfect business um to be at the Forefront of of crypto um you know it’s two Innovative Technologies that are both emerging I mean if you look at the flows from you know traditional Finance where are all the traditional Finance flows going they’re from mutual funds to ETF uh funds right and so then if you look at like you know um you know crypto it’s just like this kind of liquidity black hole that’s just a one-way sort of people kind of come in and they don’t really ever leave it’s Hotel California um and so being at the the marriage of both that it’s a great business um so I’m I’m curious about the history you know wisdom trees history with crypto have you been there since the start of wisdom trees’s history with crypto um did you lead those efforts did you kind of come on as uh an additional you know kind of uh partner is they’ve already been doing it for a long time is this their first fourway just give us a little history yeah no I’ve been there there since day one I love uh what you just said there about you know flow of funds going from mutual funds to ETFs and and and now what comes next the Genesis of um look our whole blockchain tokenization crypto Journey came from uh you know a question posed by our founder which was like we saw this technology like can this do to ETFs what atfs did to mutual funds that’s the Genesis of how we got into it as a company so exactly what you just hit on that’s exactly where we came from uh and from that sort of all of this this kind of sprung you know it really did start with with small projects like looking about how we could get access how we could provide access to the major cryptocurrencies Bitcoin ethereum those were the tracker products we also you know took a really really Keen interest early on in uh tokenization and because that’s like there’s a direct corer between what ETFs did to mutual funds and what tokenization has has the potential to do um the thing that I really love about that ETF story was you know is that you know I think the reason that it was a successful is not the one that most people talk about right everybody talks about you know oh intraday trading that was this huge you know technology improvement over what mutual funds used to do but I don’t actually think that that’s it like the biggest thing here was access um if you had an online brokerage account you got access to any ETF listed in that ecosystem because it was really just leveraging the equities Market technology right you got access to any ETF that that existed and from any issuer that ever had existed or ever would would exist in the future previously mutual funds got away with charging like two and 20 because they really like restrained your access to just their platform just their products so they weren’t pushed and I think this is also why because people have better access they have way more Choice innovators have been issuers sorry have been forced to innovate on the metrics that matter to Consumers which is price and product innovation um and we’ve seen that really aggressively happen through the ETF space driving down costs putting out more product doing more Innovative products um I see the same thing with tokenization and we’re no longer just talking about a technology that gives access to like anyone with a brokerage account in a given country but rather we’ve now got an internet native piece of infrastructure that can give access to like anybody that’s that’s you know got an internet connection um really anybody that’s got a smartphone and that sort of potential for like scale and reach and efficiency and disintermediation I think is going to be incredibly powerful and the number of people that you can potentially get products and services in front of I think is going to be exponentially higher in the future man you couldn’t you couldn’t have really I mean said said it better I think that gets to the core of of what um you know a lot of these efforts are um with these web3 initiatives and web 3 companies being able to get folks all around the world um the 8 billion people in quickly growing people all around the world in fact the demographics and some of the emerging markets and the developing markets are astronomically growing quicker than the developed worlds over here in the west and all that kind of stuff um so that’s one thing I mean there’s a a huge economy that that uh we need to be able to um you know interact with essentially um and give them the same tools and resources that have helped us have this incredibly developed world with lending and borrowing and access to Capital and all these really amazing things um that you know right now a lot of the the world doesn’t really have um for for one reason or another I think a lot of it is regulation and stuff like that um and so crypto and blockchain blows the doors open off that and I’m curious how Wisdom Tree thinks about um interacting with for instance you know customers right would they be your customers would you be a broker I mean I know a lot of this stuff is still being fleshed out but you know how do we think about banking the unbanked um with a A system that Wisdom Tree Prime is building yeah absolutely so I think there’s a couple of things you’ve hit on here but a lot of it relates I think to sort of efficiency and stability of um of the infrastructure that we’re working with right we’ve the financial system right now in in even the most developed parts of the world has been built on top of itself for better part of a century right um you know do you know why it’s called a wire transfer because it used to be done by telegram oh right that’s how West that’s what Western Union used to be it was a telegram company that worked out that if you could you know you could send a message vior code down to Telegram and have pots of money at