# Institutional Digital Asset Adoption and Infrastructure

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-11-04

## Transcript

On October 29th, I joined Chainlink and several of this industry's biggest leaders from Wall Street at an event called LinkNYC here in New York City.
And I got to moderate several conversations during that event.
We are going to share those conversations with you today in this episode.
And so just so you have a little bit of a preview of what's coming.
One of the conversations was called The Next Wave of Digital Asset Adoption.
And it was with Teddy Fasaro, who is the president of Bitwise, and John DiAgostino, who is the head of institutional strategy at Coinbase.
There was another conversation that I got to have with Andrew McCormick, a fireside chat with him.
He is the head of institutional and market development at Chainlink Labs.
I really enjoyed getting to meet him and to have a conversation with him about everything that Chainlink has been building.
He's relatively new at Chainlink, but very insightful and very plugged into what's happening at the highest levels of Wall Street's adoption of digital assets.
And finally, I got to have a conversation with my old friend, Joe Shalom, who is the CEO of Sharplink.
And I talked to him about a lot of things he's been doing.
And I think this is a good supplement to the recent podcast episode that I got to record with him earlier this week.
So a lot of alpha in this.
I hope you all enjoy this episode.
But if that all sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe.
Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it.
And as a reminder, our podcast today is free and that would not be possible without our wonderful partners at Alumni Ventures, giving accredited investors access to private market investment opportunities alongside leading VC firms and Nexo, the digital asset platform that lets you earn, trade and borrow all in one place, all from one account.
So keep an ear out for more information on them later in the show.
But for now, enjoy these conversations I get to have.
Thank you to the Chainlink team for inviting me on site to do these interviews and to be part of this amazing event.
And I hope we can do more of this in the future.
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So make some noise for the algorithm.
If you like us going on site in person to conferences to interview people.
And I hope you all enjoy the show.
It's really great to be here at LinkNYC.
This conversation is going to be called The Next Wave of Digital Asset Adoption.
And I'm joined here by Teddy Fusaro, who's the president of Bitwise.
And John DiAgostino, head of institutional strategy at Coinbase.
And I am John Gillen.
And I host the Milk Road Crypto Podcast.
I'm really happy to be here.
This is going to be a great conversation.
Gentlemen, we only have 15 minutes or...
20 minutes, so I wanted to get right into this.
The big thing that brought the first wave of institutional adoption of crypto, a lot of people would point to the spot ETFs that were launched in 2024.
And the question I want to ask today is, what do you think is going to be the catalyst that drives the next wave of institutional adoption of digital assets?
Taylor, let's start with you.
All right.
Well, great to be here with everyone.
A room full of link marines.
Always a lot of fun.
Great question.
So I think you're right.
In my mind, at least, the ETFs were a watershed moment for Bitcoin, for crypto, for Chainlink, for the industry.
It's a big moment.
But that was really about access, right?
It's about providing the non-crypto native investors, the big pools of capital, financial advisors, the ability to access crypto exposure.
And then I think the next part of what we're working on as an industry is going to be about utilization.
And so I think that's where we are.
And I think we're making amazing progress, but I think it's going to take a little bit of time.
It's going to take a lot of hard work.
It's going to take events like this.
It's going to take education.
And so that's where I think we are in the phase.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So utilization, John, what about you?
What's your perspective here?
Thanks for having me.
It's great to be here with the most famous mustache in crypto.
And I think Teddy nailed it.
And I think I don't like the question.
I love you.
I don't like the question because I think we have to get out of this notion of we need a catalyst.
You know what needs a catalyst?
A dying body, right?
That's what needs a catalyst.
We don't need a catalyst.
It's happening.
Micro-catalysts, trademark John D'Agostino, Coinbase, micro-catalysts are happening every single day.
And what they hide is what Teddy referenced, which is the grind and the work.
I met Teddy when Bitwise was starting up.
And the credit And they're wonderful participants added to the ETF ecosystem, and we're proud to work with all of them.
But I think folks like Bitwise, the thousands of meetings in tiny little conference rooms in no-name flyover states, all the work you put in over the years to lay the foundation to allow for the...
explosion of interest in the ETFs when they finally launch.
That groundwork has been laid already.
So look for micro catalysts.
I'll even shout out a competitor.
ICE investing in trade XYZ today.
All the work NYSE is doing with Kraken.
The gradual replacement of 100-year-old infrastructure is happening with blockchain as we speak.
It is just going to take time because they're not going to give it up without a fight.
And in fairness, these are crucially important legacy systems that have to be displaced slowly.
Gotcha.
Okay, so we're not looking for a major catalyst, but gradual change.
Teddy, I would love to have you expand on your point about utilization and just what that looks like, what drives that, and how you think that starts to happen.
Yeah, I think that to the point about taking time for these things to happen, I think what has happened, you know, as John so kindly mentioned, Bitwise has been at this for almost a decade.
And I think a lot of industry participants, entrepreneurs, analysts would become frustrated by the lack of progress over time.
It's almost like dealing with a...
hypochondriac where people think they're sick or there's something wrong with the industry because acceleration and adoption is not happening fast enough.
