Daily Crypto Deep Dive: What If Blockchain Wins... But Crypto Holders Lose?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome back to the Daily Crypto Deep Dive. Today's question is, What if Blockchain Wins, but Crypto Holders Lose? Just stop and think about that for a second, because we have spent years hearing the same argument. BlackRock is coming. JPMorgan is using Blockchain. Banks are tokenizing assets. Wall Street is moving on-chain. Trillions of dollars could eventually be represented on Blockchain technology.
And naturally, the crypto market hears all of that and thinks one thing. This must be incredibly bullish for crypto.
But does it actually have to be? Because today, we are going to ask a slightly uncomfortable question.
What happens if Blockchain technology becomes one of the most important pieces of financial infrastructure in the world? Trillions of dollars in stocks, bonds, funds, deposits and real-world assets move on to Blockchain rails.
And most crypto holders still make absolutely nothing from it?
We are going to look at what Wall Street is actually building, work through the maths of what 10 trillion dollars of tokenized assets could really mean, and then try to identify which crypto assets genuinely have a mechanism for capturing that value. Because there is an enormous difference between a Blockchain being successful and the token attached to that Blockchain being a good investment. And that distinction could decide who actually makes money from the next phase of crypto adoption.
Before we get into it, remember that if you sign up to Kraken through our link, we are giving away 20 XRP to listeners who join through the show.
The link is in the episode description.
Now let's start with what is already happening. JPMorgan's blockchain business, Kinexis, says it has now processed more than $3 trillion in transactions. The bank has built infrastructure for programmable payments, tokenized assets, money market funds and near real-time settlement. BlackRock says its tokenized treasury fund has become the largest tokenized fund in the world. The DTCC, which sits at the heart of traditional financial markets and already custodies more than $114 trillion of assets, is developing a tokenization service designed to allow traditional securities to exist on blockchain-based infrastructure. The International Monetary Fund is openly discussing a future involving tokenized bank deposits, stable coins and tokenized central bank reserves.
This is no longer a group of crypto enthusiasts sitting around talking about what might happen in 10 years. The financial system is genuinely experimenting with this technology now. But here is the problem for crypto investors. Imagine JPMorgan moves $1 trillion a day across its own blockchain system.
Why should that make Bitcoin more valuable? Why should it make Ethereum more valuable?
Why should it make XRP, Solana or any other public token more valuable? The honest answer is that it doesn't necessarily have to. A bank can use blockchain technology without buying your token. It can create a permissioned ledger, issue tokenized deposits, settle between approved institutions and capture the economic value itself. And this is the first major lesson of today's episode. Using blockchain does not automatically mean using cryptocurrency. But the situation is more complicated than simply saying Wall Street will build private blockchains and public crypto will be left behind. Because JPMorgan itself is already crossing that line. Its dollar-denominated JPM coin has been issued on BASE, Coinbase's public blockchain network, alongside its work on private infrastructure. So we are not looking at a simple battle between public and private blockchains. The more likely future could be a mixture of both. Private systems for some transactions. Public blockchains for others. Banks connecting with stablecoins. Tokenized funds moving between networks. Traditional assets potentially becoming usable in decentralized finance. And that is where the real battle for value begins.
Let's try to put some numbers around this. Suppose the predictions are right and eventually 10 trillion dollars of traditional assets are tokenized. A lot of crypto investors may instinctively think, 10 trillion dollars on blockchain equals an enormous increase in the value of blockchain tokens.
But it does not work like that. Imagine 10 trillion dollars of tokenized assets turns over at a rate of 20% per year. That gives us 2 trillion dollars of annual transaction volume. Now imagine the blockchain captures an average economic fee equivalent to 0.01% of that volume. That is 200 million dollars a year.
Increase the fee to 0.1% and suddenly it becomes 2 billion dollars a year. Those are huge numbers, but notice what just happened. We started with 10 trillion dollars of assets and ended up with somewhere between 200 million dollars and 2 billion dollars of annual fee revenue in our simplified example. The value of everything sitting on a blockchain is not the same thing as the value captured by the blockchain's native token.
And that is absolutely critical. A house worth 500 thousand dollars might be represented by a token on a blockchain. That does not mean 500 thousand dollars has somehow flowed into the blockchain's native cryptocurrency. A 1 billion dollar treasury fund can exist on chain without investors needing to buy 1 billion dollars of Ethereum. The real questions are these. Where does the transaction settle? What fees are paid? Which asset is used to pay them? Is the native token required for security?