Gracy Chen: Tokenized Equity Is The Next Biggest Trend In Digital Assets (What's Next)

**Robbie** (0:00)
All right, guys, welcome back to Tokenization Tower. After our intro here about the token equity debate and more, we have a lovely guest, Gracy Chen. Gracy, welcome to the tower. Good to have you here.

**Gracy Chen** (0:11)
It's a great place. Yes, it's nice.

**Robbie** (0:14)
It's great. I'm glad that you made it to New York. It's good to have you here. This is kind of becoming like the capital of crypto in a way.
And so I'm sure you're busy, so we can kind of get right into it. CEO of Bitget, one of the longest standing exchanges serving global customers across crypto assets, commodities, equities and more, kind of expanding into this universal exchange. Really wanted to kind of just hone in today on the state of affairs in digital assets because we're obviously what? Eight, nine months deep into this bear market. And every bear market that you've been through, that I've been through, things change. And the kind of common denominator is tokens are bad. Every bear market tokens are bad. Nobody wants to own tokens. And this time it's a little bit different though. And I'm almost reluctant to say that, but we went through this entire period of different types of tokens last cycle and previous. And we saw just a lot of, frankly, retail taking losses for tokens that don't have the right structures, for insiders, for market makers. Like there's just the whole nine yards. And so we're now in this era where token holders are demanding investor rights in the same way that equity holders are earning the rights of their respective...

**Gracy Chen** (1:28)
They want to have voting rights and go to the AGM. Yes.

**Robbie** (1:32)
And they want to know what they're owning, right? And so we're currently today at the presbyis of what feels like the inflection point of this token equity conversation that we've been having so on and so forth. And so maybe, Gracy, just high level from your perspective, what has changed from your view in the way that the token market is now kind of constructing itself based on previous bear markets? Where are we at right now from your view? And then we'll kind of get into the nuance.

**Gracy Chen** (2:00)
Sure.
The tokenized, so first of all, I think a big shift that's happening since 2025 until right now is when you talk about crypto, it's not just an alternative asset class. It's about blockchain. It's about the underlying technology that can potentially revolutionize the track fine market that is trillions of dollars. And then similarly, if you talk about token, as you pointed out, like lots of altcoins are just losing the momentum and the price either looks like totally like this, like just dropping all the way, or looks like a roller coaster. And that's probably some market manipulation there.
And token is not just all coins like these, but tokenized assets. So RWA is a very important topic since 2025, and we are obviously very pioneering on that. Since last year, we have already tokenized, we've already listed some tokenized stocks and commodities, tokenized commodities, et cetera. And now, as you point out, we offer not just crypto, but Forex, stocks, ETFs, even bonds, we started to think about that, money market fund, of course, and pre-IPO stocks. So we listed SpaceX pre-IPO stocks together with Republic Crypto, and that was in April, and we gave retail user a good opportunity to capture the game before the token, sorry, the stock is even listed on the public market. So that's the kind of revolution that I see in the industry, and that is a very important one, because finally, crypto is not just this small group of community who listen to your podcast a lot and care about my Twitter, but now we need to include Wall Street and Trefi and all these big banks and lawyers, regulators, and even politicians, and all these people are very, very important and very important stakeholders in the crypto industry.

**Robbie** (4:03)
Yeah, I totally agree.
I mean, I feel like that this transition, we've gone from thinking about this asset class for the two to three trillion dollars of existing total market cap, as well as the $150 billion that is existing in DeFi in terms of TVL today to, well, there's hundreds of trillions of dollars of assets that are coming on chain that are going to be tokenized and that will come on chain. So I think that's a very, very fundamental shift that is happening.
By doing that, getting back to the original top of the conversation here, the type of investor coming in is different. And this type of investor is demanding a different set of token requirements than previous investors. Retail, when I first got in, I was happy to buy a token because there was a narrative that some bank might put it on its balance sheet or might adopt this protocol. But now, token investors are demanding revenues. They're demanding redistribution of value back to the token. They're demanding a clear, transparent framework for the token versus the equity split. And they're really just thinking about this asset class from a, what do I own? And as a token holder, am I a first class citizen? So I'd just be curious to hear your view on this transition of the token economic structure and how you anticipate this new institutional wave of RWA's and new class of investors coming in. Plus, with the regulatory action kind of being more fair and a bit more positive, how that's leading towards a shift in the way that investors are thinking about tokens.