Aave's Horizon Powers Institutional DeFi RWA Lending & More RWA News - Security Token Show: Ep. 298

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Uh,

Speaker A: Hello, everybody, and happy Friday. It's that time of the week. It's time for the security token show. That's right. Kyle and I, we've got the latest and greatest tokenization news for you. Real world assets are on, um, fire. Wow. Some big news this week on the institutional front, on the blockchain front. Some cool regulatory opinions, some investments and more. We've got it all, don't we, Kyle, how are you this week?

Speaker B: That's right. I'm feeling great. We are kicking off another amazing episode of the show her wig. I am getting ready to head out to Asia, beginning my world tour round two. Uh, that doesn't mean I'm not going to be available for the show, but, uh, this is my last, my last stand on the ground here in Miami, Florida for about a month.

Speaker A: Well, you know, it's a good time to get out, uh, because it is hot. It is hot out there, folks. But, uh, I will be actually up in New York for RWA summit in the next few weeks. Uh, so if you're going to be out there, hit me up for that. Or if you're going to be out in Asia in the next month, hit up. Kyle, maybe you just might overlap. Uh, but, uh, with that. Kyle, shall we start the show?

Speaker B: Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker A: Okay, well, a couple of big headlines to cover the market movers, if you like. That's what we call this market segment, of course, to talk about the biggest moves in the space. And I'm starting it off with. With aave. Okay. They are the biggest lenders, you know. Is it aave? I don't know. You tell me. But they are, I believe. Is it the 38th? You can check aaverank.com. i'm looking at it right now. And jump to AV. It is 38. That's right. The 38th biggest bank. FDI Insure. FDIC Insured bank, uh, by assets. Uh, if you include it as a bank. Uh, that's huge, Kyle. Uh, and they are getting into RWAs and something that I think we've talked about on the show, if not many times, uh, privately. But aave, to me, a gonna be a RWA company. Uh, so it's gonna be completely, you know, now it's already at number 38. It might jump to number 10 or more thanks to RWAs. And I think they know that over there. Uh, we've seen Stanley on the road show for RWAs here and there. And now we see it coming together with Horizon. So Horizon is, I guess, a platform where Institutions so not retail can go and actually borrow against their real world assets. They can get a number of different stable coins they can choose from to borrow against a variety of institutional assets from securitized from superstate, from centrifuge, from, from a variety of different grade A RWA issuers that institutions are comfortable with. So this is a very big deal to me Kyle, uh, because this is of course one of those use cases that I've been talking about all year. The fact that people can start borrowing against their assets, start looping them, uh, and actually start finding real utility out of their RWAs. One day you might actually be able to use RWAs to stake and borrow against other uh, opportunities. It's all kinds of uh, cool innovations that are going to come from this I think. And they're starting institutional which means it's going to be big checks. Kyle, what do you think?

Speaker B: Yeah, this is tremendous. Um, uh, look, this is a great example of DeFi really becoming a institutionally respected stack of services. I think that this is something that maybe would have sounded crazy as when AV launched, launched you know, back in at least into the mainstream in that 2020, 2019, 2021, that type of time period. We were covering the DeFi summer and now we're seeing it generate real liquidity acting as a real distribution channel for these banks, institutions in a way that they hadn't previously accessed. Right now any of these banks are accessing private bank clients, private wealth management, institutional counterparties have uh, is bringing a totally different bank set of liquidity into this ecosystem. It's no wonder that a lot of these institutions are beginning to really explore how to leverage this platform. It's a whole new stack of liquidity for them.

Speaker A: 24,7 Permissionless for institutions to use. Now that is pretty cool. Good stuff, you know, else is pretty cool. Kyle. Toyota is officially uh, putting out one of their initiatives from their blockchain division. Toyota Blockchain Lab. Uh, the Mobility Orchestration Network or mon, uh, is actually gonna enable an NFT solution to basically tokenize vehicles. Uh, eventually. If you have a bunch of these NFTs, you might have a fleet of vehicles that you own. They're saying it could lead to structured portfolios and other securitization opportunities, uh, and beyond. It's actually a pretty detailed paper that they put out if you want to go look it up and it's using Avalanche. So my company of the week from last week, another win from them. Now they've got Toyota uh, to add to boot uh, to their many List of partners, uh, that are, you know, uh, that are using Avalanche blockchain. So Kyle, any notes on this one?

