Tokenization, Regulation, and Prediction Markets: Inside the Future of Finance

Welcome to FinTech TV.

One of the most prominent topics here at Digital Asset Summit 2026 has been tokenization.

Now the New York Stock Exchange and securitize announced a partnership to move actual stocks onto the blockchain, and at the same time, BlackRock's Larry Finks saying tokenization could transform the plumbing of the world's financial system.

Well, joining me live here in New York City is John D'Agostino, Head of Strategy for Coinbase Institutional, and also board member for AMA.

Well, thank you so much for joining me, John.

Remy, it's always a pleasure to be here.

Well, a lot going on in Q1 of 2026, but here we are at the Digital Asset Summit 2026, and a lot of announcements coming through.

So first and foremost, what do you make of the announcement with securit ties and the New York Stock Exchange?

Yes, so look, this conference is great.

Congrats to Jason and the team for putting together an All-Star event during a crypto winter, especially.

Um, look, I, I was a little bit skeptical of the timeline a year ago.

So I was asked, I think I was on the show, and I said, you know, having been an exchange executive before in traditional exchanges, um, these are battleships that take forever to turn around, and, uh, it took, you know, it took a decade for the NIME to go electric, uh, and digital, uh, decades longer than it should have.

And so a year ago I was like, look, this is, this is happening.

Tokenization is absolutely the rails on which value will be traded and risk will be traded eventually, but this thing could take, you know, decades to happen.

I have been, I think, proven wrong.

Uh, the pace of adoption is extraordinary.

So, you know, NASDAQ, nicely securitized.

NASDAQ announcing their partnership.

Obviously Coinbase is building the everything exchange, rapidly tokenizing, allowing for 24/7, 365 trading of virtually any asset.

Um, and I think, uh, who knows exactly what the catalyst has been to exacerbate that, but once these exchanges start doing either parallel after-hours trading, um, The best analogy I can give you is once a trader has the ability to hedge crude oil exposure at 2 a.m. on a Thursday or a Friday, when there's an attack um in the Middle East, they're never gonna go back to waiting until markets opened.

And the, the best analogy I have is we are never going to go back to waiting until the theaters tell us when we can see a movie now that we have streaming.

And so the more exchanges that build that capability, the more after hours liquidity will build globally, and the less likely we are to ever go back to that old sister.

Yes, and you bring up an important point because all of us, we are paying attention to what's happening geopolitically, but the activity when it comes to digital assets and as you mentioned, futures price action, right?

There have been a lot of headlines breaking on the weekends, especially before US equity markets.

Or we've been watching oil futures on the weekends before the trading week commences here in the US, but given the comments by Larry Fink regarding tokenization, what does this tell you about the growth of the space?

Well, it tells me that the major players are heavily behind it.

Um, you know, you have the issuers have to support it.

It's very, very difficult to do something with someone's stock or derivative or equity if they're not a fan of that action.

So, for example, private pre-IPO private markets for tech companies, uh, they exist, but they've always been challenging.

Ultimately because the tech companies themselves aren't huge fans of their employees gaining early.

Liquidity, or at least historically weren't, and they fought against that for a while.

You don't want that junior engineer who to get the wealthy pre-IPO.

You want them to be young and hungry and scrappy up until the IPO when they lose their motivation because now they've got, they've got liquidity.

But we're seeing over time the company starts to get comfortable with this, see it as a competitive advantage to offer.

Curated selective windows of pre-IPO liquidity.

So that that went from that went from becoming a threat, from being a threat to being a strategic recruitment advantage.

And now that they're on board with that, those markets can start to build.

And, you know, we have these wonderful uh derivative perp. as well, which kind of simulate futures contracts.

Uh, Hyperliquid's been extraordinarily successful.

Coinbase can offer them to non-US investors for now, hopefully someday US investors.

Um, the horse has left the barn about this stuff, and once people taste overnight 24/7 instantaneous liquidity.

Very, very difficult to get them to go back.

So we're watching activity 24/7 as it unfolds, but I do think agents might be, yeah, absolutely.

So that is something that we are talking about here at Digital Asset Summit as well, the role of artificial intelligence and agentic commerce.

So it'll be interesting to see how all of this unfolds.

But before we get to that, I do want to get your take on what we're seeing in the nation's capital when it comes.

To regulation.

So we've been hearing about potential progress and taking steps back when it comes to the Clarity Act.

So how does all of this eventually shake out?