But I think that the reality is that we see every day in the work that we do, the work that our teams do, our engineers do, that Chainlink is doing to do things that are more than just providing Oracle prices, which is what people may think of Chainlink is doing or providing custody or trading services, which is what people might think of Coinbase is doing.
We start to see in the tokenization stack, in the need for composability of assets across different blockchains, when you're running a vault product that needs information, data, compliance, sources from all different places that all needs to live on chain, all of that takes a lot of time and it needs to be very robust and it needs to become a part of the infrastructure instead of like this unique thing like, oh, this crypto company just announced that they can provide a price used to be like an exciting thing.
It needs to be part of the standard operating procedure so that these products and services just work.
Nobody wants to ask the question, like, oh, how does the price feed into...
this product so that it's accurate.
It just needs to work.
That's how you have robust infrastructure.
And I think as usage increase, adoption gets increased, that's the kind of thing that's going to start happening and it's going to be below the surface.
It's not going to be visible to everyone.
This pullback on Bitcoin is scaring a lot of people and I am not one of them.
So if you want to see what I'm not selling and why, what's on my watch list and when I'm going to be deploying more capital into these markets, you can join Milkrow Pro today.
It's just a dollar.
The link is in the description.
I answer questions day and night in Discord.
I'll see you there.
Okay, John, I want to come back to you on this.
And, you know, Teddy brought up this idea of infrastructure.
We're here at LinkNYC.
Chainlink obviously is known for being essential infrastructure for the whole digital asset ecosystem.
Why is infrastructure connecting blockchains to these TradFi systems so essential for this next wave of digital asset adoption by institutions?
All right, so let's talk about the elephant in the room.
All of us who believe in crypto, who've been around for a while, believe in the...
Purity of decentralized systems and permissionless systems.
That's why we're here.
There are central characteristics of these systems.
There is a reality that certain legacy financial systems, very large, powerful legacy financial systems, will not go gently into that good night.
And they will insist on running parallel experiments with...
more permission centralized models.
So stable coins versus tokenized deposits, right?
We believe in the power of stable coins.
We have to acknowledge the reality that tokenized deposits currently dwarf stable coin utilization because they're starting with a massive, massive ground game.
So given that that's the reality of the world we're going to live in, where are the fault points?
Well, we all know where the hacks occur.
They occur at the bridges.
That's where they occur.
So what CCIP is doing, amongst other things, bifurcating confirmation versus execution, is extremely important for the practical real world we're going to live in and to create, as Teddy...
correctly points out, you can tell we love each other, we just complement each other often, right?
As Teddy correctly points out, no socks, obnoxious socks, that's how we do things here.
As Teddy correctly points out, we have to, I hate the word compromise, but we have to meet people where they live.
Yes.
And they're going to live to some degree in centralized permissioned systems.
And I see this as a forcing function to getting them comfortable living their life on chain.
And I'm okay with that.
Okay, Teddy, anything you'd like to add to that about connecting Wall Street and these public blockchains together and how that's going to help bring more institutions into digital assets?
Yeah, the thing that I would add that I was thinking about when John was talking very eloquently was the process of undergoing this kind of change.
It's very transformational type of change.
The process of doing it.
is slow and painful.
Most people who work in crypto or who operate companies in crypto, they came here because it's interesting, it's fast, it's exciting, it's a new technology.
But you're talking about disrupting financial infrastructure that has been the best financial infrastructure in the history of human civilization that has been in place for 75 years in this country.
And so to expect that we're going to wake up tomorrow and it's going to be wholesale cut over, it's not a software upgrade, simply.
It takes time and you need to go through these painful types of intermediate steps, which is why right now, I think in 2026 and in a lot of 2027, we're going to see more pilot programs, more integrations that are hived off of the whole piece because it's not upgrading a video game.
with a new software pack.
We're talking about the financial infrastructure that is the envy of the world's capital markets.
And so while my belief and our belief at Bitwise is that it's going to happen, it is also, I think, important for us to all realize that it needs to happen sequentially and maturely.
Could not agree more.
And we need to understand.
Just because not everyone who's resistant is dumb.
Yeah.
Not everyone who's resistant is a Luddite, as Teddy points out.
And I think follow Teddy on X because he is able to go through the technical reality of how mint and creation recurred.
He's got better than anyone in the world.
The analogy I try to give some of the younger people in crypto is if you're on a plane and the pilot comes out and says, they've got great news.
The brightest minds in the world have invented a better engine.
On paper, this thing is just fundamentally superior to every engine, and we're testing it today.
You might be like, I believe in science, but let's just give it a shot with somebody else.
And so I just think we have to be a little bit patient with these folks.
It is happening.
It's not happening.
So right now, every major exchange in the world is either running turning on 24-7 on-chain based trading or running parallel side-by-side trading.
I was there when they shifted over from open outcry to electronic trading.
The day before the screens went live, they were convinced it would fail.
And guess what?
For the first couple of months, it wasn't this incredible switch.
Over time, people recognize the superiority of better latency, composability, and so it's going to happen.
Let's be patient with people who I think reasonably want to see it being tested out before we shift over essential infrastructure.
