# Tokenized Equities: The Next Decade of Financial Infrastructure

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-10-02

## Transcript

I'm actually the most bullish I've ever been since I started in crypto.
five seven years ago tokenized stocks on base did over a billion dollars in volume in their first month and now you can even borrow against your nvidia shares on ave is wall street finally moving on chain and what do investors need to know about all of this hello and welcome to milk road crypto the show that would tokenize itself but the sec only approved 75 stocks per exchange and we didn't quite make the cut i'm your host john gill and today is thursday october 1st and today we are joined by two fantastic guests matt hogan chief investment officer at bitwise Back on the show again, a old friend of Milk Road and Antonio Garcia Martinez, better known as AGM internally at Coinbase.
He is the head of growth at Base, one of the best people in the market to tell us what's going on with tokenization right now.
This is going to be a fantastic episode.
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So keep an ear out for more information on them later in the episode.
But for now, welcome to Milk Road Crypto.
Matt, Antonio, gentlemen, AGM, welcome.
How are you guys?
Matt, I forgot to unmute you.
You're going to have to do another story.
There I am.
I'm back.
That's all right.
AGM can take the lead.
It's great to be here.
It's good to be here with both of you.
It's great to have you.
I do want to start with AGM on this.
I thought a great place to start the conversation would be introducing you to our audience because I think this is your first time on Milkwood Crypto.
Tell us about the path to becoming head of growth at BASE and a little bit about this collaboration with Bitwise here.
Oh, wow.
How much time do we have here, John?
Yeah, it's a slightly twisty tale.
So I was founder of a company called Spindle that got backed by Dragonfly and Multicoin and other investors right around 2022, which...
you know, feels like a long time in crypto years.
It wasn't that long ago in actual years.
NFTs are still a thing.
DeFi hadn't quite taken off yet.
Hyperliquid.
didn't even exist yet, as far as I know.
And Sam, we started a company that was basically on-chain attribution and eventually an ad system.
What that means is someone logs in in an app, in a wallet, whatever, and then does something on-chain and we joined it all together into sort of a user funnel.
So you'd understand where your actual users are coming from.
This is all very known technology in the Web2 world, we basically built the on-chain version for it.
And so Coinbase, which was an investor, eventually acquired us.
that sort of core function of like, oh, something happened in the world, then on-chain value actually happened, kind of morphed eventually into what's become kind of the base growth team.
And what we try to do is measure that funnel and then also incentivize where we can that funnel.
So that means running campaigns to give a little bit more yield on CBE lending, say.
on base, for example, and a few other things that we can get into.
But that's the sort of thing that we do to drive growth on base.
Okay.
Well, I'm really happy to have you on the show.
There's a lot of things driving growth in crypto right now.
One of the biggest ones is tokenization.
And I wanted to talk about that in this conversation two weeks ago, a little bit over two weeks ago.
The SEC put out something called the Innovation Exemption.
They and the CFTC have been working very hard to bring clarity around tokenization.
just in plain English, Matt, you're really great at this, like putting things in terms people can understand.
What's been approved here?
What does this unlock for crypto?
What do we need to know about this?
Yeah, it's a big moment.
If I were to take it at 100,000 foot view, and then maybe we'll go down to 30,000, and then we can go down to three if you want.
At 100,000 foot view, the SEC sort of made accessing tokenized stocks legal for Americans.
A good way to think about tokenization so far was it was very hard to access these.
If you were in the U.S., it was mostly for international users, and they created a pathway for us to get to the point where U.S.
users can access them.
That's the 100,000-foot view.
At a more discreet level, they did a couple of important things.
They allowed tokenized securities venues to operate without being national securities exchanges or ATSs on an exemptive experiment.
level.
So that's like letting them exist and try out this technology without being subject to the same tier of regulation and the same rules that we apply to New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ.
So that's a nice little sandbox.
They also made it possible for AMMs to provide liquidity into the space effectively for us to create this sandbox to see how this works in the US system.
Now, the limits, you mentioned them at the top, limits on number of stocks, limits on size.
But importantly, It opens the door to tokenized stocks in the US.
I think we'll look back at it as a signal moment where we started to make the evolution from the old system to the new system.
AGM, this leads right into a question I had for you, which is that Coinbase's tokenized stocks are still, as I understand it, offshore only.
Does this open the door enough for Coinbase to start moving those onshore and make them available to US customers?
I mean, that's certainly the plan.
We definitely want to move them and offer them to U.S.
users.
We obviously started overseas, as many crypto projects do, for all the reasons that Matt elucidated.
But yeah, no, no, we want to get them on shore.
I mean, look, the big advantage here is that, you know, when I started on Wall Street, we still had, Matt probably remembers, we had T plus three settlement for stocks.
And then I think incrementally, like in the 90s, they got to T plus two.
I think we're at T plus one now, but it's still like hyper slow.
Like the AMMs that Matt talked about will literally do the trade in a second and that's it.
Like it's T plus two seconds.
It's not a day, right?