So I'm not a policy expert, uh, but I have, we have great ones at Coinbase.

Um, I will say I have never seen, so market structure, which clarity is market structure, is enormously impactful, broad, and expansive.

We don't see them very often.

But even something simpler like genius was horse traded until the last moment.

I mean, people now look at it and say, oh, it's wonderful, it passed bipartisan.

But I remember when weeks before, days before it actually was passed, people were betting that it wouldn't pass, and there were all this consternation about, you know, uh, all the, all the amendments.

So, it doesn't surprise me that we're here.

Um, I think the adults are at the table.

Things are moving forward.

Uh, we're fighting very, very strongly for the American consumer.

At the end of the day, we want to build and allow. for competition around rewards and interest payments.

It's very, very simple.

You should not be getting 10 basis points when the issuing bank is getting 4 or 5% from the US government.

It's really simple.

So the only way to drive that is shrink that that spread is to allow for competition.

So we hope that the final form of the bill allows for the American consumer to extract as much wealth as possible for themselves, um, but we are encouraged by the administration's.

A dedication to getting this done.

Yeah, so John, you and I will continue to monitor what happens in terms of progress on this, but you mentioned one word, and that is betting.

So if we're talking about betting and regulation, what do you make of prediction markets?

Well, I think prediction markets, I think as a whole writ large, uh, I, I understand some people try to taint them with the over term of betting.

I think there are very, very different types of prediction markets.

There's sports prediction markets.

There are, uh, event prediction markets, but then there are like really impactful things like prediction markets on interest rates.

Um, and we saw an amazing report on Kaoshi talking about how their prediction market on interest rate, uh, cuts or raises is more predictive, is better predictive than, uh, traditional surveys.

So I have a soft spot for those types of prediction markets.

I think there's, you know, all these amazing like EIA Energy Energy Information Authority releases these really important numbers every month of how much natural gas we have on the ground or crude oil and storage.

Um, it'd be really.

Wonderful to have prediction markets that can help people hedge against them being over or under those numbers.

So, the states and the federal government are gonna kind of fight it out.

Uh, again, we have a, we have a dog in that fight, and uh we have an amazing legal team that's working on that.

Uh, we'll see how that all turns out.

Um, I'll stick to what I know, which is, uh, the, uh, important economic indicator prediction markets are incredibly valuable.

They're valuable.

From a hedging perspective, from a market participation perspective, but they're incredibly valuable from a data and information perspective.

And I don't think it's long, it's already happening in some markets where the large globalquant funds start thinking and using prediction market data over other traditional forms of data.

And so, you know, we, we want that.

We want the source of that information to come from the US because it's very, very powerful.

Yes, and finally, before I let you go, because you mentioned rates, and I know you spent time at the NIMEX, so I do want to get your take on where you think we are in this market cycle given all the geopolitical concerns.

We know that energy prices are elevated and that is a concern for global central banks here.

But you and I, we don't have a Crystal ball, we don't know what's going to happen.

But big picture, what are your concerns?

How is this going to play out?

A long time since I traded energy.

Um, but, uh, I saw a lot of friends who are very active in the market.

And the one thing I was taught early in my career, which really hasn't changed, market structures changed, the way instruments, energy is traded changed to some degree.

But one thing that hasn't changed that people tend to forget is crude oil. is priced by the marginal unit of production.

It's the marginal barrel.

That's why you could, you could uncover a quintillion a quintillion barrels of oil under the crust of the earth or on an asteroid somewhere, and everyone will talk, talk about it, write about it.

It doesn't really matter in terms of the price because all that matters is, can I get that ship to turn around and come to me to produce my widget, and how much am I willing to pay to do that.

So that hurts us when the strait is closed because the few ships that can get through get bit up and bid up and bit up.

Um, but I will say this, it has an equal effect on the opposite side.

So, you know, any day now we could see an opening of the strait, and you have all of those marginal units of production increase, you know, I think it was Bernstein or Goldman wrote an article recently saying how there's been demand destruction because of rising crude oil prices.

So very, very quickly, you could see excess.

Marginal production or marginal availability versus short term demand, and crude can drop really, really fast.

So I am, I am cautiously optimistic that if we can get a resolution around the strait, people will be surprised at how quickly the market, the spot market changes.

Well, John, always great talking to you.

Thank you so much for covering so much ground in terms of topic.

I appreciate your perspective as well as your insights anytime.

Thank you.