Speaker B: Look, I think this is really cool because on the flip side of what we just described, this is a large scale institution that's breaking into the blockchain infrastructure because they see the opportunities. And we've talked so much, Harwig and I've used the analogy so often, whether it's on sales calls or whether it's, it's on partnership meetings or on panels or whatever, about using the blockchain analogy of it being like a highway where traditionally you'd have all these different assets that represented cars or trucks or motorcycles or, or you know, runners or bikers. And traditionally each one of those people or each one of those vehicles might need to have their own pathways in order to transact within the economy or in the highway system. Whereas with blockchain we can standardize that road and those rules so that everybody can pass on it in kind of a convenient way, in a streamlined way so we can see all these things together. I've always used that analogy of a highway. I think it's cool to see Toyota also seeing the opportunity here with all their vehicles with the, you know, they point to EV financing, they point to autonomous, ah, vehicles and everything within their ecosystem being an opportunity to layer it all in together using a blockchain infrastructure stack. I think that's exactly the way that we always saw it here on the show. And it's really cool though, it's just funny that they use the, it was the analogy coming to life with respect to this application.

Speaker A: Now they're taking it quite literally, uh, about tokenize. This is the point of real world assets. Right. So I love to see cars and worth mentioning, right, that Avalanche also did do that, uh, you know, partnership with the DMV in California to put title on chain. So the fact that they're now starting to you know, uh, really touch different parts of the life cycle here I, uh, think is really cool on the ownership of cars here. But moving on, uh, another pretty interesting article I thought was that the U.S. department of Commerce, you know, responsible of putting out a variety of different economic data which you know, of course guides a lot of market activity and global market, uh, activity, uh, in response to it. Uh, well, they've done some pretty dramatic, in my opinion. They've brought 10 or they've brought their economic data to 10 different blockchains. Okay, that is amazing. Uh, they're talking about Arbitrum, Avalanche Base, Botniks, Ethereum, Linea, uh, Mantle Optimism, Sonic and Zksync, and they even say that they will expand to more chains based on demand. But what does this mean? It means that the personal consumption expenditures, price index, uh, the gross domestic product, uh, economic data, everything related to sort of what the Bureau of Economic Analysis puts out here that they decide to put on chain, you will be able to leverage now for any of your applications that you're building on, on chain. Um, so I think this is important in context to other security tokens that are RWAs that might be uh, able to leverage this data, uh, or portfolio behavior and you're actually able to respond to this data being published. You can now actually use that uh, for vaults even, uh, and react to that. So uh, Kyle, I don't know about you, but I think the possibilities are endless. And they clearly didn't choose one chain, uh, they chose 10 just to make sure they show that they're neutral I think in this way. Uh, but also they chose Chainlink, which is a pretty big statement for chainlink. Once again, uh, we see Sergey over there, uh, in the White House meetings all the time. Uh, now, uh, you see some activity here with the US Department of Commerce. Wow, Kyle, uh, are you as giddy as I am?

Speaker B: Yeah. There's a couple of really interesting components here. One I think you mentioned, which is uh, continuing the interoperability narrative, right, this idea of having interoperability between these different chains. Because I think that everyone's recognizing the fact that the kind of the walled garden style of approach is not a sustainable one because of the fact that you have so many different competing interests, so many different countries and, and it's just too big of a world. We need to make sure that the different components that we're working on are going to connect together and that becomes a huge strategic advantage. When we just look at pointing back to earlier in the show, decentralized finance. And why that's become a really incredible opportunity for institutions is because they're pulling together much smaller stacks of liquidity into one larger sum as opposed to a lot of the institutional components where they have their own private banking client and networks which are the high net worth clients, but they lose out on a lot of these kind of mass market approaches. Um, and so I think that interoperability here with data as well being a really key component, we've seen this trend that's only going to further continue as we begin to disintermediate from a user experience perspective when the customer, whether that's a client, an institutional client or a retail client. They don't care about what chain it's on. They don't want to have to do all the technical cybersecurity stuff of signing with their wallets, doing all this stuff. Even though that is the most secure approach, it's not the most user friendly one. And I think that over time users are just going to want a front end platform. They click and click and click and done. And so, um, that requires significant interoperability, um, technical buildouts on the other side. I mean look, the US Government is posting economic data on chain. That's just, that's really, really fascinating. Um, there's just, this has been just such a year, I mean like last year or a couple years I guess. What last year we had the Bitcoin ETFs which felt like such a big deal. And now you look back and it's like, man, there's probably five different pieces of news that came out in 2025 that blow that out of the water with respect to institutional and regulatory adoption, especially from the largest economy in the world. So um, it's really, really fascinating. I'm uh, I'm really psyched that, that this is happening and I think that this is a, a good next step. We've seen some criticisms around the changes and adjustments to the accounting strategies that are published by the Department of Labor and things like that on inflation and metrics and stuff like that. Now you're posting it on chain. There's no taking it back now.