Okay, I want to pivot the conversation a little bit here because we're short on time.
Both of you are in constant dialogue with a lot of institutional clients and participants in this ecosystem.
I'm curious how the tenor of those conversations have shifted.
What kind of questions you're getting now as a class in this industry starts to accelerate in growth?
Teddy, let's start with you on this one.
Yeah, so we started in every year since 2018, we've done a...
Bitwise has done a comprehensive survey of financial advisors and we publish the results.
We make it into a marketing piece.
We share it.
We find it very informative for financial advisors, for our business, for the industry.
In 2018, very few financial advisors themselves had exposure to crypto and almost zero had their clients investing in crypto.
That has changed dramatically.
One of the biggest pivot points over the years was in 2024, as you mentioned off the top, John.
We finally got Bitcoin ETFs approved.
Many other crypto ETFs followed, including our Chainlink ETF, CLNK.
And the thing that has changed really dramatically in just the past year is that even in 2025, the conversation with professional investors, with financial advisors, was primarily a Bitcoin conversation.
It took a very long time just to get over the hump on understanding Bitcoin, understanding blockchain, crypto, what's the investment thesis, should the clients have exposure.
And this is very clearly demonstrated in these surveys that I mentioned.
The thing that has really changed in the past one year, really, since October of last year, when we started getting more crypto exposures inside ETF packages, including Chainlink, is that professional investors, financial advisors, high net worth individuals want to understand the investment thesis and the underlying mechanics of more than just Bitcoin.
And I think that that is still early.
Because again, if it was 2018 to 2024, when we just got advisors and investors.
comfortable with Bitcoin.
Now we're in that second inning where they're interested in more assets.
how they work, why they may have value, what the investment thesis is, et cetera.
Okay.
So education's happened.
Interest of you spanning.
John, you're- Yeah, I mean, look, Teddy knows the RIA and high net worth group better than anyone in the world.
I can speak to the institutional trading group, hedge funds, private equity, hedge capital funds.
So I'm on the board of this thing called AIMA, Alternative Investment Management Association.
It's the largest lobbying and working group for hedge funds in the world.
I got elected to the board on a pro-AI, pro-crypto.
platform.
And I'm not that likable.
And I crushed it.
I think I got more votes than anybody else, which shows this latent demand and interest.
And we do surveys all the time of our thousands of members.
And every year, the percentage of funds that are looking at this asset class goes up.
Now, to some degree, that's just logical.
Their job is to find alpha.
This is an asset class that produces alpha.
But the nuance about this is hedge funds have, they can't just invest in anything they want.
They have investment mandates.
offering memorandums are called and that limits what they can invest in.
So when hedge funds say I'm thinking about doing something that's fine but when they say I'm actually going to put risk capital to this brand new asset class that structurally means they have to go to their investors and get permission.
So what we're seeing now is the looky-loo phase is over.
They've recognized they can extract alpha.
And they're actually going and changing their investment mandates to allow them to trade this new asset class.
And it's in the high six-handle, 60% of funds that are looking to do this.
And they need to go out and change their offering members.
Absolutely.
They have to get permission.
If you invest in an equity longshore fund, they turn around and say, I want to do credit.
You get, no, no, no, no, you can't do that.
So they have to actually get permission to do this.
And that's what's happening.
Okay, I would like to just kind of like wrap this up with an outlook for a year from now.
Because as you said, like, a lot of this is still happening.
The institutional bull run is moving at breakneck speed for Wall Street.
But for people who are maybe digital asset natives, it feels like it's taking forever.
There's lots of paperwork and process that has to happen.
Where are we a year from now in terms of institutional adoption of digital assets?
From an investment perspective, from a product perspective, where do you see that being a year from now?
John, let's start with you.
Sure.
I think there's a lot more global and fingers crossed.
I hope our government allows US citizens to participate in tokenized equity offerings.
There is an insatiable appetite.
I co-lead our effort out of Abu Dhabi for tokenized equities.
I'm telling you there's an insatiable appetite.
amongst global citizens for US equities.
That is a good thing.
We should want everyone in the world who can scrape together $10 of savings to want to invest it in the economic miracle that is US capital markets.
This is the most wonderful marketing for our country and they want it and they love it.
And so there'll be a lot more of that.
And I'm praying and hoping that we create parity with US citizens to invest alongside who maybe can't get a Charles Schwab account.
God bless America.
Teddy, go ahead.
What's your outlook for a year from now?
Where are we going to be on institutional adoption of digital assets?
Yeah, God bless America.
Agreed.
That was great.
Tokenization, huge market, insatiable demand, as John said.
Stable coins can continue to be a growing theme.
On-chain infrastructure, things like vaults and decentralized borrowing and lending, huge.
The thing that I would say, if we're talking about in a year from now, what I foresee happening.
I think that in the rest of the remaining months of 2026 and maybe the first quarter or first third of 2027, we're going to see more pilot programs from big name institutions, longstanding financial services companies that are going to roll out and announce their The things I was talking about earlier, maybe a pilot program or a limited run version of something that has a maximum size or is only offered to a limited set of clients.
And then I think a year from now, as we're in...
