In like a minute, guys, so please get seated. 34th Annual B of A U.S. Financial Services Conference. This is Craig Siegenthaler, North American Head of Diversified Financials at Bank of America, and it's my pleasure to introduce Jonathan Steinberg from WisdomTree, Steve Kurz from Galaxy Digital, and David Post from Helix. So Jonathan is the founder and CEO of WisdomTree, which he's led since 1988. WisdomTree is a global asset manager with over $160 billion in AUM. Steve Kurz is the global co-head of digital assets at Galaxy and is a member of its founding team. Galaxy is also a leader in digital assets and data center infrastructure with $12 billion in assets on platform. David Post is the founder of Helix. Helix is a thesis-driven advisory and incubation platform partnering with leading Web3 funds, projects, blockchains.
Prior to Helix, David led ventures and ecosystems at Chainlink. Jono, Steve, David, thank you for joining us.
Thank you.
Thanks for having us.
So the first topic, and maybe we'll direct this one at Kurz and Post, but let's start with a quick macro update. In your view, why did we see such a sharp correction in crypto prices in the second half of 2025, which continued over into this year despite a very supportive administration from the White House?
Yeah, look, I mean, obviously the setup for crypto seemed to be perfect, right? You had a complete 180 in regulatory. And so I think certainly the expectation for the market was that we'd have an up year in Bitcoin and in crypto. We didn't have that. I think part of plugging in, which is what crypto has started to do at an institutional scale, means you have to compete at scale. And on some level, Bitcoin is now just a part of the macro dashboard, or the fintech dashboard. And so from a narrative perspective, the market was focused on other areas: gold, quantum stocks, etc. And then you also have this crypto cycle that some people believe in, around a four-year trend for Bitcoin that was coming to an end.
But I think the most specific answer to that is in October there was a mini credit correction that really resulted in $19 billion of leverage unwinding in the system. That obviously put a real chill on the retail and crypto-native participants in the market. And then there wasn't the cavalry from the traditional financial services market. So you've had a slow bleed-out on crypto. On the face of it, that's a bad thing, I guess. But if you compare it to 2022 when we had a similar washout, that was much more like a Lehman event, where the back end of crypto was the plumbing, the market structure was fundamentally unsound. That's very different than where we are today.
And so I think what you're seeing is less demand for speculation, a higher bar for crypto in general to be able to live up to the narrative at scale that other pockets of investments have demanded. And ultimately, I'm not too stressed about that. I think crypto infrastructure is a bull market, crypto price is down, and everyone's concerned about the narrative for crypto. I think narrative is the lagging indicator. And so I think when crypto comes back, there will be a narrative that will follow. And so it's just a bottoming process that'll take some time.
Yeah, I think if you've been in this space for a while, I've been in it for almost 10 years, this is pretty normal. I think as any industry is maturing, you have these types of ups and downs. In some respects, there are these Cambrian extinctions at different periods. We had it with the internet. I wouldn't say that we're in the extinction phase. I think that was like 2022. There's definitely a maturation process. If you're an altcoin and you're launching and you don't know how to manage your token or you don't have real revenues coming down the pipe, there's probably not a market for that token. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? In my mind, it's just a maturation thing. It's probably neither.
So I think that the important thing to remember, you see prices going up and going down, is that crypto and tokens are a different capital formation process. If you have an equity, it's an equity. Every company's equity more or less looks the same. What I think's very exciting, and I think that the regulatory tailwinds are going to support this, is when you have tokens plugging into revenue-generating companies and revenue-generating systems, I think it's going to create lots of things people are not expecting. And for me, that's the most exciting part here, is I do think we're going to have a regulatory structure which allows tokens as an asset class, and especially as a capital formation process, to begin to become more competitive with equities.
Right. So this one will be for Jono, for Steve's second. But let's move on to the regulatory backdrop. What is next between Clarity and SEC Project Crypto? And we've been thinking Clarity might be at risk for a while. I think that became much more transparent after Brian Armstrong pulled his support following the pushback on stablecoin rewards. But what is your outlook on the regulatory front in the U.S.?
So stepping back, this administration is just it's night and day with respect to digital assets and crypto as opposed to the last administration. So I think it's been incredibly positive. The Clarity Act, we're sort of indifferent. I mean, generally, we're positive for it. We would say getting rid of ambiguity is a positive for the industry. Adding Clarity, pun intended, is good for the markets. When you talk about Project Crypto, which is the SEC's efforts to actually innovate and work with businesses, I mean, it is such a pleasure. I mean, WisdomTree recently got our tokenized money market fund. The SEC recognized our exemptive application where, for the first time ever, our security, our money market fund, will have 24/7 trading and settlement on chain. And so for the first time ever, a security will act like a native asset on chain.