Speaker A: Uh, that's also true. Uh, so better not mess anything up when they're posting that data because it will have big ramifications as that code, uh, sends a lot of potential, uh, again, future RWA activity, market activity as a result of this coming on chain. So really kudos once again to uh, this administration, to this government that's really embracing the possibilities and capabilities of blockchain, um, and we're seeing that get pushed to the boundaries, aren't we Kyle? We talked a couple of episodes ago in the past about tokenized stocks, how uh, Robinhood and Republic and others are now bringing both public equities and private equities pre IPO companies to market and a variety of different sort of structures as we're seeing and on different chains, uh, even uh, on those global market, uh, which has uh, been touted for a while now as one of these big tokenized stock markets coming, uh, is coming next week on September 3rd. So that's a pretty big deal. Well, meanwhile, the World Federation of Exchanges has come out and said, hey, we do not like this. Surprise, surprise. Uh, they came out a letter and basically urged crackdown globally on tokens that they say, quote, unquote, mimic equities. Um, and, you know, they're using all kinds of terms saying, you know, we don't know whether these things are derivatives or we don't know whether what kind of, you know, underlying rights or protections. And there's certainly a lot of fair questions they're asking. I'm not sure if they've actually done a lot of the research into a variety of these different players and the way that they've structured, whether it's X stocks, whether it's, you know, denari, whether it's, um, you know, on those structure that they're going to launch, or Robin Hood. Um, at the end of the day, uh, this to me seems in my opinion, a little bit more like they're worried about startups coming in and starting, uh, to take away a lot of the influence and control, uh, that perhaps the WFE has. I don't know. Um, but, um, they're certainly saying, hey, you better check these things out. We did see the SEC earlier this year say, hey, make sure you are obviously following all securities laws when you're approaching innovation in tokenization. But, uh, Kyle, what do you think? Uh, should, should people be more worried about, uh, these tokenized stocks?

Speaker B: Yes, yes, I think they should, honestly. Um, and this is not necessarily me ringing the alarm bell on any fraud, um, or commenting on any specific company. I can't read the tea leaves, and quite frankly, I don't know what's going on. But the fact that I don't know is why we should be alarmed and frustrated. Right. I think that the one thing the World Federation of Exchanges points out that I thought was really relevant is that each one of these tokenized stock structures is not fungible. And what I mean by that is each one has a totally different kind of structure. Some are wrapped stocks, some are derivatives, some are mirrored assets. Some don't have any backing at all. And they're more like prediction markets where you're betting on the changes in valuation. They all are different. And while that's been a beauty of, uh, private markets in the sense that they can be, any security can be structured in kind of a novel way. I've talked about this at length of why the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ forcing companies into a box, I think does not necessarily help companies that have innovative structures and doesn't help the capital markets grow and innovate. I think when you're talking about a particular stock that does have those boxes around it, and then we kind of fuzz the edges a little bit of what's actually going on here, I do think that can be dangerous here. So maybe there's a line. I don't want to sound like I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth, but when you're buying tokenized Tesla and you're staking tokenized Tesla in the different tokenized Tesla stocks representing technically different levels of credit risk and exposure to the underlying, I think is dangerous because I don't think that there's enough information online about what you're actually buying. If they were all different, but it was very clearly ideated exactly what you were getting, exactly where the exposures lied and exactly how these things were structured in each one, I would be less frustrated because even though there'd be four or five or seven different tokenized stock shares, at least we know which ones are which. The problem is that I think this trend is only going to continue. And I wouldn't be shocked if this is kind of like a stablecoin style of craze where you might have 12 or 15 or 20 different issuers of, uh, tokenized Apple stock, tokenized Nvidia stock, tokenized Google stock. And so if you have 20 different tokenized Google stocks, no one's going to be able to properly diligence the risk. And we're all just going to assume that it's actually backed by Google stock. And in a lot of cases, especially for the private market ones, they literally cannot own any of the underlying shares because they don't have access to the shares. And so, um, we've seen the pushback from OpenAI, we've seen the pushback from Anthropic on SPD. I think this is a pretty significant from my perspective because someone's going to make a mistake here. I'm not saying it's any one of these firms, I'm not saying that it's going to happen anytime soon. It could, but it probably won't. But one of these firms or one upstart firm is going to build $1 billion of TVL and tokenized stocks that they don't actually own. And the whole thing is going to blow up. And why I feel so confident about that is because we did just see this already in 2021 when RTX tried to do this through their Swiss entity. And the whole thing blew up in everybody's faces because it didn't actually own the underlying shares. And So I do think this is a pretty big concern, a fair one from the World Federation of Exchanges. That being said, I love the fact that these things are tokenized. I think the market needs it and I love that everybody's embracing it. I just think it needs to be done in a more sustainable way.