The fourth quarter of 2027 is when we're going to start seeing those pilot programs mature into and turn into real offerings that have tested the infrastructure, that have tried and failed a little bit or tried and found success in how they're utilizing on-chain infrastructure.
And then that's when I think we're going to start to see these actual products and services being offered.
And what we'll notice at that time, people won't know or care that the underlying infrastructure is...
Blockchain.
It'll be invisible to the user.
It's just a better technology.
Ultimately, it's 10x better technology.
And what we'll see is that the product and the service is being offered and run.
The investors will care that it's being run on blockchain or using decentralized infrastructure and technology.
But the users won't know.
The agents will love it.
Yes.
The agents will love it.
Well, I think that is a good place to stop.
I'm tempted to ask more questions, but we're already pushing time here.
So I'll just say thank you both so much.
John Giacosino, head of institutional strategy at Coinbase and Teddy Fusaro, president of Bitwise.
I've been doing a lot of Bitwise and Coinbase partner podcasts on Milk Road.
So this was a great conversation.
I'm so glad we got to do this.
And thank you to Chainlink for hosting this and having us all here.
And thank you all for listening and being with us all.
But gentlemen, thank you so much.
This was really great.
Thank you, guys.
Good afternoon.
Welcome.
I want to start with a little bit of introduction here.
Andrew McCormick is the Head of Institutional and Market Development at Chainlink Labs.
He has been with Chainlink Labs since June, I believe, and has a very long career, which we won't go into right now because we have limited time.
But you have been on the digital asset side of things, on the Wall Street side of things.
A question that I would like to start with is your perspective on some of the milestones that have happened in 2026.
Something I've been saying a lot on the Milk Road podcast is that people are starting to go blind to a lot of these major headlines of institutions coming to crypto.
What stands out to you from 2026 as some major milestones we've crossed that really signal the future of where we're going with this institutional bull run and digital assets that we've seen?
We'll certainly appreciate the time and questions.
So to me, 2026 is such a massive year of building.
And I look at the key infrastructure providers, right?
I could not have imagined two years ago that you would have the DTCC pushing into this space and getting regulatory approval for it.
NYSE, NASDAQ, and SWIFT.
These are what are described as black holes and in a good way.
So if you have the DTCC moving into tokenization and collateral management, all their hundreds, if not thousands of broker-dealers who are part of that ecosystem have to go that direction.
So in May, when the DTCC announced our collateral app chain, massive moment.
Just yesterday, going live with tokenization.
The type of things people have been talking about on panels for years is actually happening today.
And now you have the two leading exchanges on the planet getting regulatory approval to move into tokenization.
I don't think there's any way you're putting that genie back in the bottle.
Well, good.
I'm glad the genie's out of the bottle and the black hole is pulling in the right direction.
But that gravitational pull can sometimes feel like it takes a lot longer than some people would like.
Talk to me about where that direction of travel takes us and how fast we're going to go down that road now that we have gotten some leadership from names like the DTCC and others.
Yeah, so I think we're still in the building phase, right?
And you're seeing a nice...
You know, trend, right?
Right now, I think we have 40 billion or so of tokenized RWAs out there, right?
A couple of years ago, it was, you know, much smaller, right?
And a couple of years ago is almost nothing.
Now, you look at the broader market, equities alone, 150 trillion.
So there is a massive, massive, massive opportunity to head.
I think 27 is still going to be building and laying these pipes.
And the reality is if you're at one of these large institutions, large banks, compliance, risk, regulation, the controls, governance, cybersecurity, this stuff takes time.
And I see one of my good friends from Boney here.
There's a reason a place like Bacon, New York, Mellon has been here for 200 years because they're thoughtful and they think about the building and they want to make sure they're not just building for today, but for tomorrow and the next 50 years.
So 27, I think a lot of buildings still, but we're going to see those tokenized asset numbers, I think go up a lot because we're showing the technology works.
And now it's about adoption and giving utility to it.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So let's talk about some of this because the list of financial juggernauts that Chainlink is partnering with or working with is very, very long.
But talk to me about how Chainlink's work with some of these major institutions is starting to help accelerate this adoption and move us faster down that progress of institutions coming to digital assets.
Cool.
So our goal is to enable institutions to build in as simple of a way as possible.
So again, I came from a large bank.
I get those compliance risks, controls.
You don't want to throw that away.
So one of our products we launched, I think at our conference last year, the Chainlink Runtime Environment, the whole goal is to take all your typical workflows you use and the systems you use today, use this tool, and then we will plug it into smart contracts and the blockchain to allow you to build in a more efficient way.
So you can...
do what you do best with your systems, your governance and controls, and then we will do what we do best and put that onto the blockchain in a secure way.
So we're seeing more and more firms use this orchestration type tool.
And Chainlink, we started with just data, then cross-chain, and I think orchestration and the CRE product specifically is the next wave.
And that's what we're using with the DTCC and their collateral app chain.
All those hopefully trillions and quadrillions of dollars moving through their blockchain.
We'll be on Chainlink's runtime environment product and orchestrating all these different workflows.
Can you tell me a little bit more specifically about the Chainlink runtime environment and some of the stakeholders in this?
