Crypto’s Next Chapter: Tokenized Treasuries, Flash Crash Lessons & Adoption

And now let's get to the big story breakdown.

The tokenization of real world assets is transforming global finance, bringing tangible assets like real estate bonds and commodities on to blockchain networks.

The market for tokenized real world assets has exploded.

Total RWA on chain nearing $34 billion after growing 224% in 2024.

Forecasts now point to a $30 trillion valuation by 2034.

Now Polygon recently launched Rio, a major payments upgrade.

I mean a Bank, a Swiss regulated institution teaming up with Polygon to launch the first ever institutional staking service for Paul.

Well joining me with more live at the New York Stock Exchange is Sandeep.

Wall, co-founder and CEO of the Polygon Foundation.

Great to have you here, Sandeep.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me here.

Well, first and foremost, we're here at the New York Stock Exchange, the center of tradie.

So I do want to ask you first and foremost, tell me about this growing shift of institutional adoption into tokenized treasuries as well as private credit.

Yeah, so what is happening, what you're seeing is that crypto is maturing from this, you know, niche asset class which is highly speculative in nature to actually the crypto technology being used as financial infrastructure.

And what you're going to see is like stablecoin, for example, right?

It's so big, but if you see stablecoin it's just a tokenized version of US dollars.

Similarly, now you are seeing a barrage of, you know, tokenized assets are coming on the chain which includes your bank deposits, your hedge funds, mutual funds.

Everything is going to be tokenized because why?

Because it provides additional liquidity, additional avenues for people to Utilize that liquidity into different things, right?

So that's what we are seeing and this moment with stablecoins, what stablecoins did was stablecoins were able to create this whole catalyst effect and now finally tray is understanding that this is not only one particular asset class, it's basically financial infrastructure and everybody is now it's a race to come to use this financial infrastructure now.

Yeah, and Sandeep, I'm glad you mentioned the word infrastructure because we are fast approaching the end of 2025, which is hard to believe.

But when we think about some of the deals that have been highlighted on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange this year, Circle going public as well as the Polymarket investment by the New York Stock Exchange parent company ICE.

These have been some big headlines here, especially when we're talking about blockchain and crypto digital assets, but we did see that crypto flash crash last Friday.

So what was your take?

Yeah, so first of all, you know, you mentioned polymarket.

Like we are super proud that polymarket has come here.

It's a big thing for the entire cryptospace and for Polygon, you know, specifically polymarket is fully built on polygon.

It's built on polygon blockchain and the overall ecosystem that polygon blockchain provides them is no longer like now.

Blockchain having cheap transactions anymore right and fast transactions.

It's more about having this entire ecosystem of on-ramps, off ramps, stablecoin liquidity, and so many things which make these apps really successful and that's what we are seeing in the success of, you know, polymarket you mentioned about.

What was the specific question I, the flash crash we saw in crypto.

The flash crash really, you know, obviously it shook everyone and it was almost like I remember I was, you know, sitting and watching these, you know, numbers and suddenly I saw that what's like the 3rd World War happened or what like because this was bigger than COVID sell off also, right?

So but it seems like it was like a cascaded deleveraging of so many things happened.

It looks like.

It started from a particular stablecoin which recently got added as margin stablecoins in various exchanges, and then the price of that stablecoin was being taken from one thin book and what happened is that somebody, whether it was like planned or it was like organic, you know, just after the announcement from President Trump related to the tariffs like that, there was a lot of selling of that stablecoin and that thin book and that created that stablecoin to Dee.

And because that stablecoin was being used as margin for many other trades, so all those trades started getting unwinded, and then you know when market makers sees that you know some some big scale thing is happening plus a macro news, then everybody thinks that this is something.

You know, big and make us start pulling off their liquidity and then the whole chaosk started, but it also tells you about that this that it's super interconnected and also that you know the exchanges, it's a good call wake up call for the exchanges that especially Oracle feeds and all that needs to be taken very seriously and because one exchange, one incident in one exchange can impact the whole exchange because it's super interconnected with everything being you know, online, on chain, and 24.

Yeah, and I think many of us were watching our screens on Friday afternoon here in New York and we were astounded by the swiftness of that decline, not only in crypto but also in the stock markets and it really shows you how much is going on, whether we're talking about national.

Politics or geopolitics, but I do want to focus on polygon and since the launch of Matic Foundation and that renaming to Polygon, a lot has happened on the regulatory landscape as well as technology shaping polygon.

So tell us about Rio.

Yeah, so Rio upgrade is like one of our biggest upgrades that has happened in the past few days, and Polygon generally started as a, you know, layer two blockchain which had 200 TPS like transactions per second, rough, you know, quantity of the throughput.

With these last two upgrades and which culminating with Rio, we have now gone to now gone to the capacity to have 5000 GPS.

Makes Polygon probably one of the most high throughput chains across the industry, and that helps applications like Polymarket to scale their user base to hundreds of thousands or millions of users, right?

So now the gas fees becomes even cheaper and you know, the throughput becomes much, much bigger.

And plus we are, as we as Polygon now has is razor focused on stable coins and token. and everything and payments which is which you know drive a huge amount of volume and so this upgrade is extremely pivotal for us for us to go to 100,000 TPS, which allows us to go to Visa or Mastercard level so that like multiple parties across the globe can use this platform for payments and stablecoin and tokenization.

Yeah, and of course I do want to ask about RWA's tokenization, but Stripe just launched subscriptions on Polygon.

Well, so tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, so Stripe has been live on Polygon for a long time, like since 2021, 2022 days, and you remember Polygon, you know, from 21, 22 days where we were the first blockchain to bring the barrage of institutions on chain, including Starbucks, including Meta Instagram launching NFTs.

They were also on our polygon and Reddit still has like their NFT program on Polygon and everything, and because we have always been very focused on utility, polygon as a blockchain and an ecosystem because probably for me as a founder and the leadership, we are not very speculative in nature by ourselves, right?

So that culture in polygon ecosystem is also very heavily around utility, and that is what we have seen.

So Stripe and these big fintechs coming on chain when it was happening.

Polygon was the first choice of the chain and If you see even Stripe today, Stripe has the highest amount of volume, stablecoin volumes, peer to peer payments on Polygon only, and we expect this to only grow and the subscription is basically any platform which is using Stripe, whether you are on X or you are on Telegram, if they are using Stripe in the background, the subscription, the monthly subscription that you do that now you can do with stablecoins on Stripe and all of that gets processed on. polygon.

So that's a big thing for us, and we are seeing a huge amount of these big heavyweights in the fintech and payment world taking notice of this and getting onboarded and in the coming few months you're going to see like a huge amount of these the barrage of these payments and other giants coming on and finally before I let you go, we have less than 60 seconds here, Sandeep, but I know that financial Inclusion is an issue that is close to your heart.

So tell me about the growth happening not just in Latin America but also in Southeast Asia.

Yes, Latin America, Southeast Asia, even Africa, where the currencies are devaluing very rapidly, where if you get your salary of $200 to $500 you immediately want to convert it from the local currency to USD.

That is driving a huge amount of volume there plus it's very easy, super easy.

You don't need a local bank and all that.

The blockchain is just a click of a wallet, click of a button, you are, you have an account and you can receive and transfer money.

And so we are seeing this Southeast Asia, India, Turkey, UAE, Africa, we are seeing huge growth and Latam like we have like 70-80% of the market share there in terms of these transactions.

So it's going to be bigger and bigger and bigger.

Well, Sandeep, great having you live here at the New York Stock Exchange.

I look forward to continuing this conversation at another time.

Thank you so much.