Speaker A: Yeah, you got to. Yeah, you're playing both sides a little there. Uh, but, uh, that's. That's how innovation goes. Right. You're going to have to push the territory and the boundary. But I do encourage you to actually look into a lot of these because it's very easy to cry foul and for sure somebody will make a mistake. It's happened in every single industry outside of blockchain and outside of tokenization. So this is nothing new. The SEC will do their job. Um, but, uh, I do think that this is one of the next mega waves of onboarding folks into RWAs. And, uh, absolutely, you're right. People should make sure these structures are right and you should do your own research when looking into these stocks. But, uh, you know, of course, of course there's going to be mistakes here. But, uh, the genie is out of the bottle, I say. And, uh, watch out because if you want to take advantage of this, you can't, uh, you can't have both ways. You got to do your own research, you know, got to make sure you don't get caught, uh, yourself. Right. That's the important thing. But I think this is right. You're right, Kyle. There are going to be many different variations when it comes to private markets especially we're seeing some new innovation happen here. Uh, but at the end of the day, uh, like I said, the genie's out of the bottle. So I'm excited to see what happens. And, uh, uh, we've seen the SEC say they're pretty pro, uh, innovation when it comes to tokenization. So, uh, yeah, let's see what happens. And, uh, final article here we've got Republic Digital making an investment into centrifuge. So centrifuge has been on fire lately. They passed a billion dollars in assets tokenized under their, uh, different product lines that they have available. They have their new De Rwa DeFi, uh, platform and approach to tokenization. And now Republic, uh, is backing them as well. And that's a big deal because they have a lot of activity going on in the tokenization space themselves. So I'm excited to see what kind of overlap we're going to see there. Um, but, uh, yeah, this is a pretty big deal. Undisclosed amount. It's not exactly clear, uh, how much, uh, the investment was, but I believe, according to this article, this may end up, uh, that and I'm not sure actually, so you'll have to confirm this. But it would be pretty cool to see if this, this investment can kind of end up in the Republic note somehow, because that continues to be the largest exposure to different startups out of any tokenized RWA out there, as far as I know, over 700 of them. So that's pretty cool. Pretty cool. Kyle, what do you think about this one?

Speaker B: Yeah, Republic, a former company of the year winner. Um, they've done some really cool stuff and I think that they just bought the INX ATS license so that now they can do the trading. Now they're making investments into some of the leading firms in the industry. They just continue to make moves, continue to drive this market forward. Um, um, I just, um, psyched for their team and excited to see what's next from them.