So I think that's the direction of real-world assets in general. So very, very positive in general.
Yeah, I would say the same thing. We became a Nasdaq-listed company last year. In terms of Galaxy, we were previously listed on the TSX. And one of the first things we did, even before we became a Nasdaq-listed company in May, we sat with the crypto task force, the new crypto task force, in February. And we said, hey, you know how do you feel if we were to tokenize our equity, not necessarily to increase liquidity in our stock today, but to just test it out and see what happens? And so we actually partnered with the SEC, which is, compared to six months before that, an impossibility. And so the tokenization of Galaxy's stock wasn't a European SPV. It was actually on-chain ownership in a wallet of our shares on a one-to-one basis. So that was pretty exciting.
I think on the Clarity Act, our view, some of our peers have been a little bit stubborn, as you referenced, we think it's much more important to get something done than not. We think that it should happen sooner than later. We shouldn't let this become a political issue. Crypto should never be a political issue in our view. And so understood the entrenched interest around stablecoin yields, we would like our peers to push this through, get more Clarity out there, as you say, and we can always tweak later.
Great. So I'd like your response from all three of you on this one. But let's talk about the tokenization of real-world assets: equities, bonds, commodities, real estate, investment funds. I know some of you already have these offerings out there. What are your high-level thoughts on this trend? Maybe, John, would you like to start?
So big picture, we would imagine that eventually everything goes on-chain. It'll take time. Right now, you're serving the on-chain community, which is really, from a retail standpoint, those investors that made money in crypto, so that's retail, and businesses that are serving the on-chain community, whether it's the Coinbases of the world or the stablecoin issuers. You are seeing it. WisdomTree definitely has one of the broadest portfolios of tokenized real-world assets: the whole treasury chain, equities, model portfolios, the money market fund, gold, stablecoins. So we have a lot. And as I did say, we did just achieve some real innovation in the market with the money market fund getting noticed for its 24/7 trading and settlement, which I think will go effective at the end of this month. So that'll be a real highlight.
And then maybe later we could talk a little bit about tokenizing ETFs, which is coming up in conversations.
Yeah, I mean, I think crypto has been a very confusing topic for a long time. If you took crypto assets out, Bitcoin, Ethereum, put them away, what's interesting about tokenized everything is that it comes on the back of stablecoin growth. I think stablecoin growth is the breakout app. I think that increases the on-chain economy over the next 3-5 years. And then that's going to create an environment, a digital environment, on top of which people are going to need more things. They're going to need yielding options. They're going to need to invest in diversified portfolios. And so in terms of sequencing, you're going to see scale and scope coming from stables first.
Quickly thereafter, all of that infrastructure and tooling is the same infrastructure and tooling that allows for what has not been possible, which is scaled distribution of other assets in tokenized wrappers. I think people get so focused on Bitcoin or Ethereum and their view on that that they lose sight of what's fundamentally a plumbing and infrastructure conversation first. Once that starts to shift, you're going to be able to see real scale to a lot of the innovation that WisdomTree and others have already started to build for.
Yeah, I'd agree with what you said. I think that what's becoming clear is stablecoins are superior to running on-chain or superior to how money currently moves. So I think that you see that the infrastructure is shining right now. And it's just being used objectively better. It's super interesting what's happened with NYSE in terms of saying they're going to allow tokenized stocks trading 24 hours a day. Why are they doing that? Because they have to. It's better infrastructure. Everybody else is going to use it. They have to as well. So I think that the first is the back end plumbing. I think you're right. After that, there's then more assets come on-chain with more yield. And then I think the third aspect of that, which is even better, is then you get more new financial products, the ability to combine these DeFi Legos.
This has been basically the promise of decentralized finance, is you can have composable sets of primitives that allow you to create new financial products. The first step is the base primitives. The second step is more interesting, is kind of like more traditional yield. The third step is probably stuff we haven't thought about, but it's all based upon the efficiency, the transparency, and the advantages of running on-chain versus running off-chain. There's kind of a forcing function. There's nothing better to kind of promote or inspire change than either making money or losing money. That's about what's to happen. If you move, you're going to make money. If you don't move, you're going to lose money.