And so like that advantage, plus all the other things we're going to talk about in the show, I think is part of the reason why.
like it's inevitable that we kind of get to the point where even US equities, it's not this weird offshore oddity.
It's like, and most users aren't even going to know it.
They're just going to go to a new bank and buy a share of Nvidia and they're going to have Nvidia and there's going to be a stock split and dividends and all that.
It's all going to work.
And they're not going to know the rails they run on in the same way that nobody knows what T plus one is, but that's going to be kind of the future.
Yeah, except for they do know when they sell the stock and they have to sell someone money and they have to wait a day for it to settle.
I mean, it is worth noting, you know, we, we, we, we rush over these things but t plus one is absurd right when we went to t plus one you may remember this agm bloomberg ran a article that said stocks settle the fastest in 100 years which meant that we just caught up to where we were settling stocks in the 1920s Think about any other space where we're like catching up with the 1920s.
It's completely ridiculous.
So yeah, I think users won't notice that much of a difference except for settlement will make that money instantly available to them.
And the tokenized version will be easier for collateral.
There'll be all these nice benefits as well.
Just want to pause for a quick second to remind you all that the crypto bull market is back.
I have been deploying capital into altcoins that I think are going to do very well this bull market.
Some of them are already up over 2x from where I entered.
So if you want to see what's in my portfolio, what's on my watch list, and have access to me in Discord to ask questions 24 hours a day, join Milkroad Pro now.
The link is in the description.
It's just a dollar.
I'll see you there.
Okay.
AGM, I have another question around this.
The rules that the SEC has laid out say that a tokenized version of a security has to carry the same rights as the real share does.
So this includes dividends, voting rights, all that.
How big of a lift is that for Coinbase to do technically?
Or are you already pretty much there?
Like what's that gulf look like?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that was a super hard part, actually.
And I'm the face of it here, but I'm not even the guy who deserves credit for getting this through.
But yeah, when you own a base equity, you have voting.
and dividend rights.
The shares are actually custodied by somebody somewhere.
Even if Coinbase were to go blow up tomorrow, you'd still own the shares, right?
And that means you actually own a share of it.
So dividends are typically a multiplier.
It's like, I'll own a share of Google and somehow I get 1.05 shares of Google, which then obviously gets realized when I sell it.
How voting is going to work, you have voting rights.
How voting is going to work is a little bit TBD.
We don't actually have it baked into the app yet.
But yeah, no, it's coming.
That's the key part to it.
Not to mention some of the competing stocks here necessarily, but it's very easy to have something that nominally represents the stock.
But frankly, it's just Vibes maintaining the lock with the off-chain world.
But in this case, there's a mint redeem window.
In the same way that if you have an ETF...
whose nav is like in lockstep with like the underliers because somebody is actually either selling the ETF and buying the stocks and vice versa depending on how slightly it is out of whack.
You have the exact same phenomenon going on with base tokens, right?
So you're kind of locked together because there actually is real value going from off chain to on depending on how pricing works.
So it's as real as anything can be real effectively.
Yeah, no, and I think that what I wanted to highlight with that question is exactly that Coinbase has gone let's say a different route on some of these things than some competitors and that differentiates the product there.
Matt, I've heard you compare this moment to Nvidia right after ChatGPT came out and you said that this is when most of the gains came after everyone could see it.
Why do you think that tokenization is at this point right now?
And walk us through what you think happens from here.
Well, I mean, I was trying to respond to investors who were like, I missed it.
It already happened.
It's already priced into these assets.
They're up 10, 12, 13%.
And I was trying to make the point that like, If you decided AI was going to be important, not just after ChatGPT came out, but a year later after ChatGPT came out and you invested in the most obvious stocks like NVIDIA, you did exceptionally well.
Like most of the gains did not come from ChatGPT3 in the first year.
They've actually come more recently.
When you're investing in megatrends, it's completely fine to miss the first 10, 15, 20, 25, even 100%.
In the case of tokenization, There's $300 billion of tokenized assets worldwide, maybe $350 billion.
There's $674 trillion of assets worldwide.
So this thing could 2,200x before it penetrates the existing market.
It doesn't matter if you weren't on it the day before the SEC issued its tokenization exemption.
This is a story that will play out over the next decade.
And so the point I was trying to make was people miss a lot of these opportunities because they think they're quote unquote late, we're one 2000th penetrated into the tokenization market.
It's like super early.
And I was trying to get people to recognize that, that that's going to be a mega trend that you can invest in in multiple ways.
A 2000X sounds mildly bullish.
So thank you for that context there, Matt.
AGM, I wanted to talk to you about where we are in the growth of this so far, because we're about a month into these tokenized products.
Like I said, we've done over a billion dollars of volume on base so far.
Most of this is going through Aerodrome right now.
What's your just assessment of the launch and the success?
Has this exceeded your expectations, been roughly in line with what you thought, or just how's it been so far?
Yeah, definitely at pace.
I mean, you cited the billion dollar number, I think.
September 30th, we had our first $100 million a day in terms of volume trading on Airdrome.