each end that’s how people sent it right deposit at one end they hand it out from the pile the other it’s still called a wire today right based on us sending telegrams around um and so it’s just an anecdote to say that like we’ve been building this thing incrementally for a very long time and as a result there’s a lot of parties involved and there are a lot of Choke points in the system that make it kind of very you know relatively inefficient um versus I think what we could get to um if we if we kind of have a first principles approach to doing things and I think the reason that we get a lot of people boxed out you mentioned like banking the unbanked but the reason that people you know don’t get access to financial services estimates from the treasury by the way like 20% of the US population is underserved by the existing system oh wow it’s really just because of these like inefficiencies uh it ends up being very complicated very expensive to service sort of low value clients and so not through kind of malice of the companies involved right now but just because of the nature of the the ecosystem and the costs that come along with it it ends up not being profitable to serve them and at the end of the day they are businesses and they’re there to make money so you know I I think by smoothing a lot of this out it will just lower these barriers to entry lower the cost of serving these people allowing them access to it I think that’s really really powerful and you know when you talk internationally those choke points or marketing efficiencies become even more kind of aute the one I love to talk about is or the example I like to use is El Salvador where it’s like 40% it’s like 30ish percent of their GDP comes from like crossb remittance which is primarily people working in the US sending money home right huge chunk of their their GDP comes from that um Western Union makes $400 million a year off El Salvador and this is a country where people live on a few thousand doll a year like that that’s a huge chunk of just like crossborder payment Revenue that’s taken out from that’s taken out from those people if we can drop that down by again just and their role in the system is just to sit between essentially two banks in each places and send messages right that’s what 4 might be why might be why El Salvador has really got the pedal to the metal on absolutely and and the idea that these guys wanted to to move into that into this technology space to kind of you know make it a creative for their people just to keep that money for themselves like that seems pretty obvious to me um and so I think you know as we say internet native way of doing these things without requiring someone in the middle is going to be really efficient for these people and allow them much much better access yeah no awesome um well tell us you know what exactly um outside of the uh the ETFs that widom tree has outside of any of that what are you working on at Wisdom Tree Prime that you’re really excited about that is going to turn the crypto industry upside down look we we’ve got a big big focus of two things we want to bring uh mainstream assets on chain so this is about tokenization real world assets is the way people kind of talk about this but I just talk about bringing traditional assets on chain so that we can normalize the experience with the new asset class the new way of dealing things um so we have a tokenization platform where we’ve uh tokenized I think it’s 11 now uh 40 act mutual funds so a US focused to start with uh covering all the asset classes so equities bonds money market funds Etc um in in order to allow people to utilize this infrastructure to to hold move this value around um and we’re then making wisdom free Prime which is our direct to Consumer application that allows people to easily in a familiar way no seed phrases no private Keys No browser extensions this sort of stuff um to sort of hold and interact with these tokenized exposures right so day one it looks very similar to to sort of a a fund app or an investing app that you might have um that will have both like you know traditional exposures funds we’ve got some asset allocation products as well as well as crypto all sitting next to each other all sort of acting in a standardized way which I think is a pretty unique thing like the idea that we can collapse um what’s probably two or three apps in your phone today into one I think is really powerful and allow these things to operate in a in a similar manner try to connect all of this to like daily financial services that people need so you know we’ve got banking Partners so there’s a debit card attached to this you can get an A and account routing number if you want to get your salary deposited um and then working very heavily on connecting this product to the white a digital asset ecosystem right to allow value to move in and out of us sort of seamlessly quickly with finality um and as we see that ecosystem grow we know that like the digital asset ecosystem is is still relatively nent we see people trying to bring interesting Innovative products from sort of trading solutions to sort of Consumer loans and everything in between on chain and I’m a huge believer that you know if we can connect this ecosystem and not have walls up around our products but allow people to like seamlessly move it from one service to another um that they’re just going to have a much easier life you know managing their their financial matters yeah one of the things that I’ve noticed is that a lot of the Trad five players that were involved with the various Bitcoin Spa ETFs that were just approved are all showing interest in tokenization and rwas now and that kind of like begs the question because every time we have a a podcast like this price it feels like the the topic