Speaker A: All right, well, that's all the big market headlines we have. But don't go anywhere because we've got more, tons more. As we've seen throughout the summer, there's big, big news every week. So with that, let's keep on cooking. All right, well, it's time for a big update from the RWA Foundation. If you haven't heard about us, we're trying to bring together the leading voices and builders in the industry across blockchains, marketplaces, defi protocols and more. Uh, in order to onboard over a billion people into RWAs, right, we need to create a community, starting with crypto natives, to educate them and help them take advantage of this incredible new trend that's the future of finance. That course we've been talking about for years now on this show. And now we're not just going to be all talk. We're finally going to walk the walk. Next week, you're going to hear details about our RWA pod, our first initiative to enable crypto yield to be converted into RWAs and help us launch Wally, our DAO, at the same time. So if you want to learn more about our Dao, go check out WallyDao XYZ W a l l y d a o XYZ. Uh, in the meantime, stay tuned next week for a huge update on how you'll be able to support the RWA industry and win at the same time. So with that, let's keep going with the show. All righty, Kyle. It's another big week of news. Um, so why don't we start off with some of these STOs, some of these new offerings that might be coming out, uh, that some might be able to take advantage of most of the time pretty institutional. So you and I cannot but, um, start off with Season. Okay. S E A Z E N. They are a Chinese builder and they have announced, actually saying that they plan to tokenize debt in Hong Kong before the end of the year. Um, so very interesting to see again, professional firms starting to leverage, uh, tokenization as if it's a normal activity. Uh, but also they pointed out that they see a burgeoning digital asset ecosystem growing in Hong Kong that they of course want to take advantage of. Uh, also real estate in Paraguay is coming on chain, about $6 million worth of equity, uh, coming to Polkadot, uh, which I know has a bit of an RWA scene, but it's not huge. So nice to see. I believe it's paradata and better use blockchain. Better use blockchain that shows Polkadot for this offering. So really cool to see latam as well starting to gear up. And last but not least, Kyle Mantra is launching their first, uh, offering here. That's VARA compliance. So a big deal out of, as we know, Dubai. It's, uh, the Pice E bike fleet. So if you want to get in on an E bike fleet business, now's your chance. Powered on the Mantra Blockchain. Kyle, any of these deals stand out to you?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I'm excited for the, uh, Paraguay token issuance to come live. Um, Latam is obviously close to our location here in Miami, and I think a huge opportunity here just because of the financing opportunities that can be captured there. How this is just not quite as common in traditional markets there. So. So, uh, bringing those opportunities in. This is a fully equity token deal, which I think is fantastic. And, uh, I think they already own the land, so they already have $6 million worth of land all ready to go. So now they're trying to do the raise, but at least it's not a raise to do the acquisition or something along those lines. Um, and so I think this one's a cool one and I'm excited to see the development here. I'm actually going to be in Bali next week for the Polkadot Governance Council. So maybe I can find out a little bit of info on this deal, um, some insider stuff from the Polkadot team or figure out how that's happening. Um, and I do want to give a shout out to Mantra. I was critical of them, um, with how the kind of things unfolded in Their drama from earlier this year. Um, they then were able to bring the project back, uh, through their partnership with Invenium. And now they're bringing a new RWA token. They clearly are not going silently into the night. They are looking to continue to drive RWA Traction forward. And I think that's, uh, a deserved congratulations for them to stay resilient in the face of, uh, apparent adversity.

Speaker A: Yeah, I won't say that they're probably over the hump until they get that token price to where they had it, right? That's when they'll probably be satisfied. But they sure seem to be doing everything right to be back on track. That investment from Invenium. Now a token offer coming live. Uh, you know, it seems like, uh, things are going in the right direction, that's for sure. Uh, also some other announcements from the space, Kyle. Um, this one isn't a deal that you can take advantage of, but one that is good for the environment. Uh, Bluebird, uh, a player on the scene that's powering tokenization using Red Belly, uh, is working with Arcs Veritas. I'm guessing that's the firm that has the ability to create these carbon reduction assets, as they call them. Uh, and they're targeting around 400 million tons of CO2 emissions to prevent. Uh, that's a lot. They're saying that's 105 times 105 years worth of emissions from Iceland, according to this article. Or a $32 billion ESG effort as they're quantifying it. So really cool again, for the environment there. Uh, also crypto.com, they have their Kronos chain and they've unveiled a road map there at Kronos, and it includes tokenization. Of course, we know crypto.com has already been talking about it. Uh, and I think they might be powering some, some tokenized stocks already, or at least plan to. But now we know that tokenized finance, AI agents, ETFs and real world reach are part of their 2025, 2026 vision, including, uh, an AI ready tokenized finance platform. Um, um, very cool. Token targeting, tokenized global markets. They say at least a $20 billion exposure. Let's see what that ends up meaning for them. Uh, and then Kraken, ah, has met with the SEC crypto task force. We've been touting about how great they've been meeting with the industry all year long in a var, uh, variety of meetings and hearings and type things with the different players. Now it seems like Kraken has got the direct attention here, uh, to talk about this exact uh, concept, Kyle, that we were just talking about earlier. Organized stocks and what this means. Uh, so it does mean that uh, the SEC is getting smart on this and they're making sure they're going to be on top of it. So you better watch out, you better make sure you do things right if you are going to get into this space. Please don't be the bad apple that ruins it for the rest of us because I do believe it's going to be a mega trend that cannot be stopped. And last but not least, out of these announcements, Kyle here, Schroeders, uh, is offering tokenized assets to retail in Luxembourg soon. Um, so that's I think a, ah, pretty good, you know, licensing, uh, just a signal from the license that uh, the Europe is also really trying to move on chain and get into this RWA action. But also good on Schroders for looking at the retail opportunity here. Obviously I love that angle. Can't wait to be announcing some of their offerings soon enough. Kyle, any of these announcements stick out to you?