So it's getting up there.
And I'll note that we launched, because we did it this heavy-handed, everything-has-to-be-official way, I think we launched with four names and we launched another four.
And then I think we've got nine on the way.
I might be spilling the beans.
And obviously, we're going to be launching.
more coming forward as fast as possible.
So we're not even really fully launched.
It's not even supported in the retail app yet, although obviously that's coming overseas.
So basically we've literally just thrown out a few of the names, set up the AMM liquidity and kind of seen what happens.
And that's where we are.
So imagine once it's inside the actual retail app, imagine once we actually have a couple hundred names that exist, then I think it's going to do very well.
So yeah, it's very much outpaced, I think, what we expected at first.
Okay.
Well, you're more than welcome to keep spilling beans all over the show.
That's kind of what we're doing.
Feel free to continue doing that.
I'd also like to talk about some of the things you can do with tokenized stocks that you can't do now with traditional equities issuance.
Aave started letting people borrow USDC against tokenized Apple, NVIDIA, Tesla, other things.
Why is this such a big deal?
And what do you think this unlocks for the future of the equities markets?
Either one of you, I think I'd actually like to hear both of your takes on this, but whoever wants to start, go ahead.
AGM starts off.
I'll start with the Aave thing, yeah, and then you can...
go into the Bitwise part of it.
So, yeah, so AVA is a London borrow protocol for those who aren't familiar with it.
And then AVA v4 has this interesting hub and spoke model.
And what it basically means is that there's like a cluster of collateral that you can use to pledge and borrow against it.
And so they have like a Mag7 hub.
And basically, I can deposit NVIDIA shares in it and then borrow cash against it.
And why is this interesting?
I mean, it's interesting because it basically matches the functionality in Schwab, right?
I can obviously borrow money against my stock portfolio.
What I can functionally do is get 2x leverage and say, well, you know what, I'm going to put in a million dollars or $100,000, but I'm basically buying $200,000 worth of NVIDIA.
Obviously, they're charging me financing on the $100,000, that's the finance leg of it.
But basically, I can do the exact same thing on-chain that I can do off-chain.
That's cool.
Here's something that you sort of can't do off-chain or it's harder to do.
The reverse of that, it doesn't exist yet, but obviously it's in the cards.
The reverse of that, which is which I lend out my NVIDIA and make...
make a VIG on it, which by the way is what your broker is doing behind your back.
They're actually lending it out, holding in street name, and then someone's shorting the stock on the other side.
You can actually enable that in a very open and transparent way.
The analogy everybody cites is DeFi is composable like Legos.
There's a tokenized equity, there's a London borrow market, so now you can lever the long side and you can take the short side.
And then I think you can do cool things like what Matt is doing with Bitwise.
I'll popcorn to you.
Yeah, for sure.
I'd love to pitch the Bitwise thing, but just one note on that.
This is widely available to very wealthy investors in traditional systems.
If you have $10 million and up, you can lend out your shares.
You can borrow against them pretty easily.
That gets pretty smooth.
Everyone else has a hard time accessing that.
Maybe you can set it up if you're extraordinarily persistent and annoying, but basically the rest of the market is closed out of it.
One of the things I love about this, just like everyone can do it.
You can do it at this scale.
You can do it at this scale.
It's fine.
And so it really provides this more even playing ground that lets everyday people access the kind of returns and flexibility that traditionally has been reserved for the largest investors.
So I'm very excited about that.
Awesome.
Okay.
So we talked a little bit about the T plus one settlement time and we're moving towards 24 hours, you know, 24 seven trading basically.
Robinhood talked about this.
They're moving in that direction at their product event this week.
Coinbase's tokenized stocks are already trading around the clock.
However, the traditional markets aren't quite there yet.
Talk to me about this gap.
Does this present some kind of structural risk management problem of like, you know, when the markets are closed, you're still trading and there could be issues there?
Or do you think like eventually we go to 24 seven on all these markets and this problem resolves itself?
Antonio, what do you think of this?
Yeah, so this is one of the more fascinating problems.
My former quant mind here loves this problem.
So the problem is, right, you've got like whatever it is, I guess it's.
what is it, seven hour trading days, so seven, five trading, right, seven hours and five days, and then, you know, going to 24, five or 24, seven, right, sort of trading is the next step.
That's interesting for a bunch of reasons.
Obviously, the market can dislocate, right, like you can have trading on chain that's different than the market that's off chain.
Why does that tend to happen?
And by the way, everything's gonna have to change on Wall Street because of it, as everyone here knows.
all the companies involved here included, right?
They tend to announce the results exactly half an hour after the market closed, or they tend to have news happen outside of market trading hours to intentionally not roll the markets.
Well, that's kind of, that's going to not be meaningful anymore because the market is still trading.
It doesn't matter, right?
So that's one interesting thing.
The other thing is getting back to this Avid business and lending, you have what are called oracles, right?
And so these oracles link the outside price like in the world to the price on chain that you use.
do things like liquidate margin positions.