of rwas and tokenization just keeps coming up yeah and so my question here you know why are all of the big you know trafi institutional players like yourself interested in the tokenization in rwa uh space but also like what are the main benefits when it comes to tokenization yeah why are all the cool kids doing it yeah what how do we get into the cool Club so look this is something we’ve been working on for a long time I think a lot of it it tends to come down to like efficiency um transferability and liquidity these are like the three big highlevel topics that that people talk about this now like to to Really reach the full potential we we talk about it like at scale after we get you know the next couple trillion dollars sort of flow into the space but you know if you look at markets today they are heavily intermediated and again it’s simply because we’ve been building a system on top of itself for better part of a 100 years if you invest in an ETF today which is nominally the most efficient way for you to go about your investment exposure um there uh they they estimate between like an advised investment there’s about 4% taken out in the US or Europe in one of the developed markets so by the time you pay your advisor you pay the ETF fee uh that e at some point you will have traded that ETF so you’ve probably got a broker in the middle as well uh they faced off against a market maker or a bank who faces off against an exchange that has a clearing house underneath it there’ll be a market maker on the other side who will have gone and bought the who will have subscribed to the ETF from the issuer which will result in new shares getting created and that ETF uh issuer will have a portfolio manager that’s gone out to another broker to buy those underlying stocks right everybody in that chain gets paid and it all exists for a reason and markets have been getting more and more efficient over the years but a lot of it really is around like who’s got access to which part of the system and how do we reconcile one piece against the other um the big reason that like people are looking at this spaces we can see the benefits for efficiency the ability for these things to move around natively we can you know drive down the number of people that are required to do the same thing again that’s just money back to the end investor um I think also reach is a huge one right we you know again this is internet native technology the number of people that you can get to the way in which you can get to them uh is you know I think just going to have a much greater scale capacity than what we’ve uh what we’ve seen in markets today right now if you’re a product Creator and financial services you have to enter every single Market discreetly that all have their own technology stack set of service providers and intermediaries that you need to deal with that is a very laborious process that’s not going away over night right like you know these systems tend to exist side by side or you know it takes time for them to transition but the potential to you know drive down the complications associated with that is huge um and so I think the fact that these guys are looking at it is starting to become obvious we’ve been here for a few years now um but you know as people are it’s become obvious that this isn’t going anywhere and so more and more people are coming to play yeah it’s so fascinating all those things that you mentioned um just about increasing the efficiencies across businesses um it reminds me a lot of the hype uh surrounding AI right now I mean think about all the efficiencies um that a business gets by incorporating AI helping people do tasks you know 10 times faster Etc um even the things that we haven’t even like thought up you know there the AI is going to be doing so much more than we could even imagine right now um it’s going to be even uh coding itself and auditing its own code it’s going to be crazy um but there are similar efficiencies I think that you know blockchain is unlocking here as you’ve described um in the capital markets and so I could see um you know of course the the main narrative in this bull market for stocks and stuff is like AI right like that’s the underlying driver of GDP growth and all that kind of stuff um do you think in the next bull market uh blockchain or tokenization might be that underly driver like the the E uh the economics of it could actually be that substantial uh look I potentially absolutely uh I think that we don’t quite know what the business models are yet that are going to do that right I think we’re still quite early with this as a technology I make tons of Internet analogies when I do this kind of stuff right and I but I think it’s a really really sort of Apt one in that you know the internet comes along we’re in 98 um you don’t know like what Netflix you didn’t know that Netflix was going to be what it is we didn’t know that streaming was going to completely disrupt you know media but it ended up doing it that was a new emerging business model as a result of you know that information sharing technology you know what we have here is a technology that is for financial services and you know we’re going to see the business models evolve as you get more reach more scale more and more consumers coming in absolutely so when you’re looking at you know different uh assets um and different things that are inside of the Wisdom Tree Prime app uh you know how do you determine what you want to tokenize because there’s so many different assets that can be tokenized out there whether you’re looking at gold or bonds or equities or or any other kind of traditional asset whatever that may be um when you’re like narrowing it down what does it kind of come down to uh so I think that over time it’s going to be everything right