00:00So whether legislation's in place, which will be very helpful to us, or legislation comes later,
00:06and our exemptive relief generates activity, brings tokenization home to the U.S., that could inform legislation down the road.
00:13So people have been calling this a five-year exemption, but what happens in year six when an entire market
00:18has been built around all of this?
00:20Well, hopefully, if that happens, and we hope it does happen, and the exemption's successful and tokenized trading comes to
00:27the states and gains traction,
00:29it'll be really hard to remove the exemption.
00:31And who would want to remove the exemption?
00:33Because in our view, tokenization and crypto's been politicized recently, but it's not naturally a politicized function.
00:41It's fairly bipartisan, and success of the country in terms of developing these markets should have good bipartisan support.
00:48I wanted to give you a chance to respond to the criticism from former SEC Chief of Staff Amanda Fisher.
00:53Again, I'm going to repeat this.
00:54She posted on X saying, quote, overall, this will exacerbate market fragmentation and worsen price discovery.
01:00More venues that don't talk to one another increases the chances for price dislocations.
01:04How do you respond to that?
01:05Well, the challenge with Amanda's view is that tokenization is already happening.
01:09It's happening offshore.
01:10It's happening via synthetics, right?
01:12So, you know, our innovation exemption would require the tokens to have the full, you know, sort of rights and
01:19privileges of the equity, right?
01:21So shareholders get the same rights and privileges they do if they own the underlying equity.
01:25So, you know, they're insured that.
01:28They're protected.
01:29If we allow tokenization to continue to grow offshore, you know, that is true fragmentation.
01:33So we bring it home.
01:34When you say offshore, what specific exchanges are you talking about?
01:38There's any number of, you know, I don't know if they even trade on exchanges, but any number of issuers
01:43have issued tokenized swaps offshore, have issued tokenized debt instruments offshore.
01:48Again, none of the rights and privileges of the underlying equity.
01:51So, you know, there's a fairly famous now debate between Robinhood and AMC, you know, which illustrated the lack of
01:59clarity and the problems to, you know, that issuers see, you know, if this issuance is done, you know, offshore.
02:05So, look, tokenization, wonderful technology.
02:07We want it done in this country so this country wins.
02:10You know, if we sort of follow sort of Amanda's advice and do nothing, you know, then we lose out
02:15and investors are potentially disadvantaged because they're exposed to this activity offshore.
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