So if I borrow against, say, $100 of NVIDIA stock, and it's probably not going to happen, but let's say NVIDIA crashes 50% or something, there's obviously going to be a margin call there.
What triggers that?
How does that work?
Is it the on-chain price?
Is it the off-chain price?
It's three in the morning on Sunday.
What is truth here?
It's like an epistemological problem of what is the value of NVIDIA right this second because we have financial decisions to make.
And it's a fascinating problem.
The problem already exists on a protocol called Hyperliquid.
They're trading oil in size.
There's all these geopolitical events going on.
What typically tends to happen is they maintain a sort of oil price over the weekend that's kind of, you know...
binned within a certain floor and ceiling and then it repins to the NYMEX price on Sunday.
And kind of a similar thing is going to happen here as well.
What you're going to have is you're going to have the risk curators, basically the overseers over the lend pool, are going to look and see, okay, how much are we going to actually let this move?
And then specifically, how much are we going to borrow against assets?
whose, you know, overnight liquidity or sorry volatility might be high and might be shifting.
And so basically, this is getting a little wonky, but basically the amount you're going to be able to borrow against that position is going to be less than if the market's trading, because obviously, you know, if something is very liquid and the market is clear, you can borrow against it.
And if it isn't, there's less.
And so it's basically a risk management problem, but totally like you can deal with this risk management problem that over the weekend curators are going to have to get a little bit more aggressive on the on the caps on borrowed, basically.
Cool.
Yeah.
And I just wanted to kind of hear how you were thinking about that problem.
I want to keep talking about some of the things that...
this new tokenized version of equities unlocks.
The biggest one I want to talk about is these ATPs, automated token portfolios that Bitwise has launched on base.
For anybody who missed it, Ryan Rasmussen, who is head of research at Bitwise, came on our show on Milk Road Crypto to talk about this the same day these launched.
We did a deep dive on that there.
But Matt, I think for anybody who maybe missed that episode or hasn't caught up, could you give us a little summary, a high level of what automated token portfolios are and what investors should know about these?
Yeah, at a really simple level, their model portfolio is created by a professional asset management firm like Bitwise to capture a specific exposure.
So an example of one we have on base is the Mag7X, so the Mag7 stocks plus SpaceX.
But you can imagine a wide variety of thematic.
or tactical exposures that we can design in a paper portfolio and someone can subscribe to.
And then what happens is that it is replicated in their own direct wallet.
So they own those individual stocks in the percentages that match what the paper portfolio is doing.
In a traditional asset managed world, we might point to this as something like a model portfolio or an SMA.
It's not quite that, but that's the idea.
You have a professionally designed portfolio and then someone can subscribe to it.
It's interesting for a few reasons.
From a user's perspective, it's very interesting because they retain direct custody of those assets.
This isn't a pooled vehicle like an ETF or a fund.
They own those individual assets.
They can use those assets in the DeFi ecosystem.
It's much more direct.
From a product development perspective, it's much more interesting because it's very fast.
It's very flexible.
It's very movable because it is just a designed model that people can replicate in their portfolios in their own wallets at their discretion.
We can launch new ATPs very quickly.
We can adapt to changing market conditions.
And from that perspective, it's very interesting and very lightweight, which is nice from an innovation perspective.
I always like to think about when you get a new technology, what can you do with it that is uh similar to what we've had in the past but better in certain ways this is similar somewhat to what etfs are doing there's certainly a lot of thematic etfs but it's better in that it's faster it's lower cost it's more efficient it allows for direct custody by the end customer it's not a regulated fund so it doesn't have the same protections but it has a lot of benefits that are interesting to people Okay, so lots of new benefits, lots of opportunity for innovation.
AGM, I want to ask you about this.
When this launched, you said that now a taxi driver in Argentina can get the same portfolio exposures as a professional wealth manager.
And I'm really curious who you're seeing as the adopters of some of these products and customers who are engaging with these products that have been launched.
Is it taxi drivers in Argentina?
Is it professional wealth managers?
Is it some of both?
What do you see?
It's interesting.
I mean, it's funny that's become a meme because the original story was I actually...
I was in DEF CON in Buenos Aires and my taxi driver actually held crypto and I asked him what he did with it and he said kind of nothing because he couldn't invest in anything.
So that's where the meme came from.
So there was in fact the archetypal Argentinian taxi driver.
I don't know what he's invested in these days.
I mean, to be honest, it's early days.
We don't even have most of the names out there.
So we just started with the Mag7 because obviously it has the most investment.
Like Matt said, that's obviously where you start.
It's a weird curiosity that the names that get traded on chain are not necessarily the names that are most interesting as a company, right?
One thing we've seen inside retail, the sort of names that get traded, we also have an off-chain equities product, tend to be interesting.
It's like the GameStop phenomenon.
What the hell is GameStop?
Once the last time you even saw GameStop, and yet it possessed the entire Wall Street world for weeks on end.
It's kind of a similar phenomenon where it's not necessarily the most high market cap name, but those are the ones that are going to draw the most on-chain attention.
