00:00With a U.S. Clarity Act stalling, what's the first real market behavior change that you're seeing
00:04when it comes to institutions on the ground?
00:08Thanks for having me. I don't know if we see a massive change of behavior, right?
00:14So I think when we're having the same conversations about genius, it was about the U.S. sending a
00:21signal to the world that the economy is ready for digital asset adoption and putting the dollar
00:26on-chain. With clarity, it's different. On one hand, we strongly believe that it will put the
00:32industry on a much more substantial legislative footing and regulatory clarity. On the other,
00:39a lot of these decisions have already been made at an agency's level, so we don't see a slowdown
00:45in terms of our client interest, institutional client interest in digital assets adoption.
00:50Do you think that this regulatory delay is pushing liquidity and innovation and maybe even
00:54infrastructure decisions offshore, or do you think that's a little bit of an overstatement?
00:59I think it's a little bit of an overstatement. I think that commercial activity is never only
01:07determined by a regulatory decision-making, right? So the U.S. is highly energetic, very well
01:14financed market, so we don't see institutional activity moving offshore just because there's
01:20ups and downs on whether clarity was at 60 percent or 50 percent or 40 percent.
01:25What are you seeing in custody and settlement flows at Fireblocks? I mean, do you find that
01:30they signal real institutional growth or do you still think that they're concentrated in the hands of
01:34just a very few power players?
01:37I think we see a real institutional growth at Fireblocks. So we now service over 100 banks
01:44around the world and that number was not where it is today. Our pipelines definitely pivoted towards
01:52payment institutions and banks. So for many years in digital assets, we've been talking about the
01:58advent of institutional capital. I think over the past 12 months, we can definitely see signals on the
02:03markets that is here. And in your view, at what point does tokenization force crypto venues to look
02:09more like traditional broker-dealers, as we were earlier talking about with our guests, and really
02:13force them to get exchanges from a licensing standpoint? Yeah, we kind of call this the trade
02:19everything stack at Fireblocks. So we see the movement for digital assets investment and kind of
02:26crypto asset investment expand into investing in tokenized stocks, tokenized bonds and funds.
02:32I think it's a gradual momentum. And the possibility of moving from one asset class to another
02:40is really forcing players around the world to consider what set of licenses do they need in order to
02:47provide access to their investors to all sorts of tokenized assets, be they crypto assets or traditional
02:53financial instruments.
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