In this episode of Taking Stock, Olivia Vande Woude, Tokenization Lead at Labs, explains why the real story in crypto isn’t daily price swings but the underlying financial infrastructure quietly being built. She highlights how fintech and blockchain are converging as major players like JPMorgan, Cash App, Gusto, and Deel roll out stablecoin products, while Meta reportedly explores global payment integrations. Drawing parallels to Vanguard’s once-dismissed index fund revolution, she argues tokenization is reshaping finance through instant settlement, programmable money, and lower operational costs. With firms like Dragonfly raising major capital and platforms such as OpenTrade and Denari expanding access to tokenized assets, she says blockchain infrastructure is unlocking institutional-grade financial tools for everyday users worldwide signaling a structural shift that markets may be underestimating.
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And joining us now on taking stock is Olivia Vande Woude, a tokenization lead at the Labs.
Olivia, great to have you here.
So first, when people talk about crypto, they tend to obsess over daily price swings.
So do you think the real signal is the plumbing and not the actual ticker?
Yeah, absolutely.
Thank you for having me.
Um, first of all, fintech and crypto are increasingly converging, and in my view, the market is missing it.
You know, the institutions are building out the custody infrastructure, the tokenization pipelines, as well as the on-chain settlement rails, um, and they're making multi-year capital allocation decisions completely decoupled from daily price movements and really the buildout is accelerating in drawdowns, not, not despite them, and that distinction.
Really matters and the market, of course, has misread structural shifts before Remy.
You know, the market laughed at Vanguard's first index fund and it went on to fundamentally rewire how capital gets allocated globally and the same dynamic is unfolding today in the context of tokenization.
You know, while attention stays very much fixed on token prices, stablecoins, as well as tokenization and blockchain technology writ large, are dismantling the frictions of legacy finance.
They're delivering.
Near instant settlement, reduced counterparty risk, and 24/7 availability across real growing user bases, and the scale is really undeniable.
We saw Cash App, Gusto, Deal, JPMorgan all launching USDC products last quarter.
Metas of this week is reportedly building stablecoin payment products across 3 billion users.
Tokenized assets have surged to $25 billion in value on chain.
Just last week, Dragonfly raised $650 million.
And oversubscribed in a down market and on LP conviction really around stablecoins and FinTech convergence as opposed to Bitcoin's price.
So really the reason that capital keeps flowing here regardless of price is simple.
Blockchain-based infrastructure is better financial infrastructure.
Programmable money, instant settlement, and embedded compliance really can't be retrofitted onto legacy rails easily.
They require a financial system rebuilt for how money moves today.
Yeah, and Olivia, you just mentioned stablecoins, so I do want to ask you about adoption we're seeing in this space.
So do you think crypto, the term crypto, is really just a label for modern fintech?
Great question.
Really, if you think about tokenization, it's actually quite boring technology, um, and tokenization, though it may be boring in principle, is really quite exciting and how it can improve fintech.
You know, the addressable market for tokenized assets is really hundreds of millions of retail and SME users in dollar-constrained markets who have never had access to US Treasury yields or institutional grade financial products.
Products, you know, when the peso depreciates 20 to 30% in a year, dollar denominated yield isn't a convenience so much as a core value proposition, and reaching these users at scale has been a decades-long challenge that traditional financial infrastructure really couldn't solve, but tokenization solves the unit economics that made it impossible.
The business outcome, in my view, for FinTech is threefold.
It's novel.
Revenue streams, a product suite that competes with what's been gated behind, you know, private banking minimums and lower operational costs by embedding compliance controls directly into a token, and this is already happening and has been happening for quite some time now.
In 2024, Colombian neobank Lydio, for example, processed over $100 million across 300,000 users in Colombia, and this is all being made scalable.
Available today by blockchain-based platforms like Open Trade and Denari which offer stablecoin yield products and tokenized US equities infrastructure distributed through APIs and really the blockchain enabled financial products are creating new revenue streams for FinTech, scalable distribution for asset managers, and, and access to institutional grade yield and equity for end users inside FinTech apps that they already know and trust.
Well, Olivia, we will have to leave it there for today, but thank you so much for joining us and thank you so much for sharing all of your insights.