And we haven't even gotten there yet.
So a long-winded way of answering your question, I don't think we know exactly.
what they're going to trade.
I don't think it's going to be obviously the case that they're just going to buy, spy ETFs and go away.
I think knowing the on-chain world is going to be a little bit more interesting.
I mean, ATPs, right?
Like novel trading strategies that don't exist now that again, I mean, those exist as hedge funds in the off-chain world, but here we're bringing them into the on-chain world accessible to anybody.
So I think the collision of that is going to be really interesting.
And again, it's just too early days.
Like they're just even going beyond base, Robinhood, whatever.
We just haven't had them long enough to even understand who's going to really trade these things.
it's always exciting to see what happens when the meme coin trenchers get a hold of tokenized assets so we'll see what it plays out there on base um Matt, I want to ask you about this.
This is something I've asked Ryan about and some other people from Bitwise, but as the SEC starts to open the doors for things like this and ATPs become a product that you could potentially bring onshore into the US, how do you see this relative to your ETF business?
Is it a competing product?
Is it a supplementary product?
Do they conflict with each other?
And just how do you think about that in terms of different products that Bitwise is bringing to market here?
yeah sure i mean i come from an etf background right i used to run a company called etf.com you can think of etfs as hugely disruptive to the mutual fund industry It's not that the mutual fund industry went away.
It still exists.
In fact, until about a year ago, it had more assets than the ETF industry, even though no one's bought a mutual fund in a long time.
I think a little bit like that when I look at the tokenized world.
Look, we love ETFs.
ETFs are going to be here for the next 30 years.
They're extraordinarily efficient.
There's some efficiencies that come from pulling capital together.
It's a beautiful vehicle.
But there are these other vehicles that are capture new users, younger users, different demographic, global users, and they're going to scale over time.
What Bitwise tries to do is to have a core level of expertise, which is a deep understanding of the crypto markets and the traditional markets that we can smash together into interesting projects that could be expressed through an ETF or an ATP.
I think of them as existing side by side.
Right.
We also do vaults and we do SMAs and we do hedge fund like strategies.
You have different wrappers for different people.
This is just a unique wrapper that we can do unique things for a unique audience.
I do think there this space will be very significant.
Otherwise, we wouldn't have moved into it.
But, you know, I think of it as complementary to the ETF.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So they can grow together.
I want to talk about growth because AGM, you are head of growth at Base and growth is something that's happening a lot in crypto right now.
Tell me a little bit about what the strategy is to grow from here in terms of adoption of these products and of Base in general.
You have a very successful history.
You were involved in Facebook's ad machine growth over there.
Any lessons learned that you're applying to grow Base and what's that overall strategy look like for you right now?
Oh god, Facebook was such a different world.
Crypto is the reverse of the regular world.
I used to joke that Facebook had more ad inventory and more users and it knew what to deal with while crypto was in the reverse situation.
That said, on the flip side, the average crypto user is worth more than the average Facebook user for a bunch of reasons.
So what are we doing on Grove?
Like I said, Spindle came out of the whole ads world.
We still run ads actually inside Coinbase Wallet and a few other places.
But what we're really doing now, again, is just seeing where do users come from, where are they going?
We have these beautiful flowcharts that we should probably have blog posts about that literally show where's money coming into tokenized stocks or liquidity insights and lending pool, and then where does it eventually go?
And so just making sure that it's real retain TVL.
These are real users who are actually trading.
A lot of things get farmed on crypto.
And then having targeted incentives.
So we actually have a cashback reward system for trading equities through.
I would rattle off the list of names, but I don't know them offhand of like the 10 or 15 partners that we're launching with.
And then we probably run the same thing with retail, the Coinbase retail app once it launches.
So running things that are like, I mean, it's very similar to what other brokers like, hey, here's 10 bucks to transfer 100 bucks to your account and start trading and then holding on to it for 30 days or whatever.
We're probably going to have trading style competitions for the big whales to see who trades the most in size, very typical sort of crypto tactic to drive growth.
I think we're actually a lot better, it's a little bit more scalable, is just making sure there's things like AMM liquidity.
There's actually liquidity in these names such that people can actually trade them and it actually costs them less to trade than they would in the Tradify world.
So making sure that that makes sense.
Or when it comes to lend-borrow, markets are always unbalanced.
There's people trying to lend more than there are people to borrow or vice versa.
So you've always got to juice the yield on one side or the other.
get that flywheel going and get that spin going.
So things like that.
We have a lot of measurement to set up to figure out where do we need to inject a little bit of liquidity reward and actually get the markets to solve the cold start problem and get going.
Particularly a market like this that's literally starting from zero.
The organic growth has been amazing.
Again, $100 million in a day is more than we thought you'd get a month into it.
But still, right, like the borrow pull on Aave is nowhere near that yet.
Right.
So do we need to inject liquidity there to get that lend borrow going and get those wheels going?
I mean, the answer is probably yes.
So like things like that are what we think about.
OK, so target of incentives to get things running.
What is the metric that you're most focused on?
Is it users?
