The tokenized real world asset market has hit over $26 billion and this excludes stable coins.
Meanwhile, the SEC's Investor advisory Committee is holding a meeting this week on tokenized equities.
The agency has been providing regulatory clarity on tokenize stocks, and their guidance outlines two types of securities issued sponsored and third party sponsored.
Now tokenized money market funds are also included in their guidance.
Institutional players are growing these funds on chain included Franklin Templeton, Blackrock and Wisdom Tree and Wisdom tree recently received a CC approval to allow 24/7 trading and instant settlement for its money market fund was joining me live here at the New York Stock Exchange is Will Peck, Head of Digital assets for Wisdom tree will have here.
Thank you so much for joining me 2026 is well underway and we've seen a lot.
Trends emerge in digital assets, but give us your take on where the SEC currently stands when it comes to tokenized securities.
Yes, absolutely.
So the SEC put out a statement a couple of weeks ago, multiple divisions in the SEC put it out regarding tokenized securities, where you know to our eyes it was kind of fully expected the things that they said kind of spelled out kind of the people say tokenized securities, but it can mean lots of different things in the context of US law, right?
So.
Made very clear the kind of different categories of tokenized securities, what is kind of clearly within the law in the United States, what might need conditions might need to be met for some other models as well.
So the SEC is kind of, I think, appropriately fostering a technology neutral kind of regulatory stance towards this technology and towards securities broadly, and I think fostering an environment where businesses can do pro-consumer innovation.
Yes, and we will continue to monitor what comes out of the nation's capital in terms of the regulatory front when it comes to digital assets, but I do want to get your take on tokenized money market fund, the wisdom tree approval.
So tell us why this is a game changer.
Yes, absolutely.
So we view it as a game changer.
These types of exemptive orders in the investment management space are pretty rare.
Essentially the approval we got allows our tokenized money market fund WTGXX, which is a US 4DA registered money market fund, to trade and settle 24/7 instantly in the secondary market.
So money market funds in the past have historically been limited to a once a day batch settlement process where you place your order at 10:00 a.m., you don't get the shares back into your wallet until 4 p.m. right after the net asset value is struck.
So what this approval allows us to do is say, hey, if you want to buy or sell the money market fund at 10:00 a.m. you can do that against a broker dealer in the secondary market at a price of $1 per share, which really opens up a lot of use cases for this tokenized money market fund to sit alongside stablecoin and other crypto assets in people's workflows.
I mean one of the examples that I really like to point to is a business that's doing treasury management using stablecoins.
They're making payments in stablecoins over a weekend.
Historically they couldn't use a tokenized money market fund as kind of their store of value in that because if they wanted to trade it out on a weekend they'd have to wait until like Monday at 4 p.m.
Now they could trade it at 10:00 a.m. on a Sunday, immediately make their payment.
It just opens up lots of use cases across Treasury management, collateral mobility, and other use cases for these funds. and that wisdom Tree you also oversee not just these funds but also crypto as well as tokenized real world assets.
So give us an idea of what's really happening on the ground and you also mentioned use cases.
So give us an understanding of the expectations as we move forward.
Yes, I mean we've seen an explosion in activity post Genius Act where the Genius Act passed in the United States, not even kind of fully implemented yet, but a lot of kind of traditional big financial services businesses, a lot of startups. come into this space and said hey we're going to build, launch, use stablecoins to kind of solve XYZ for our customers and kind of post genius act there's just been an immense amount of interest in kind of on-chain financial services starting with the dollar and stablecoins expanding to money market funds from there and then beyond, including things like tokenized stocks, etc.
So we've just seen a lot of activity from kind of various participants in the market around this just trying to achieve.
I think about it as creating a better user experience and better distribution. kind of enhanced distribution for these types of products that we have and you mentioned genius, so we're also paying attention to what happens in terms of clarity.
But for the lay person out there who's trying to understand what's actually happening here, it's hard not to pay attention to what's happening to the crypto majors in terms of price action.
So give us your take on what we can expect and what retail investors can see.
Yeah, I mean it's it's tough to say.
I think.
With crypto prices, it hasn't really slowed down any activity here.
You know it feels like we're seeing a shakeout where there's not kind of this boogeyman to point to saying oh this is why crypto prices aren't going up, right?
Like the environment is there and it's really just a matter of supply and demand and market dynamics.
So I think we certainly believe in an allocation it's part of a balanced portfolio can make sense to crypto.
Very hard to say what the prices are going to do in the near term.
I think Bitcoin has proven not to.
This true risk off asset in the short run like you might think of gold.
Now in the long run over the past 5 years, gold and Bitcoin have performed about the same, so it's not like you can't say it's not working over long periods of time.
Certainly over 10 years, Bitcoin performed extremely well.
It is just to kind of know what it's going to do in the short run just given the supply and demand dynamics that we're seeing.
And finally, before I let you go, you and I are here on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
We continue to hear about token.
Announcements coming out from both of the US exchanges.
So what does that mean moving forward for the investors?
Yeah, I mean, I think for a lot of investors it probably like these products, these tokenized assets today are not for like a regular retail investor who's like very well served in their Fidelity account, right?
Like I always say the example, you wouldn't buy like a US large cap tokenized fund instead of an ETF in your brokerage account today.
You're very well served in your brokerage account.
This is really about a.
Community or a new community of people who are doing things on chain who might not be particularly well served in their brokerage account or might want to do more and more things in their on-chain infrastructure that they're using today.
So I see it as kind of serving a whole new set of people.
The customer journey is not trying to convince somebody who is currently very well served by an ETF in their brokerage account to move over to a tokenized fund.
Now with that said, I think you're seeing a lot of innovation and a lot of certainly hiring from big traditional financial services firms.
You see reporting around big broker dealers hiring people, building out products.
So I think over time we're going to be seeing more and more of this embedded into kind of people's financial services companies, and that's just going to open up opportunities for like, hey, this actually does this thing, you know, 5, 10, 20% better than it could have done in the past, and then people might start using this more and more as part of their daily financial lives.
Well, it was great having you here.
Thank you so much for breaking all of this down and as always, thank you so much for sharing all of your insights.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