Right. So this one for Jono and Steve. But Dave, if you want to chime in, please do it. But Larry Fink has talked about tokenizing all of his ETFs. And there's some advantages there, but also address a growing network of younger investors. So I was curious on your thoughts on both, what are the advantages to launching an investment product on-chain versus not just a mutual fund, but an ETF, an SMA? This hits home to Jono's business, but also the ability to go after this growing network of client assets that we see on Binance and Coinbase and these very large platforms that are growing.
So first, I would say it's definitely going to happen. So it's not if, it's when. So that's for sure. There are definitely regulatory and operational issues to tokenizing, let's say, ETFs. I would just flat out say WisdomTree, I would pretty much bet your life, Craig, that will be first in tokenizing ETFs, but if not actual first in that first wave. But I think we have made the investments in blockchain infrastructure. We're creating wallets. And we've got the New York Trust. We've got the broker-dealer, so the regulatory technology stack built for executing on this plan. But I think when I think about it, the way we got here, we asked the question, what could do to ETFs what ETFs did to mutual funds?
Now, when you talk about it from a private equity standpoint, how do you take something that's a horrible investing experience and making slightly better, as opposed to when ETFs approach it, how do you take what's best on Earth and make it better still? And we could see that it could be tokenizing real-world assets on-chain. That on-chain is the key here. Bitcoin was the first killer app, right? So you raised $1 trillion with no employees and no institutional ownership. And there are just things like atomic settlement will unlock $ trillions in capital for the big banks. So there's just too much energy and opportunity to unlock for it not to happen.
Yeah, I agree. I mean, from an ETF perspective, I think the obvious answer is that today there's a small but growing distribution channel. And that's going to get better as things like the broker-dealer and transfer agent issues associated with all of this get better integrated. And so BlackRock and WisdomTree and others starting to attack those problems is you can start to think ahead to a world where that's going to happen because that's not two guys in a basement figuring that out. That's a strategic priority. And so I think just operationalizing that and then creating bones around how you build your smart contract tooling so that everything becomes more efficient vis-à-vis ETFs, including on the front end, is really important. So that's an evolution. I think first movers are going to do really well because ultimately, on-chain distribution is effectively brand, right?
On the other side of this, and that's what's really confusing and actually scary for, I think, a lot of legacy traditional players because you think you control the client, but the client is going to be able to move much more fluidly than before. And so there's a big race to be there first and to establish that brand. I think from Galaxy's perspective, we operate on-chain and have for a long time. And so we're kind of backing back into the traditional system as the convergence happens. ETFs are going to exist for a long time. But this parallel bridge is already starting to be built. And then you'll, again, see a convergence of those two bridges, not in a year, but three, four, five years.
Any add, David?
No. Maybe sooner than 3-5 years. I think someone from BlackRock just spoke yesterday saying it could be 3 months. It could be 12 months. It could be he doesn't know exactly when, but it's happening. It's sooner rather than later, really, is what I believe.
Yeah, sorry. Just to be clear, what I mean by that is more the parallel architecture and infrastructure writ large for financial services that lives on blockchain rails. I think that bigger picture takes a little while.
I will add something in this case. It just goes back to what I said before. If you don't do it and your competition does, then your competition's going to take share away from you. The choice is either take proactive moves or react later when someone else has already established.
I think the single biggest thing to know for all of this is that I really do think you should ignore crypto price and on some level should ignore what those assets are doing. Obviously, I have a fondness for Bitcoin. But I guess more importantly than that, we are in an arms race for crypto plumbing. It is a bull market for crypto plumbing.
It is a top 3-5 priority for most C-suites, whether they're G-SIB custodial banks, whether they're traditional regional banks. The level of activity and focus is no longer about a pilot program. It's no longer about checking a box. It's not about having a guy with a title. It's literally, this is going to be a part of the future. And how do we start to blend these two things together? I think in a year, you're going to look back and say, wow, 2026 was the year of crypto plumbing institutionally.
All right. So if I can just go off track and do a follow-up here, what companies offer crypto plumbing today? Is it Securitize? Is it Coinbase's tokenized offering, which is pretty new? What companies are the biggest in this sort of plumbing and picks and shovels around blockchain?
