If I can take a step back, I think it's important to recognize that a lot of the activity that has taken place so far inside of these ecosystems has largely been what I call “digitally native”, or blockchain native tech. It's kind of this self-referential loop rather than touching real-world businesses that are out in the “meatspace”, as people in tech would call it.
Where we're crossing into now is this point where companies like Visa are recognizing that tokenizing U.S. dollars perhaps is a faster form of settlement than using the SWIFT network for wires or different ways of clearing cheques. We're at this point that I mentioned before, at the spectrum of activities where you have NFTs and DeFi and on-chain trading happening over here, but now you're seeing banks and financial institutions asking if they should be tokenizing equities, bonds and securities and using this also as a form of settlement.
I don't think it's clear yet how these two worlds are going to collide, but it feels as though in the next two to three years we're going to start seeing all of this activity happening on something like Ethereum.
I also would point out that it's important...because I get this question a fair amount: What are the real-world business cases? Even though it's not quite clear exactly how the technology will be used today, I liken it to the early Internet, when people were looking at how the post office was maybe going to offer electronic mail for people to come into a local service centre and send something to someone in a different jurisdiction, and that would validate the technology of the Internet, when in fact the biggest businesses turned out to be a library in something like Google, which didn't have that much value in terms of monetary value prior to the Internet. It was the same with Amazon, Facebook and social networking. It's really hard to imagine what the biggest businesses will be in this new world. There are probably things that are more digitally native or blockchain-native than something that we can mirror back to society today.
In terms of regulation, I think where we're at now is that we have done very well with structured products. As I mentioned, we have a few listed entities joining us today. I'm one of them. We have ETFs that we brought to market. But retail investors may want a different access point. For people who are comfortable with the technology and who want to hold the asset direct inside of a centralized entity, in a crypto trading platform or a self-hosted wallet, they are going to look for a way to purchase that asset.
I think the next thing we need to do is figure out how we give enough clarity to the local platforms—