Is it applications built on base?
Is it volume?
Is all these things like how do you think about measuring the success and the growth here?
Depends who's now giving me on Slack asking me a question, where are we on, what number, whether it's Jesse or somebody else.
I mean, usually the high level metrics are the obvious ones.
I mean, at a core level, the chain makes money off sequencer revenue, right?
So gas fees are like a core thing.
But that's a very short term sort of way to look at it.
Obviously, I mean, Dex volume is one of it.
Dex market share compared to other chains is actually a big one.
Lend borrow and financing is super successful on base.
Like we've just been seeing balances for lend borrow just go up.
on base for different assets, not just tokenized equities, CBBTC, CBETH, etc.
So just understanding how much we have locked up, how much of that retained.
So once again, we do a reward, does it stick around or is it fly-decapital, for example?
So metrics like those, total payment volume, there's billions and billions and billions of dollars of USDC on base.
pay all the time.
So that's another metric that we look at.
So it's sort of the basic high level stuff you'd find in a in the Dune dashboard.
But specifically when it comes to growth, things like retention, where are they coming from?
How long do they stick around?
Like that's the sort of thing that we ask.
You know, one of the weird things about crypto is that the longer you're in it, the more accounts you seem to end up with.
You buy in one place, trade somewhere else, earn yield somewhere else.
And if you actually need capital, you end up having to sell something that you probably wanted to keep.
That's why we at Milk Road are partnering with Nexo.
These guys keep the whole thing under one account.
You can buy, trade crypto, earn interest on what you already hold, and even borrow against your capital without having to sell it.
All in one spot, all in one account, all on Nexo.
So if you need liquidity, but you don't want to give up your position, or you're already holding crypto and you want to be able to do more with it, I think Nexo is worth your time.
We love working with them.
I think you will too.
Tell them Milk Road sent you.
gotcha okay so one of the key things for growing any ecosystem is things being built on it that people really want to use matt i'm curious your perspective on why you guys chose base for atps for these automated token portfolio products what was that decision making process like and what were those conversations like leading up to launching this product yeah i mean that's it's pretty easy coinbase is an exceptional partner uh bitwise has been partnered with coinbase i think for eight years now in one way or another so we're deep friends uh with the company We knew and liked how the actual tokenized stocks were functioning in terms of what AGM said, being actually the tokenized stocks with full rights and responsibilities.
And we felt confident they would do a good job on liquidity, which in fact they have.
Right.
So just a high degree of trust.
When you come out with a new product into a market, you really want to get it right on the first instance.
And you want there to be a high level of trust and quality.
And we felt comfortable doing that with base.
So it's a great part of a continuing.
Bitwise Coinbase story is how I view it.
Okay.
Continuation is always a good thing.
AGM, I wanted to ask you a question about something that I saw you posted on Twitter, which was about who wins the automated or the agentic trading economy.
And you wrote an essay about this on Twitter and I didn't get a chance to read it.
But I wanted to ask you about it because I thought it was like really relevant to like just the growth of crypto overall.
And so, you know, just give me some high level thoughts on this and how that figures into the growth strategy at Coinbase and for base.
Being held accountable for what I post on Twitter, this is one of my nightmares.
I think this one went viral.
People from Stripe and Tempo were replying to it.
This agentic payment thing is cool.
I think everyone probably understands it.
This business, my agent goes out into the world and spends money.
To cite another company building on base, Cloudflare, which hosts 20-25% of the internet, will have a feature where if an AI agent comes and scrapes through data, that's fine, but they pay you some microcent amount.
And so there's this thing called X402, which is an HTTP code, which basically says, hey, bot, you got to pay me a tenth of a penny, say, for this information.
I mean, the publisher can say what that is, right?
And so rather than having like 100 subscriptions, you just go and incrementally get whatever information you need.
You paid five cents for that query in the same way that you paid that many tokens to the frontier model.
And life goes on and the world's information is open to you.
So that's kind of the agentic payment example.
I think there's a lot of ways this conversation can go, John.
There's agentic ads, there's all that.
But I think the agentic economy is really interesting.
I totally live in constant AI psychosis, basically, like everybody else in San Francisco.
And I've literally got 12 agents chugging along even in the middle of this podcast.
But that world is real.
Crypto being programmable money, it's the perfect currency for AI, right?
So I think increasingly you're going to see this collision between AI and crypto.
And the AI people don't like crypto, so we're going to have to rebrand it as stablecoins and payments because that's the new name for it, which is fine.
But you're going to increasingly see that collision happening going forward.
Okay.
Well, this collision and going forward is exactly what I want to talk about with the last little chunk of this conversation here.
And Matt, I want to start with you.
It's been a while since we have caught up.
Our Milk Road audience loves hearing your takes on the market.
You've been doing a road show, traveling the country, talking to institutional investors.
What are you hearing on the road?
What's your outlook?
And what are some of the lessons you're learning from these conversations you've been having recently?
Yeah, I think I've been at eight or nine TradFi conferences in the last two weeks.