I think I work for one, but yeah, there's a couple of them. So I think there's the—let me start with the retail version of this—is very obvious, right? Robinhood versus Coinbase is the everything app, right? The wallet's the app. The app's the wallet. The institutional version of this is still taking shape, right? I think there's the wallet infrastructure piece. There's the tokenization piece. And then there's vault architecture, right? Vaults are just a future where asset managers are going to curate and select different yielding and risk opportunities for their underlying clients. You're going to need to have the equivalent of a fund administrator on top of that. You're going to need to have some version of regulatory compliance on top of that. And so on some level, that hasn't happened yet. I think picks and shovels, obviously, there's Coinbase, Securitize, Galaxy.
Wisdom Tree.
WisdomTree. We have a role.
Everything that Securitize does, we do. We did Securrency, which we ended up selling to DTCC. They just got some innovative exemptive relief to help bring tokenized securities on market. But the infrastructure that they have, we have our own version of it purposed towards our own efforts. So we have everything that they have.
Well, yeah, and maybe I can riff on that. I think that the idea of there being someone like Securitize, not to pick on Securitize, but that has a narrow focus on selling their services to clients versus operating businesses that inform the infrastructure build that can then be white-labeled or used in other capacities. I think that model is better because this is still so early and dynamic. You have to be following the path in your business. Ultimately, I think a lot of these banks are going to want to internalize this and own the process themselves. So who are their build partners? Who are their white-label partners? That's going to be the interesting next 12 months.
And I'm sorry. Go for it. The banks are coming. You do have tokenized deposits at the Bank of England. So the sterling has been tokenized. It's definitely happening in the U.S. and in Europe. I would think one of the two might come to market, tokenized versions of deposits at the Federal Reserve or the ECB by the end of this year. So that's very exciting. WisdomTree is an investor in something called Fnality. We led the Series C with Bank of America and a number of other financial institutions, which is the institutional version of the stablecoin. It's the institutional version of the cash leg. And that really matters to the banks. So it really is taking hold underneath that.
No, that's totally cool. No, I think that the stack is not. There's people in different parts of the stack, but there's not kind of an integrated stack. If organizations try to take this all in-house like they've done in previous cycles, my concern is you don't get the benefits, which is common business processes around financial workflows. So I think that there's going to have to be a needle that's threaded here, basically, between everyone's need to maintain control and generate efficiencies internally versus the macro-level synergies that can be generated if people are kind of operating according to the same business processes. Now, I think the first step, as you said, is let's get through phase one first. The way this has to unfold over time is kind of on phase two, which I think is kind of business process standardization.
Agree.
Jono, my understanding is your tokenization engine was sort of capped at that. That's how you launched these funds. Are you going to potentially offer that to third parties?
We actually have discussed it with certain third parties. I'm not sure it's in our best interest. It's a question of empowering for money, some of our competitors, or going first. But we have, again, the tokenization platform. We have our own TA. We've got a lot of this in we create wallets. We have engineering in-house. So we're doing what is necessary. We saw and know intimately what DTCC bought. So we know best in class here. And so anyway, it is definitely we don't have to do it for others. We might want to. We'll see how. For the right strategic deal, yes, we would do something for the universe.
But tokenization is just a technological capability. That's why not saying it's not great. You do it. You do it. There's other people that do that. It's like, what do you do after it's tokenized? You put in better products. Do you allow it to be packaged in different types of ways? But everyone's saying, oh, wow, there's X billions or whatever of tokenized assets on-chain. That's great. Why is it better than what's off-chain? It's better because you can do more interesting stuff with it. That's why it's important.
Yeah. Jono, the DTCC is a very interesting buyer. Why were they the highest bidder for that business?
They are the leading infrastructure company for regulated financial services in the U.S. They needed their own blockchain initiative. This gave them the impetus to be a player in the blockchain. Again, we're all talking about the very early days of a replatforming of financial services onto the chain. They had to be there. For them, it was sort of, I think, a must. For WisdomTree, it was a very constructive journey. I mean, I would have liked to maybe have kept it, but it worked out OK for us. It advanced our thinking significantly. Little things that seem little today, but we didn't build our own chain. We have interoperability. I think we're on eight chains. We are committed to open blockchains, which five or six years ago, that was controversial.
But what you're going to see is closed chains and open chains working together. I mean, there's going to be both. And so navigating all of this, then what's most important is you got to find your own revenue streams, build it into a business. Early is better than late, certainly for somebody of WisdomTree's size. So we wanted to be ahead of for WisdomTree, I was 13 years behind the SPDR and 7 years behind iShares in ETFs. This time, I wanted to be first through the regulatory door. And I feel we are. And it seems like it's starting to catch on.
Steve, you made a comment earlier, but I know it's kind of a small business today. But you consider Galaxy Digital a top five in terms of tokenization engines for third parties?