In other words, like who the ideal clients are, where the products, the end result of that lives, and how people get access to that in the market?
Just a little bit more about the specifics of the stakeholders in that process of Chainlink bringing this CRE to market.
Yeah, so it's one that's built for the large.
institutions, right?
Whether it's DTCC or large banks who maybe aren't crypto native in the same way as some other firms.
So it's designed for them who have existing systems, controls, processes, teams, and using the existing technology.
What's great is you can use a lot of different things here.
So some of our stable coin type companies are using this for you pull data in, proof of reserves in, minting of tokens, and it's one place.
One place you log in, one portal, as opposed to three or four different connectors.
And this is something I think is really unlocking a lot for our partners because it just makes building on the blockchain a little more seamless, a little easier.
And so I think going forward, you'll hear a lot more about CRE.
Data is part of that, cross-chain is part of it, but CRE is almost like your app store on the iPhone.
get in there and then from there you can get TikTok and Instagram and ESPN, but that gateway can be CRE.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, there's a lot more to unpack there.
I want to ask you about another product.
Chainlink launched Custody Sync this week, I believe with Anchorage.
Yeah, Monday.
Yeah.
And so this, I've heard you guys saying that there are somewhere around $700 billion worth of crypto that's sitting with...
qualified custodians right now, but they can't get access to DeFi in the current environment.
Talk to me about CustodySync.
How does this start to unlock some of that capital and give it access to DeFi without compromising that qualified custodial solution?
Talk to me a little bit about this.
Yeah, so the regulationist space is critical.
We're talking about people's money, their assets, and you want them to be protected.
And so folks like Anchorage and others, they've gone through a lot of diligence and regulatory supervision to make sure they're a qualified custodian.
So the idea here is with Custody Sync, which is announced on Monday, if you have these assets at Anchorage, but you want to access DeFi in some way, you can have a receipt token that's created and is put into a DeFi protocol.
But that Bitcoin, ETH, LINK, whatever may be, still sits at Anchorage in a custodian that's been reviewed, not just once by regulators, but on an ongoing basis.
And my biggest surprise in my four months or so at Chainlink is large institutions asking how to get into DeFi.
So they're sitting on, whether it's their customers or their own corporate assets, lots of digital assets, and they want to put them to work in some way.
And not everyone just wants to shift their Ethereum over to Aave, right?
But this is a way maybe you want to access that, but leave the ETH and the qualified custodians a way you can do that.
three days in and we've already got a lot of follow-up calls from others wanting to explore this as well.
I'd love to hear more about what it's like, you know, you've been at Chainlink now for four or five months, something like that.
And a lot of these products seem to me to be really born out of dialogue with industry, with institutions and sort of like...
tailor-made to meet those demands.
Talk to me a little bit more about what it's like stepping into this role and picking up these conversations with these institutions and what the demands are for the next wave of adoption, the next product that they want to use.
What has that been like so far?
It's been amazing, exhausting too.
I've not seen my family quite enough, haven't slept enough, haven't been to the gym enough in the last few months, but the learning is literally infinite.
And my favorite part about this role and working with Chainlink is that we're literally the link of this entire ecosystem.
And you see it on a roster of speakers today.
You have the DTCC speaking, large banks speaking, largest asset managers, and then Kraken, well, they're not here today, but one of our big partners.
Polymarket and Robinhood and the fact that we can work across all those different verticals is really exciting and I think what's interesting and I saw this especially in the last three weeks where I went from Cybos, a very heavy banker conference, straight to Token49, like stereotypical crypto degen conference and then almost straight to Money 2020 payments and the conversations were the same across all of them.
Everyone was asking the same types of questions.
Traditional financial players are asking how do we get to DeFi and DeFi is asking how can we get to payment rails, traditional rails.
The fashion choices were still a little different.
You know, Cybos is all suits and token 49.
It's the other extreme, but yeah, it's been a great four months.
Just need to sleep a little bit more.
Well, we can sleep in the bear market.
There's never going to be another bear market.
Okay, I want to ask a question about this because CustodySync, like we said, there's a lot of capital that institutions have with these custodial partners.
and some of them want to get access to DeFi, but not all institutions are the same, right?
There's a big difference between bankers, between asset managers, hedge funds.
Who are, let's say, some of the institutions that are most excited about getting that access to DeFi?
And what do you see CustodySync is unlocking for the DeFi markets that wasn't available before?
I think for the DeFi access, it's largely driven by the institutions that have a retail-facing arm.
So if you have a wealth management platform and you're now seeing all the fintechs, taking a lot of your business, right?
Because they can offer stocks now, but also digital assets, and they're doing staking and these kind of offerings.
And you are a traditional player, and maybe you're just getting into offering Bitcoin or a few other assets.
Those are the ones we're asking, how can we step up our offering so we don't lose our customers to these other platforms?
And those are the ones who are really asking about this DeFi piece.
So great.
You have a customer there.
They have $10,000 of Bitcoin or another asset.
That customer wants to earn some type of yield and they can open up an app on their phone with five different places to earn that yield.