So that's almost one a day.
They're extremely bullish.
I mean, that's the short story.
The TLDRs, they're extremely bullish.
I think, you know, investors are always looking for non-consensus bets that they think are interesting.
And one thing that's happened that's probably important is AI has become so consensus and so mainstream that it's no longer occupying that niche of where I'm generating excess returns.
from a portfolio.
So we're seeing traditional investors sort of cast around for what that could be.
And one of the places that they're landing is on crypto and specifically on anything associated with stable coins and tokenization.
And the reason is they're seeing crypto follow a traditional four-year cycle.
They imagine that we're entering a new period.
They're seeing the pro-crypto regulatory push.
And then importantly, they're seeing real-world metrics of just astounding growth, even through a bear market.
And they're putting those together and saying, maybe this is the non-consensus, but correct trade.
where I'm going to generate excess returns.
I don't think I've ever been more excited about the state of financial advisor interest in these allocations.
They're not sure exactly how to express stablecoins and tokenization from an investment perspective, whether that's a blend of crypto assets, whether that's a blend of crypto equities, whether it's a combination of both.
They have those sorts of questions, but they know it's a megatrend that they want to get behind.
um i think we're going to see significant inflows from that audience in the in the last three months of the year yeah so this is a question i would really like to hear you know agm's thoughts on this because matt what you bring up is a great point everyone is bullish on tokenization right now and talking about it but my community at milk road is asking me lots of questions of how do i get exposure to this do i just by the layer ones like Ethereum and Solana?
Do I invest in decentralized exchanges like Aerodrome or Uniswap?
Or people are asking me about Ondo or Securitize.
AGM, from a perspective of somebody who's deep in the weeds on people building on this technology, where do you see value accruing between these things?
And just how do you think about that from a value accrual perspective?
Where in the stack a lot of this shakes out?
Just a plus one, what Matt said.
I mean, I just retweeted this VC called Tom Tungus who keeps an eye on crypto and AI.
And he said, the fastest growing market, to your point about AI being a little consensus now, is actually not in AI, it's in crypto.
So real world asset spot volumes had 500x in 20 months.
That's a big number even by AI standards.
And this means everything.
It means tokenized equities, it means bonds, it means commodities.
I mean, hyperliquid is probably a huge part of that number.
And so the world is coming on chain.
This is happening.
There's no question.
And it's only accelerating.
How do you play it?
I probably can't plug individual names on a podcast.
It's a reality.
And then I'd have to disclose if I held them.
So it'd be even more awkward.
Full disclosure, I hold everything.
I hold all of it.
I mean, I'm long everything.
Yeah, I hold all of it.
Even competitors, all of it.
He doesn't want to say Coinbase.
But I'll throw it out there.
Look, I think the answer is at any time you're in this phase of a technology boom, the answer is to own a wide variety of things and not pick the wrong horse.
Talk to somebody who bought Ask Jeeves instead of Google in 2002 and see how they're doing today.
I think that's the case where we are in tokenization.
So the answer to your question, like, should I own L1s or apps or companies is yes.
You know, I don't know where the value is going to accrue between that cohort.
But I bet if this thing 2000X is, they're probably all going to be okay, or at least enough of them are going to be okay.
So I really, you know, that's our message to people is don't try to be too cute about it and find the one asset that you think represents the future.
That's historically been a challenging bet.
You're much, if the beta is good enough, and I think the beta here is good enough, buy a suite of these things and I think it'll rest easier.
Matt, you know what we need?
We need a synchronization ATP.
That's built by Bitwise.
That's what we need here.
There it is.
All right.
Let's get it launched.
Let's get it launched.
I'll shoot you the equities we want for sure.
But that's exactly right.
Yeah, that is what people need, I think, is broad-based exposure like that.
That was a very well-reasoned answer.
And don't get cute is what Jan Van Eyck said to me this summer when I interviewed him too.
So there's a lot of wisdom in that.
All right, let's talk about the roadmap here.
AGM, I want to start with you.
What's next?
What's next for tokenization?
What's next for base?
And just what's on your horizon going into the last part of 2026 here?
What are you focused on?
Yeah, I mean, the big things are obviously activating tokenized equities in the US.
I think no mystery there.
We kind of started the show talking about that.
I think it's going to be doable.
I think it's going to be...
A lot of I's have to be dotted and T's have to be crossed to get there.
I think just getting it in Coinbase retail, opening it up to the average Coinbase user, I think having more retail distribution for it.
We have a number of retail partners now, but I wouldn't say it's at scale at all, to be honest.
The lend and borrow side is interesting.
you know, the ability to do a levered long on a stock if you want, or to earn money for holding a stock to be able to short it.
We still need to get the kind of feature parity with the Tradify world, or even better, right?
Like I can earn for just holding a stock.
When that happens, by the way, I think you're going to start seeing things like people are going to take off-chain holdings and bring them on-chain, right?
They're going to like, sort of doesn't exist yet because we've like shipped it so fast, but there's going to have to be like a mint window for the average user who's like, look.