but where we start is what we think is most usable for people day one right so the building blocks for people’s portfolios big market equities bonds money market funds for savings products I think are really really powerful as well um so that’s really where we start but I see the potential for this to kind of be everything and that would be you know the investment asset classes things like loans your mortgage your house deck value things that are value and unique to you this might also include things like your credit score um tokenization has a potential for anything that you has value to you that you want control of that you want more transferability more transparency blockchain and tokenization are great for that I think the one thing that is is kind of pretty known is once you get into and understand the nuances of Technology interacting with value in the tokenized world in the digital asset world is way better than it is in the traditional Finance world and people want to live more of their financial lives in that space once they get in it all moving value from like a metam master coinbase is way easier than moving it from bank to bank and so the more that we can put in there the more control people have and and the better it will be so I think it will be everything over time but we start with what they want most right now which is like the big chunk of their Investments totally yeah it’s one of those things that I’m seeing um it’s pretty incredible with how um Investments um are really merging with culture as well and lifestyle particularly just these nfts for instance um or meme coins even um in you know is it gambling is it investing all that kind of stuff who who’s to say probably more more gambling and more collecting uh than it is actual investing if you’re referencing nfts and meme coins um but there’s still a big market for for gambling and for meme coins um there’s still billions of dollars of value that people ascribe to and all that kind of stuff and so for instance um like coinbase they have a prime brokerage Ser you know Prime Services they’ve got exchanges they’ve got OTC institutional stuff but they also have bass um and bass is this wild west world that um you know they um allow meme coins and nfts and all that kind of stuff and you know I guess my question to you what is is does Wisdom Tree see a future or or anything like that where on Wisdom Tree Prime people can hold their nfts people can have a you know a self custodia custodial wallet where they could hold their meme coins in in any tokens that they want um that they deem you know is their right to hold and trade and all that stuff yeah so I I think there’s potential for sort of all of this to to kind of come together definitely where we’re starting is trying to bring like the regulated Financial Services end of things um into you know into this blockchain environment we want to make sure that this stuff is like through the front door that it’s accepted that people have protections right not all regulation that’s in existence is implemented in an optimal way but like the principle for why it’s there is great we don’t want to see people getting likeold complicated products there’s a long history of these things happening and this stuff is there for a reason but you know trying to bring these on chain I just think expands the universe for what people have got where it ends up in terms of you know what the demand for like Collectibles and things like that are like you know plenty of people love baseball cards and Pokemon cards and this kind of stuff nfts are very similar and that’s got a lot of value and adds a lot of utility to people and so I think the ability to kind of bring it together into one place is is is a worthwhile Endeavor um we’ll need to see where that market settles we’re definitely starting at at kind of the other end but I do see a future where all of this ends up in one place yeah I mean which which blockchains do you think is going to support this kind of infrastructure um we see a lot of different groups looking at the space of tokenization and and bringing these assets on I mean just recently we saw Black Rock right with the with the bidle fund and the thing that surprised me there is that instead of maybe building their own layer one or building their own blockchain they said no we’re going to do this on ethereum so do you think that that sets like the precedent do you think that that sets the standard for other groups to come in and maybe use ethereum or do you think that there’s a place um for maybe other things whether that’s like Avalanche or salana or another competitor that is that’s out there or maybe even the question is is better posed as private blockchains versus public blockchains right like you know do you think there’s a room for both maybe yeah so I think that that’s uh that’s the right framing right I tend to use permission versus you know publicly available rather than private because you can obviously you know carve out a section on a blockchain that requires permissioning um I I’m very big on um on public blockchains I think the Innovation that we’ve seen in that space is is massive um I am also a big believer in like that there will be a multi-chain future like I don’t think what we got now there’s probably too many and maybe the ones that are going to live you know ‘t in existence today we’re still in a very early Innovative sort of phase of this but I do think that like there’s going to be different chains for different use cases right like the transaction if you want to do a retail application that’s based all on chain the transactional costs associated with ethereum when it gets it’s just not going to work but for high value transactions if you’re doing $5 million minimum Clips which is what the Black Rock fund is