Speaker B: Um, well, uh, I think that, I mean, look, Red Belly again, another name that we cover here on the show a lot. So this is a great win. I think that, you know, the carbon credit space has been one that you and I both have seen a lot of leads, a lot of interest over the years of people trying to get involved in the carbon credit space. And as we've talked about here on the show, I only recently realized that not all carbon credits were created equal. And so different, different opportunities for these types of things in helping the environment. Uh, um, they're not really a standardized industry. It is a huge market. And so um, Bluebird getting involved and actually making a real difference as opposed to just trying to sell the tax credits or trying to sell the financial vehicle or assets or fundraise through this vehicle. Um, and perhaps they have but driving real change in the, in the market. You know, I don't know how much 394 million tons of, of CO2 is with respect to the consumption of some of the larger countries in the world. But, but it certainly sounds like a lot. And, and look, even if it's just a drop in the bucket, it's still doing something right. And clearly they've been able to accomplish a lot. And so I think that's a really, really cool one and it's great to see a successful initiative is really my point. In this carbon credit space we've seen a lot of people try not a Lot of people that have actually been able to do that. Um, and the one other one that I thought was interesting here, her wig is, is just the fact that it's nice to see that companies like Kraken, you mentioned earlier, with Chainlink being in the White House, these companies feel much more comfortable in meeting with the regulators inside of the US markets. I think that looking all the way back to some of those depositions from the social media guys from whatever that went viral like five or 10 years ago, where it seemed like many of the regulators just didn't really understand the business models and how these things work. Um, I can only imagine it's even more complicated and complex when they're trying to understand how blockchain businesses work, um, with the fact that now you have an international customer base and you have totally revolutionary business models and financing opportunities. So I think that it is in our government and all government's best interest to at least meet and hear with the perspectives of some of these really successful companies. And I'm happy to see that that's no longer a scared thing to do. I'm happy to see that meeting with the regulators doesn't just immediately result in enforcement actions and investigations and things like that. And instead it's a bit more proactive and collaborative in um, intent, which I think is just generally good for the U.S. consumer, the U.S. customer. And because of that that would translate and trickle from a ripple effect to customers and consumers all around the world.

Speaker A: They're literally doing a road trip around the country asking people to meet with them. Like, how cool is that? I don't know if Gary Gensler could have survived something like that if he tried to do that. Well, um, let's move on to some institutional moves here. Uh, to end the show, Kyle Versa bank, uh, which is, you know, a actually backed by a tech company behind it focused on cybersecurity and tech. They are launching a pilot program here for US dvbs, AKA tokenized deposits. Um, so US Deposits from Versa bank here, uh, are going to be coming soon, uh, into the United States it looks like. And then also the OCBC has officially issued a billion doll and commercial paper on the digital debt services from, uh, Connexus by JP Morgan. This is a big deal because once again JP Morgan is showing that they don't like to necessarily publicize things until it's already well and working right with their variety of different platforms. Their Repos, uh, platform is already doing billions I think a day, uh, in transactions. We saw a little bit of uh, an action from a municipality earlier last year I think it was uh, from Quincy, uh, in Massachusetts that use the digital debt services for a bond. But now that was $10 million. Now they've jumped to a billion dollars with the OCBC. So clearly it's ramping up and that's proof with one of their new partners it's the first third party custodian on the digital debt service. Uh, and um, I don't know if this was part of the negotiation but they invested $100 million into this offering. So they are. State street is 10% of this offering but they are also the first third party custodian for the digital debt service platform. Smart move in my opinion, uh, because it looks like they're going to start doing a lot more billion dollar transactions on that platform. So good on both State street and J.P. morgan. Connexus. Kyle, any takeaways on this institutional activity?