And then obviously without a new cost basis, ideally, right?
Like, hey, I own a thousand shares of, you know, Nvidia and I've been, you know, gig along and I'm up a bunch.
I want to get paid for, for lending them out.
How do I bring them on chain?
That's going to be possible eventually, right?
So things like that, making it such that you'd actually rather have your stocks on chain than whatever your conventional broker is, I think is the kind of the next big step.
Gotcha.
Okay, and Matt, same question to you.
You know, we just joked about you doing a tokenization ATP on base, but Bitwise has been launching products at an amazing clip.
You guys have launched a near ETF, I think a lighter ETF.
A lot of other products have come to market here.
What should we know about some of these and what's next on the roadmap for Bitwise?
Yeah, look, I think there's still some single crypto assets that need more ETF exposure.
assets where I think there's significant upside.
I think NIR is a great example of that.
NIR is a relatively small asset, but with very large ambition, having great success on intents, having great sort of goals on the AI side.
So I think you'll see us do a few more single asset ETAPs.
I do think toward the stablecoin idea, I think we're close to the moment in the market where people will want thematic exposure.
equal to their single asset exposure.
It used to be we were all tribalists in crypto, but now there are some people who are like tokenization maxis and stable coin maxis.
I think when you get that, you can get some new ETPs.
And then I would look for Bitwise to do more on chain, right?
We're now a major staking provider.
We're now doing vaults.
We're doing ATPs.
We definitely see that as a big part of our business.
So in the future, you know, I think an equal part of Bitwise's business will be on chain as off chain.
um and that's sort of where we're driving okay so final question here for both of you i want to get like you know just directional you know wind in the finger in the air which way the wind is blowing on crypto overall here because a lot of people are worried that the macro environment is deteriorating and that this rally in bitcoin is going to fade um and I think we've broken out into a new bull market and a lot of other people are leaning in that direction.
Which way do you guys shake out on this?
Do you think we're over or under 100K on Bitcoin?
Antonio, if you can't give a price prediction, I would just generally like to hear your perspective on the markets here.
Let's start with you and then we'll finish with Matt.
You don't want to hear my Bitcoin price predictions.
They've been always wrong every time I've opened a position in Bitcoin.
So I'm horribly bad at predicting that.
No, I'm bullish crypto in general.
I'm actually the most bullish I've ever been since I started in crypto.
five, seven years ago, precisely because it's like the trad five people coming online.
I'll give you a little anecdote.
If you go to the New York office of Coinbase, it's like the same people I was working with at Goldman 20 years ago, which is a bull signal.
It's the same guys in the Patagucci, like these fests, talking about trading in size on chain, not as some like weird little social experiment.
It's like, Oh, no, this is just the way the world works now.
That's the change you're seeing.
And I think it's going to happen faster than we think.
And I think 10 years from now, we're all caught up in it now.
But 10 years from now, everyone's just going to assume that they trade equities in a split second and get paid for it and have ATPs running.
Oh, that's just the way the world works.
That's how technology works.
Everyone just assumes it's true when they grew up in it.
But then this is the tangle to get to that point.
more bullish than I've ever been is always an acceptable answer.
So thank you for that, AGM.
Matt, what are your thoughts here?
Yeah, I'm also more bullish, I think, than I've ever been.
This is a crypto rally based on fundamentals and improving regulation and a widening audience.
It's still the case that, you know, 95% of all Bitcoin, to use that example, is already owned, but 95% of investors don't own it.
I think those two have to collide and come with an outcome of higher prices.
I think absent a dramatic market pullback in traditional assets crypto is in a a long-term bull market that has a lot of sustainability to it so i'd be i'd be buying on dips and and uh i'm pretty excited about where we'll be in a year matt hogan CIO, Chief Investment Officer at Bitwise and AGM, Antonio Garcia Martinez, Head of Growth at BASE.
Thank you both so much for being on Milko Crypto.
I really enjoyed this episode.
I think our audience is going to love it too.
I would like you to just tell us where we can send our audience to find more of both of you and your work online.
AGM, let's start with you.
At AntonioGM on Twitter.
I'm at Matt underscore Hogan on Twitter and Hogan has a U in it, which is weird, but you know, it's the way it is.
And you also publish, do you want to plug your CIO memo?
Because I would like you to plug your CIO memo.
I write a memo every week called the CIO memo.
You can get it at bitwiseinvestments.com.
It tends to cover the most important topic in crypto that week.
It's always under a thousand words.
So it's an easy read.
And I'd love for you to subscribe.
It's free.
I wanted to make sure we got that in there because it's one of my favorite things to read in crypto.
Gentlemen, thank you both so much for being on MillCode Crypto.
This is a great episode, really great conversation.
Thank you both so much for being here.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
And thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something today.
I know I did.
So until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you all on the next episode of Milk Road Crypto.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Bye.
Everything you hear on Milk Road is for informational purposes only.
These are our personal opinions, not financial advice.
And we may own some of the investments we talk about.
Always do your own research and make the decisions that are right for you.
See you next time.