Yes. But I think that one of the things that we did in the last two months in the company is we actually integrated all of that into one consolidated infrastructure business. So we had a tokenization team. We had a wallet infrastructure team. We had a staking team. We're putting those all in one place. And frankly, that business is going to be one of the most important businesses for us going forward. I think to your point, the tokenization piece is somewhat commoditized. And it's an expression of core infrastructure that you have to have. I think Galaxy is unique because we don't have a custodian, but we have wallet infrastructure. So we're not competitive to a Bank of New York or to a State Street. But we have the blockchain engineers.
I think there's going to be a limit up demand for engineering talent in and around blockchains globally. And to the earlier point, it's not just the talent. It's how do you introduce regulatory compliance consecutively or sequentially with dozens of different regulatory regimes at the same time while you're also keeping pace with the market? And so the operational considerations, the regulatory considerations, and the tech considerations all coming together, you need to speak the language. You need to not be selling people services in a box. And then you need to really make sure that on the other side of that, to your point, you still have a business because you can't just build for all your competitors either. And so that's what we're trying to stick the landing on in our infrastructure business.
Great. Let me ask one and maybe, Jono, you can start with this one because I think you're closer to it. But when can I open the Coinbase app and not buy USDC or USDT, a stablecoin, but actually buy a WisdomTree tokenized ETF/passive product? When will that happen? And then also, we talked about kind of regulatory holding it back. What specific things are we waiting for until we'll get to that moment?
So they don't have the license today to own tokenized securities. So one, that's why we needed to create our own WisdomTree Prime so that we could do this work. And there was a place to put the work. Then we created Connect so that we could take our tokenized assets and have it travel around the world to either self-hosted retail wallets or institutions. So we're trying to do all of that. But some of this is from the regulatory standpoint. I don't know exactly when they'll be able to get that. And when you think about tokenized ETFs, there are going to be certainly operational issues that all of us will need to figure out. And then there are going to be harder regulatory and easier regulatory paths. And we're immersed in it.
Again, we're spending a lot more time in a friendly way with the SEC. It would have been inconceivable in the last administration. We're moving that direction. I couldn't be happier with Paul Atkins. He's been fantastic.
Let's see. Anything to add, Steve?
No, I mean, I think it'll be. I mean, if you'd asked me a year ago, would we be sitting here in a year with Galaxy stock tokenized? Honestly, I would have said no, truly. So I think that it could be faster than we expect. I think part of what Atkins is also doing is whether you call it a sandbox or whether you call it no action or whatever, it's giving the implicit and sometimes explicit guidance that you can go do some of these things absent there being Clarity in something like the Clarity Act. And I think that's still at least on the crypto side, we're so gun shy because for many years, it was the exact opposite. If you tried to talk to the SEC, everything you said can be used against you.
And so I think there's almost like a trust issue where someone like a Coinbase or us would say, can I really do that? And he said, yeah, you can. And so I think that all speaks to maybe it being faster than you might expect.
So isn't the Clarity Act giving access to the current cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, to TradFi? And isn't SEC Project Crypto what we're really talking about in terms of expanding distribution and allowing Coinbase and other platforms the ability to offer tokenized investment products? So aren't we waiting on SEC Project Crypto for this, not Clarity?
I think it's a little bit of both. I mean, what I view Clarity to be is much more about a durable stamp of approval for institutions to push go on whatever their starting point is for this space, even if it's not specifically in the letter of law. If it's going to work out what DeFi is or is not, it's going to clarify the SEC's remit versus the CFTC's remit. That's all very good and helpful stuff. But I think the much more important part is it's not going to be undone in a year or in two years in terms of the political football of the country. And so that's like a zero to one moment, truly, for the institutions.
I think the SEC's guidance is very useful in leaning further into some of these projects that you're working on, feeling like that's OK, and then being out on the frontier a little bit. Those two things come together, hopefully, by the end of this year.
Great.
I wouldn't call it DeFi. It's responsible DeFi. And you have to live within the foundational principles of regulated financial services and threading that needle. It's not perfect. It's not easy. But it is doable. And there are a lot of: is it a commodity? Is it a security? U.S. markets versus foreign markets. There are a lot of regulatory cooks in this kitchen that you have to work with.