what’s to 200 bucks of transaction costs in that right it ends up being much smaller so high value things your property deed going on ethereum Main net probably not a big deal but if you’re trying to pay for a cup of coffee it’s not very economical right so I think when I think about this I’m very very focused on like what’s the use case what is the um like what are the characteristics of the blockchain that we need to make that work and then let’s get the best solution for that um from our perspective you know we’ve been working with several guys we do a lot with Stella we work with Avalanche we’re going to do um plenty on ethereum as well and it really is about like what’s the use case where does the value get added and and therefore what characteristics do we need yeah I think it makes a lot of sense um love it now when we uh talk about you know kind of some of this Innovation that’s coming on uh you know a lot of it’s actually starting to come back onto Bitcoin which is cool to see with ordinals and runes and so you know I definitely don’t want to slight Bitcoin and of course I think bitcoin’s gotten the the butt of a lot of jokes with how slow it moves and all that kind of stuff but it serves its role um but we can’t deny the fact that there’s like Capital forming um on other chains on other ecosystems there’s interest um all that kind of stuff and and Brendan mentioned a couple with salana and Avalanche and paulyon um all this kind of stuff and and we’re not going to ask you to choose the winners and and give us your crystal ball like you know which is going to be the best one and stuff but I guess my question is like you know the next ETF for instance that might come to play uh people are speculating I think Wisdom Tree actually even has an uh ETF application out for the ethereum ETF and so the logical sort of Next Step you hear you see and even Larry fin said like the Black Rock Bitcoin ETF is the first step into tokenization and like asset token like bringing these crypto assets into ETFs and stuff so like do you see a world in which like there’s many uh crypto ETFs and um would would Wisdom Tree Prime be a place um that people could hold their ETFs is Wisdom Tree you know gonna issue more ETFs all that kind of stuff uh yeah so look I think there’s a couple of points in there right so um on the ETF front I think people will continue to launch you know whatever they see demand for and what they can what they’re going to be allowed to do by the regulator and there’s a ven diagram there and and you know you’ll continue to see issuers put out um you know what whatever they’re able to in that space they’ve obviously proved to be popular the asset class has demand people want access um so I think they’re kind of undeniable facts it tends to come in my experience like it’ll go down the the market cap table that’s really how these things come into existence so you know Bitcoin is first ethereum is likely to be second and we’ll see where it where it kind of goes from there I think with Wisdom Tree Prime um it’s really more about providing an alternative way to get exposure to these so Bitcoin and ethereum are both available in in Wisdom Tree Prime today and you know as we see demand will continue to expand the access this is done in a like more direct way through Wisdom Tree Prime so it’s not the ETF itself but you know we tokenized Bitcoin and made that available inside the the tokenized platform um and so you know we’re really about providing access to as many exposures as we possibly can down all the routes that make sense for our client base whether that be the token o formed through Wisdom Tree prime or or or through the traditional rapper in the ETFs I think this idea of like providing the widest possible access to the widest possible set of assets is incredibly powerful puts a lot of you know control and power back in the investor hands yeah you know one of the things that we were talking about right before we started off the Pod was just about on- ramping the Next Generation and I think there’s a lot of people it’s not just you know the older Generations there’s a lot of people everywhere that look at crypto and they say you know I don’t fully understand it I don’t know if I want to get into it you know what do you think is the best way to onramp those people because this is starting to go Beyond just cryptocurrency right I mean we’re talking about all the different use cases that can kind of be associated with it so like what is the easiest most seamless way to to onboard everyone in like the next stages you know there’s always that 2030 number that it’s talking about onboarding a billion people by 2030 like how do we do that effectively uh look this uh might seem you know speaking to my own area but I I honestly believe it’s by building good product on top of this technology build good user experiences build things people want or build something that is an order of magnitude better than what they get today and I truly believe that this technology has the power to really do that for financial services um and I also don’t really think most people need to understand how blockchain Works in order to take advantage of it if you’ve got a good user experience that abstracts away all the sharp edges of it they should never know that it’s a token not a share um that underlies nobody knows the technology for an exchange Works no one understands a CSD find me anyone that can you know any person that doesn’t work in the space that can explain fixed messaging or the Swift Network or anything like that right they have no need to but all of those things power your brokerage and your bank today um you just don’t need to know what you need to know is that you know you’ve got your value there that it was easy to transfer around that