That large broker-dealer especially, they want to be able to offer that to their customers, but in a secure way given the regulatory.
improper oversight and compliance requirements.
I want to hear more of your perspective on something you said at the beginning of this conversation, your first answer.
You said once you get some of these major players start to make moves towards digital assets, it kind of creates this gravitational pull that pulls a lot of others.
And it sounds like it rhymes a lot with what you just described there of like...
institutions that maybe weren't interested in this before now feel like they have to be because other market participants are competing with them.
How does that forcing function kind of play out from here and how does that cascade as more and more institutions and companies start to compete with each other to try to bring better and better products to market?
What happens as a result of that?
It leads to better services and offerings for users.
which I think is a tremendous win.
And my favorite example is the Robinhood example.
So at the time I worked at E-Trade, we would charge people $7 to place a trade, $7 to sell the stock.
And that is a very high bar if you're at $100 and right now you're down 14.
And there was not fractional shares.
So if you wanted to buy Costco, whereas a dad of four kids who were at Costco like every week, it feels like $1,000 a share.
It's really hard to make that first trade.
Robinhood comes aboard as an E-Trade.
Everyone's like, uh-oh, what do we do?
Fall of 2019, Schwab announced, hey, we're going to $0 commissions as well.
And within the next week, every other online broker dealer did the same thing.
And what was amazing about that, the number of trades, like tripled 4X, just because you're breaking down those barriers, making investing more accessible for everybody.
And I think when you have these fintechs often leading into DeFi, if you're sitting at an E-Trade where I used to be, you're going to say, hey, we don't want deposit flight or assets to move.
And so we need to not necessarily do what they do, but we need to move in that direction.
But then the large institutions help them, right?
They're like, hey, we got to take compliance and AML and cyber risk seriously.
Sometimes the fintechs and startups aren't quite as serious about it.
And so I love seeing this best of both worlds.
combining and ultimately helping those end investors.
Andrew, I have a lot more questions for you.
I'd love to spend another 20 minutes talking.
We're getting close to time here.
I did a panel before this on the next wave of institutional adoption for digital assets.
and what that looks like in 2027.
I was curious to hear your thoughts on that.
What do you think unlocks the next wave of institutional adoption of digital assets in 2027?
So I think the next wave started yesterday with the DTC announcing their tokenization services.
Again, this is stuff people have been talking about for years and years and years, and it's happening.
Just given my background of retail trading, I'm really passionate about tokenized equities.
And I think just like the dropping of commissions from $5 or $8 down to zero.
opened a ton of opportunities.
Fractional shares opened a ton of opportunities.
I think tokenized equities will do the same.
So right now, 80%, I don't know if the world is outside the US.
They don't want to trade based on US hours.
And the fact that people can trade 24-7, whether in the US or abroad through tokenized equities, but then naturally, maybe now today, like on Robinhood, you need $10 to place a trade.
Tokenized equities, maybe it's 10 cents.
a fraction of a penny and allow people to just trade more, invest more, and you're breaking down barriers and allowing people to participate in the financial system.
Andrew McCormick, head of institutional and market development at Chainlink Labs.
Thank you so much for the time and the conversation.
Thank you to Chainlink for hosting this conversation and this event.
And thank you all for being here and for listening.
Andrew, thank you so much.
I really enjoyed the conversation.
Thank you.
Yeah, it was a joy.
My pleasure.
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.
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Great to see you again.
It's great to see you too.
I'm thrilled to be here.
We're going to do a quick fireside chat and I'm joined today by Joseph Shalom, CEO of Sharplink.
Joe and I overlapped a little bit at BlackRock and now he is the CEO of one of the largest Ethereum digital asset treasury companies.
Joe, I wanted to start the conversation.
You have been very prolific recently writing, publishing, and doing a lot of thought leadership on the digital asset space.
Something that stood out to me in some of your recent reporting was you are estimating...
that AI agents could save consumers up to $1.4 trillion by 2035.
I would love for you to sort of unpack this thesis for me and situate where tokenized assets fit into that picture and tell me a little bit about what you're seeing there.
Sure.
So what excites me most about this moment is not any single crypto product.
It's actually the convergence of four that we've never seen in history.
You have stable coins as the money layer, tokenized assets, not crypto, tokenized asset exposure.
all sorts of on-chain execution venues, both decentralized and centralized.
And AI agents, when you combine each of those things that are transformative, when you add continuous automation, which is what AI agents are going to do, it's actually going to be revolutionary.
And I don't use that word lightly.
And when you look forward, today there's a giant financial services market, all sorts of pillars and industries.
We estimate that over 35% of all financial services fees are going to be touched by agents, not necessarily replaced.
So about $4 trillion of fees are going to be touched and intermediated by agents.
Where the savings comes from is three or four areas.
The first is what do agents provide?
They take something that's scarce and expensive and make it cheap and abundant.
literacy and attention span.
And when you sick your agent who never sleeps on your portfolio, they will find idle cash that earns seven to 10 basis points and move it to 350 basis points.
They'll build you better portfolios.
They remove your money for free.
So what's going to end up happening is a lot of the incumbent companies that rely on you not having either financial expertise or attention span are going to start having switching happen to their business.