Speaker B: I have to say conexus is growing on me a little bit. Maybe that's just because uh, I've heard it so many times, we've talked about it so often. I was definitely a very vocal critic of the name change when uh, originally changed it. So that's something that I just realized as, as I heard you reading off these uh, these headlines. But um, this is I think a good example of the long sales cycles that come in the institutional space. Because I remember when we reported on State street getting involved in tokenization, getting involved in this blockchain stuff that was easily two years ago if not more. Um, and I'm sure they've been doing other things. I think we've covered them once or twice before on the show but it took multiple years to really get an understanding, to get an operational exposure, to understand how to actually execute a lot of the transactions and uh, deal with these things on chain. Then obviously to get the money on chain is its own headache for, for these types of institutions and of course then getting all the organizational buy in within the company and within the corporation and then finally to then actually build the partnerships and deal with the, the you know, cross firm negotiations and all of those things between them. Nexus as well as ocb, OCBC as the issuer. So it does go to show how long these processes take and why we've been so confident in the development and drive of the tokenization space. Even if in any given day, month, week, year, um, it feels that not a ton has changed. All this stuff is happening in the background and then it happens very suddenly for huge adoption points like this you

Speaker A: know what it also does, Kyle? It validates us because, uh, I'm extremely bullish, right? We put out a report that says 30 trillion by the end of the decade. Well, this is the proof right here, right? Once they get comfortable with it, they're ramping up, right, to billion dollar transactions. When Tradfi moves into RWAs and leverages tokenization, it's going to be in a big way, very, very fast once they get comfortable with it. So expect adoption to be quick, in my opinion. But of uh, course things take time as we get there. So with that, you know, I want to wish everybody a great rest of the weekend. That's all the news we have, right? Oh, just kidding. We gotta pick a Company of the week, don't we, Kyle? So let's get, let's do it. I don't know if anyone fell for it, but we wouldn't miss a Company of the week, would we, Kyle?

Speaker B: Never. Never. This is the most important part of the show. Viewers have told us that they love it. They cannot ever get enough. They wished. We got, uh, we got a letter in our inbox earlier this week that said, dear Kyle Herwig, thanks for the show. Yeah, everything you do is great, but we have one piece of critical feedback which is, can you expand the Companies of the week to four companies? Because it's such a good segment, we'd like you to have double the amount of time. And we said no one company each, each week to pick our choices which then obviously get nominated for the illustrious Company of the year award. So this is a pretty important, pretty important process, Harry, because you never know, it might just be a one time nominated company. Just get to shout out in February and the next thing you know, by the end of the year Companies of the Year strikes and that company might just win the whole thing.

Speaker A: I mean, unless you have some kind of conjoined twin that I don't know about that has their own vote, there's no way we could have more than one winner each as we get to, you know, we each get the honor to pick one. Our own opinion, of course. Not by any other meaning or metric, just who we decide to choose. So Kyle, I gotta say I'm. I'm really anxious. There were a ton of really great kind of headlines this week. A lot of diversity. So I'm curious, what is it that, you know, really made you say this is, this is what, what made you choose Company of the Week?

Speaker B: Well, look, sometimes I like to pick companies that get funds raised because driving liquidity into the Ecosystem, building the marketplace for everybody, I think is a really important thing. And obviously there's some level of trickle down, right? If a company raises a lot of money now, they have more funds that they deploy into driving infrastructure, into driving adoption. They also may become a revenue customer for other companies in the space. And often you see it the other way when, when funding dries up, all of a sudden you also have customers drying up. And so often I like to shout out companies that were able to convince investors to participate in this ecosystem, but that's not what I chose today. What I chose today was a company going the other way. They have a traditional business, but they see opportunities to innovate in their traditional business, whether that's in the actual operations itself and also how this can leverage their corporate financing divisions. Seeing the writing on the wall that the economies are changing, the times are changing, the capital markets are innovating and merging. And if you have all of these requirements within AI and within technology with respect to your operations and, and the robotics of the supply chain, while tying that in to the financing opportunities that you're already managing and of course new potential financing opportunities through this global distributed market, in the cryptocurrency sector, in the stablecoin sector and everything going on there, it would be really nice to leverage a blockchain that could help you tie all of those components together. And so I think that this week I really wanted to pick a winner that understands kind of from that metaphysical perspective how the blockchain should be used within a business which is seamlessly integrated across all of these different components, allowing everything to work into one healthy orchestra. For that reason, my company of the week this week, her wig is the Toyota team at Toyota Blockchain Labor. And so these are the individuals that are really putting together. They released their white paper on their new blockchain network, which I think is really great. They did all the research together to launch this mobility orchestration network, Mon, that is on the avalanche blockchain. And they're looking to expand their footprint. And so this stems from their RD arm in the Toyota Blockchain Lab. And they have some great articles that outline kind of everything that happens within this network, including manufacturing, legal ownership and title operations as a fleet operator for autonomous vehicles, driving the vehicle with respect to actual manual drivers, insurance for the vehicle, for underwriting and insuring and all that stuff, and maintenance from service providing mechanics, all that kind of stuff. The entire process of the vehicle, they've specifically noted, is happening within this network. I think that that's Uh, a fascinating component. And then they're also layering on stable coins and everything like that on top for payments and flows of the capital through the system. This is exactly what the ethos of how we wanted to see this stuff working. And so I just think it's really, really cool. And so for that reason, Toyota Blockchain Lab is my company of the week.