you’ve got 24-hour access to it um and that you’ve you know got control and understanding of your money and that it’s working for you and I think we can make products and user experiences that are just better than what exists today by using this technology to uh to kind of the full potential and by iterating the business models by removing intermediaries and so how do we get the next billion people on well I think they show up without knowing that they actually are in a in a blockchain enabled space I love that I think that goes for all spaces right I mean like when we look at bringing people on crypto you know I’ve always been a big advocate of web 3 and decentralized Gam gaming and the conversations uh that I’ve had with people is we need to create a good game a good product a good service first because if that’s not there then why should they care in the first place like you can you can’t even get someone to play a bad game that is coming from a traditional method you know why are they going to care if there is blockchain involved unless the underlying product or service or game or you fill in the blank there whatever it is unless that is good and is going to impact and improve their life first and if that happens then I completely agree with you you know the people will just naturally come afterwards so I just wanted to Echo that point it stood out to me and I thought it was a killer response yeah build build it and they will come absolutely hey no Jason I want to know actually kind of along those same lines in kind of in in closing um what other products or I guess I should say from your product Viewpoint what other companies or ecosystems are out there that are doing a really good job of user experience user interface um that you think is probably worth it for our listeners to check out uh look it’s it’s a really good question the the space is pretty nent and people are doing um you know interest like we’re trying to cut the industry in a lot of different ways you you guys have referenced bass a few times I I think what coinbase is trying to do is really interesting and they are trying to push the envelope a little in terms of like what a browser based wallet extension and integrating with the mobile app I I like that into playay I think that that’s clever and I do like the commitment from the company that they’re pushing things um that they are trying to push more and more on chain despite you know what their traditional business is so that’s been really impressive to see um I think the guys at Republic you know trying to integrate uh tokenized wallets into their sort of crowdfunding offering an early stage venture has been a really interesting use case for that as well um from like more the technology sort of side of things there are you know a handful of people are doing interesting things to make uh the space um I think more accessible and more more usable without kind of calling out anyone specifically I’ve paying very close attention to um what people are doing around kind of more privacy preserving transactions and how we can push that down on chain not to say that that’s a user experience in and of itself but I think the ability to build better kind of connectivity peer-to-peer experiences around that is going to be really important so I’m on the lookout for for that kind of stuff as well awesome well hey Jason this was awesome man um incredibly informative and we’re super excited to check out Wisdom Tree Prime um can you give us uh any any uh Intel on where to you know kind of stay apprised of uh everything going on any website social media are you guys on Discord how do you guys operate AB absolutely so look uh wisdomtree prime.com uh if you want to go check out the website we’re available uh in the app store for for both apple and uh Google in 34 states uh currently and we’re pushing hard to get get all the licenses up for the rest of them so hopefully we’re we’re Nationwide soon uh if you’re looking for announcements our website follow us on socials Wisdom Tree primes account you can find me at guthi uh on Twitter as well um these are normally the best ways to stay up to date and we we’re pushing updates sort of every month every other week I love it hey well next time there’s a there’s another big announcement or partnership or whatever you guys come back on and we’ll have another uh Round Table discussion here on the crypto 101 podcast this was super awesome and uh we appreciate your Insight and your time today no absolutely guys this was really great thanks for having me cool take care uh to all you crypto 101 listeners at home we always appreciate your time thanks for listening and we’ll see you back same time same time same place next week
In this episode of Crypto 101, Bryce Paul and Brendan Viehman interview Jason Guthrie who is the Head of Product, Digital Assets at Wisdom Tree. This episode focuses on exploring the convergence of traditional financial assets and blockchain technology as Wisdom Tree looks to be a leader in Tokenization and Blockchain enabled finance space with their new offering Wisdom Tree Prime. They delve into the impact of Bitcoin’s recent halving and its significance in advancing cryptocurrency adoption, highlighting the role of ETFs in attracting institutional investors. Jason shares his journey from traditional finance to becoming a leading figure in digital asset products at Wisdom Tree, emphasizing the importance of tokenization in improving the accessibility and efficiency of financial services. The discussion also covers Wisdom Tree Prime’s efforts in integrating blockchain with traditional investment products, aiming to offer a seamless and secure platform for a diverse range of assets.
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1 Comment
when was this episode recorded?