And we think the predominance of the savings is going to go to consumers.
And actually, when you use the word disruption, that's usually a bad word.
But if disruption helps consumers, that is actually progress.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So what does this progress look like as it becomes more accepted in the market?
And I think really the question here...
is around trust.
Because in order to have all these AI agents begin to take action and create this value and savings for consumers, they need to be able to trust them.
Institutions need to be able to trust them too.
How does that start to happen and how does it start to come to market?
So I think there's two elements of trust.
Today, you give your money to a financial advisor.
You believe they're going to invest it to your risk tolerance.
You believe they're going to disclose all the fees to you.
You hope that they're going to act as a fiduciary, but there's human trust involved.
An agent will work based on your delegated authority.
They will have near perfect information.
So more financial literacy than 99% of all investment advisors.
And they actually will be able to not be distracted by what distracts most people today, which is Super Bowl ads, incentives, hidden fees.
So the idea that your agent actually is working for you.
The reason the word agent matters is agents will give you agency.
That is the hope.
The second thing is, and it's under discussed, is we need guardrails.
We need rules.
We need principles.
And I would go as far as to say we need regulation to make sure that agents, first of all, are persistent.
They can move across different chains, different applications.
Two is.
There's accountability.
When there's a problem, you clearly know who is responsible for that failed transaction.
And third is we need to make sure the agents work for you.
They will provide you financial autonomy.
If we end up with a handful of new gatekeepers...
That is actually not agency.
So I think the two most important things are encoded trust through the agents and rules and guideposts.
And the theorem ecosystem actually offers that decentralized, neutral, censorship-resistant place where users and agents can persist with trustless registries.
And that's actually what's exciting.
I am most excited about what agents are going to provide for consumers and most concerned that it'll end the same way most.
technological revolutions end with a handful of winners who take most of the value.
Let's talk more about the Ethereum ecosystem and the role that plays in this because when you were at BlackRock, you helped tokenize Biddle, which was on Ethereum primarily initially.
And now you're the CEO of Sharplink, which, as I said, one of the largest digital asset treasury companies, again, focused on Ethereum.
Why Ethereum and as institutions start to evaluate bringing these products to market, why is Ethereum where they should focus?
What are some of the advantages that come from the Ethereum ecosystem?
Talk to me about that.
So I promise not to use slogans.
So I'll use words and I'll explain what they mean.
I know after 20 years in finance and we worked at the same firm, a very high caliber fiduciary, I know a few things for truth.
And the first is that when institutions build new products, when they partner and when they move technology, there are three prerequisites that are top of their list.
First is, do I trust this platform or network or infrastructure?
Second, is it secure?
And the third is, where is the liquidity?
And Ethereum has been around for almost 11 and a half years.
Zero downtime.
It has the most economic security.
But actually most important at this point, where people are starting to trust blockchains, assets and agents and users and institutions are going to gravitate to where the actual assets are.
Stablecoins is about $310 billion.
in the world today, mostly dollar denominated, over 50% are in the Ethereum ecosystem, the layer ones and layer two tokenized assets.
There's about $40 billion of assets that have been tokenized around 52% are on the Ethereum ecosystem and DeFi, not necessarily all on chain finance, DeFi was built on Ethereum.
So if you have the trust, you have the security and that's where the liquidity are, the users, which will be humans, agents and institutions will gravitate to where those ingredients are today.
And I'm quite confident we're going to live in an omni-chain world, but Ethereum has the license to win and has already started winning in the capital markets and agentic finance space.
I'm curious your thoughts.
We're here today in New York City at LinkNYC at a Chainlink event.
Chainlink obviously emerged from the Ethereum ecosystem and is building a lot of products around trying to bring institutions into digital assets and into tokenization, stablecoins in ways that make sense to them.
Can you talk to me a little bit about how you see that playing a role in this ecosystem here?
I think two of the biggest impediments for the next half a dozen years are going to be we have parallel rails.
You've got 50 to 100 years of traditional financial rails for stocks, bonds, commodities, funds.
fund redemptions, fund subscriptions that are going to live in parallel with the on-chain world for a period of time.
The second thing we have is today we have an infrastructure that's built to work five days a week from 9.30 in the morning till 4.00.
Maybe the banks open at 8.00.
And so we don't have an ecosystem where the data persists and you can have liquidity and you can have price discovery overnight on the weekend.
The thing that excites me most about Chainlink, and I've been following them and I admire Sergey, is the idea, first of all, if you're going to live in a multi-chain world and you're going to have to interact with the traditional Rails, somebody has to set the standards.
The way the internet had standards around HTTP, TCPIP for security and for data movement, someone has to establish the standards.
And by all dimensions, Chainlink is leading in that standard setting.
And therefore, you have an ability to move between traditional and on-chain rails and between chains.
There's going to be millions of chains at a certain point.
And that is a huge, huge reduction of friction.
And the second thing is I am most bullish.
I said to you before, I am a tokenization maxi because I think it's good for the world.
In order for that to work and markets to actually be efficient 24-7, you need somebody who can price every asset.
every moment of the day, 365 days a year.