And I think that the frame I take is another part of this is just, as I said before, it's clarifying the role of tokens and crypto as an asset class, as a capital formation vehicle. So some of what's in there, I think, is really important is there's not really a P/E multiple that should be applied to crypto tokens in the market right now. It's lots of speculation. Once there's more disclosures, once there's less messing around in the background, I think it becomes clearer to see which decentralized finance projects are performing well and how should those be valued because there are ones that are minting money. The problem is they're not being valued any higher than these ones that have no value at all being created.
So there's lots of good stuff, I tend to agree with both of you, that comes out of Clarity, even if it's not perfect because it's predictability. And it's kind of like a state-sanctioned maturation. That's what good regulation is, right?
Yeah. So if we get Clarity and big banks, big asset managers, big brokers move into crypto because there's permanence, they feel like things won't change at that moment, what companies are best positioned out there to help them expand into crypto, especially if they're going to white label things because they might not know how to do this themselves? Or do you think the biggest financial firms essentially recreate a lot of the stuff that firms like Coinbase have done?
I think it's both. In other words, if we've met with most of the big banks, most of the asset managers in the last few months, I think there are lags. I mean, this is why we're launching a fintech hedge fund in our asset manager. There's going to be so many winners and losers. Some of them are going to be forced into M&A that's suboptimal, but they're behind the trend. Some of them are going to white label. Some of them are going to build. I mean, look at Robinhood yesterday. I haven't had the full quote. But Vlad is basically saying there's a smashing together of these two things. And not just on the retail side, we want to be a part of building for that. So everyone from Robinhood to Coinbase to Galaxy to others are building for that.
But I think if I were a GSIB bank or a big bank, I would probably be doing both. I would probably be making sure my service providers are here today to meet the moment and then be building behind that to own the capability over time. And you can't afford to miss this year. But you also need to do it in a way that allows you to have the next 5-10 years.
Yeah. I think it's difficult to say who are going to be the guides here because the stack has matured in some places, especially things around stablecoins or, I'd say, wallets or tokenization as a technology. But that's just supporting kind of this first phase, which I think is kind of clear to the folks up on stage. It seems like we have a relatively uniform vision of that. So I think that the interesting stuff starts to happen when you get to the second and third phases because I think that's where the massive gains are. But it's unclear to me who's going to win that at this point because we're still in the first phase.
I mean, there's a lot of startups. I mean, in our venture, we've invested in 200 companies. The fintech front end, stablecoin back end is something that you really the same way you can vibe code and build code faster than anyone else in the tech department, you can really create a great end-to-end financial payments company very quickly and easily using stablecoins. We're seeing that in our portfolios. We have growth equity companies that we invested in a year ago that are just their revenues are hockey sticking. And that's not one. That's a dozen. So there's going to be new winners as well, is my point.
Yeah. Great. At this point, let's see if there's any questions from the audience. Please raise your hand. We'll get you a microphone. One in the front row?
Just curious, what have we seen on the institutional front for digital asset adoption? I guess, do we need the Clarity Act to really accelerate this theme?
I'm probably the weakest on this. I would say that you are seeing certain projects that don't require the Clarity Act. So certainly, some of the big banks, global banks, are moving forward on tokenized deposits at the central banks. I mean, that's a project that doesn't seem to require the Clarity Act. But then again, I think it would be very constructive just to get it.
Yeah. I think there's sort of three buckets of institutional adoption right now that are worthy of discussion. One is financial services companies. We've talked about that ad nauseam. I think that's here and now. Two is the asset owner allocator universe, over $100 trillion in the world. They have broadly not invested or adopted crypto because there hasn't been product market fit around the investable options for them in terms of hedge funds, venture funds, that kind of thing. I think that's changing dramatically. We are seeing a number of public pensions, sovereign wealth fund, endowment, and foundation, family office interest in and around particularly the rails thematic, which you can invest in now in the public markets and the private markets. So that's starting to emerge. And then really, the wealth market in the U.S., it's a $50+ trillion market.
Notwithstanding the success BlackRock and others have already had in the ETF race, wealth is still wildly underpenetrated for this technology. I'm sure you have a perspective on this from the SMA perspective. Crypto plugging into that in a more structured institutional way is going to be a big story for the next 1-2 years.
We have time for one more. Jono, can I ask you about the private markets initiative or save that for another time?
Save it for another time. It's about digital assets.
OK. All good. Well, guys, we will end it there. Steve, Jono, David, thank you so much for joining us. I think we learned a lot. This was great. Hope to see you next year.
Thank you.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks.
Nice to meet you. Thanks a lot.
Great to see you. Thank you.
Nice to meet you.
Take care.