Speaker A: I mean, that's a phenomenal choice, Kyle. A Toyota L1, as Avalanche would say. Uh, this is exciting stuff. The future of potentially the auto industry. Right. It seems to touch every angle of, um, mobility, as they say. Mobility, orchestration, network. So big vision by a very smart team backed by one of the largest car companies in the world. Very, very cool stuff, Kyle.

Speaker B: Absolutely. So tell me on your end, who do you got?

Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's hard to top Toyota Blockchain Lab, especially with that cool logo, I gotta say. But, um, you know, I was stuck between, uh, two, actually. I want to give a shout out to the runner up here to Chain Link for doing that partnership with, uh, the Department of Commerce, because that is going to be an important one, I think, for all markets. Anyone can kind of take this day to put it on chain, but to get it directly from the source is awesome. Uh, so very, very good job on both Chainlink and the Department of Commerce there. But no, it was not good enough to justify what I think might put this company, Kyle, in for running for company of the year. Okay. For this. This is such a big move.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: So I'm talking about obvs, uh, Horizon. Okay. Horizon to me is the match, the flywheel effect that's going to finally come off. Before tokenizing a lot of these RWAs, sure, it was a little faster. Maybe you could redeem 24 7. Maybe it was cheaper, management fees or payments were quicker. But that is nothing compared to the utility that Horizon is going to be bringing, letting you borrow against these RWAs. Specifically institutions. Hopefully one day, maybe retail. Right. But they're going for the big dogs first. Uh, and they're doing a great job with the set of partners that they have, including multiple different stable coins amongst their own that you can take out against your RWAs. But of course, the RWAs they have are the leading ones from securitized superstate centrifuge and more. So it does not surprise me, uh, that, that I've, you know, pulled this off. But more importantly, Kyle, this is what I've been saying all year long. This is what's going to get institutions to wake up and say, hey, I'm going to put in a million or 10 million into this because now I can borrow against it on Horizon and put that capital to work. That is a new source of capital that didn't exist. It's 24 7. It is in this environment that as soon as the institution is whitelisted, they can do whatever they want in it. Right? And it is pretty, pretty exciting knowing that this could mean millions, hundreds of millions, billions if not tens of billions flowing into RWAs by year's end. So if you're not hype about that, then I don't know why you're listening to this show. And that is obviously why Horizon won my Company of the Week. Kyle.

Speaker B: I absolutely love to hear it. Man, that is a great choice and you have me so, um, fired up for the future of this industry. I think it's a great choice. A plus. And I think a really great set of Company of the Week winners this week her way.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, yeah, it's uh, only going to get harder as this industry heats up. So that's why you got to keep on watching every week folks. We appreciate that support. Give us that love if you like the show, give us your feedback if you don't. We got thick skin. We want to get better for you. We want to cover what you want to hear. But most importantly, we want you to have a great weekend and we do appreciate you supporting what we're working on. If you look at the RWA foundation or at STM co, you can tap into what we're doing over there. And Kyle, any, any global settlement news you want to end on?

Speaker B: Well, uh, we may be working on our first few stablecoin pilots with large scale governments. So uh, I may have a big press release coming out very soon that I'm happy to share.

Speaker A: Well, we can't wait for that. I know I can't. So with that everybody have a great weekend and happy tokenizing.

Speaker B: Sam.

Speaker A: Mhm. M.