And the announcement this morning that you heard of Chainlink 24-7 is really important.
Because if you can't price something overnight or on a weekend, it's going to really, really push the institutions to just stay on traditional rails.
If you can price it, then actually you can trade 24-7.
But can I say something a little bit out of the realm?
You can start trading everything for everything.
You don't have to trade a dollar for a stock or a stable coin for a bond or a fund.
If you can price both the fund and the stock, why can't they trade with one another 24-7?
And the second thing it does is it unlocks collateral movement.
You saw the announcement today between Chainlink and Aave, where Chainlink is going to power the price discovery.
You need price discovery for collateral movements.
And in the future, where every stock, bond, and fund is collateralized, sorry, tokenized, it can act as collateral in markets like Aave.
So I'm...
I'm really bullish because this is the final unlock among many we've been waiting for.
I'm really excited to dig into this topic.
I wish we had more time.
So I'm going to frame this last question or maybe the last question around this idea of putting these assets to work once they're tokenized.
Because Sergey talked about that in his keynote this morning about not just tokenizing assets, but then unlocking them.
Sharplink, you've talked a lot about putting your Ethereum to work.
In other words, digital asset treasury companies, some of them just hold the assets.
You deploy the capital and put it to work.
Talk to me about what that looks like and how you're doing that today at Sharplink and where that goes from here.
Yeah, and I need to say this humbly.
Anyone can own ETH.
Anyone could buy Spot.
Anyone can buy an ETF, including the ones that we launched and I was proud of at BlackRock.
But not everyone can make the ETH maximally productive.
So what we do at Sharplink is from day one, we've been staking.
Billions of dollars of ETH, I think we're over 99% deployed and staked, and we did it quickly and we did it institutionally.
But the second thing, which is quite interesting, is every company has a comparative advantage.
Ours, as a digital asset treasury, is that we have permanent capital.
We're not a fund.
We're not...
We don't have daily redemptions.
And when you have permanent capital, like a sovereign wealth fund, you can actually deploy your capital on a multi-year basis.
And when you could do that, especially in crypto, which is starved of capital that's more than a three-month duration or a six-month duration, you could actually help jumpstart the initial capital in protocols.
So it's not just that you're an ecosystem supporter.
When you jumpstart a protocol, you also get better returns for your investors.
And what we're finding is if you can deploy on-chain into staking, restaking, liquid staking tokens, or like we've done with Galaxy, we launched $125 million on-chain yield fund, you have permanent capital, you can deploy it for longer.
It's good for the ecosystem, but equally important, it's better for your investors.
And that's very hard for an individual to do because you have to deal with all the complexities.
And we do it in an institutional way.
So when you talk about owning ETH, you want to have that long-term ETH exposure because it's going to be the settlement layer for all of finance.
But you also want to be able to make it productive because it's a natively productive asset.
So it's actually quite exciting.
It's also a huge responsibility.
Joe, we talked about AI agents at the beginning of this.
We talked about tokenization, stable coins, and we talked about these two parallel financial systems that are starting to come together.
As Sharplink thinks about deploying its capital, jump-starting things, and building at this intersection, where are you most focused right now?
Where do you see the biggest opportunity for Sharplink?
What's got you excited?
So we've been at this for about 16 months, and I would say the first year was about three things.
One is...
building the controls you need if you're going to manage the king's gold.
It's a huge responsibility.
People are entrusting you to secure it.
So the first thing was to build the controls, have KPMG as an auditor.
The second thing was to build a team who knows how to make the ETH maximally productive.
We did something different than almost 200 DATs.
We built an on-chain.
on team capability.
So we didn't have to fully outsource this.
And actually that's very respectful for investors and returns.
The third thing we did is we accumulated.
When the markets were really positive, we raised $3 billion of equity on behalf of investors and we put it to work.
I think the next stage is taking that permanent capital, continuing to deploy it on chain, but there are a lot of businesses that are one lane over from what we do that would benefit.
from having permanent capital in a number of related spaces on chain.
And I can't tip our hat what we're going to do next, but when you start by building, having a team, having controls, raising capital and starting to deploy it, you can get more sophisticated and go slowly one step at a time down the risk curve.
And the most fun thing about doing this is you could do it while raising standards.
And I spent 20 years at BlackRock and we were in the business of raising standards.
And that is what institutional DeFi looks like.
And it's what the future of on-chain finance looks like.
It's not about compromising.
It's about raising standards.
And as a public company, we can be a steward and we could be a standard bearer.
And that actually is fun.
And it also is a huge responsibility.
Well, Joe, thank you so much for raising standards and bearing standards for the industry, for Sharplink, and for digital assets overall.
I really appreciate what you're doing in this space.
I know we all do.
Thank you to Chainlink for sponsoring this Fireside Chat.
Thank you all for listening.
And thank you, Joe, so much for being here and for the time to talk today.
I really enjoyed this conversation very much.
My pleasure from one BlackRock alum to another.
And I'll speak to you again next week.
All right.
Well, I will see you on MillCode Crypto.
I hope I will see you all on MillCode Crypto.
But thank you so much, Joe.
This was really great.
Thank you, John.
Thank you all.
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