WisdomTree Digital Assets BD: Tokenization Is The Biggest Shift In Finance Happening Today (Full Thesis)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
All right, guys, welcome back to Stable Up, episode number 42, our premier weekly stable coin show powered by our friends at Fracks.
Visit fracks.com to learn more about the FRX USD product and more. We've got Meredith Hannon, the head of BD at Wisdom Tree Digital Assets. Meredith, great to have you. I know you are familiar with this area. It's a bit of a cloudy day, but still a great view. It's good to have you.

**Meredith Hannon** (0:20)
Thank you so much for having me. And yes, always a nice view in New York, even on a cloudy day.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
You're a New Yorker.

**Meredith Hannon** (0:25)
I am a New Yorker. Absolutely at heart. Yeah, we were talking about this before, 15 years. Unbelievable, but the skyline is still pretty amazing. So thanks for having me.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:33)
Well, Meredith, WisdomTree has been, some could say early to the punch on Digital Assets, recognizing the power of what's possible here and really just understanding what's happening. And I think the way that we're currently framing it within our show and community is that there's these mega trends that are forming. And they're basically the exports of the industry that are the most successful and very clearly Stablecoins are one of these. And tokenization has become, I mean, now kind of like the, you know, the more loved child in the room. Stablecoin is a little less exciting.
You can tokenize anything, right? And so these two mega trends, Stablecoin is about five years or so in tokenization still in the earlier years. And it feels like these two exports of the industry, they are kind of powering this convergence between finance and DeFi. So, you know, given that context, given what you're doing at WisdomTree, we'd love to just understand what your purview on this kind of mega trend is and how you guys think about allocating, investing, building, and how you guys see this kind of convergence.

**Meredith Hannon** (1:37)
Absolutely. And thanks so much. And I think what's a bit different about WisdomTree is that we've been doing this for over five or six years now. So while to many, this is a new mega trend for us. This is something that we've had conviction in for many, many years. And the reason for that is WisdomTree, as a publicly traded ETF and ETP sponsor with over $170 billion globally, we've been thinking about what is the future of asset management. And what that really means is investing, but also how do you use your money? And what's the utility behind that? And how do you create the best investor experience? And from that, that's where we found tokenization, because we see this as an opportunity, the way that ETFs were that gateway to access for all investors through a brokerage account. Tokenization is that access for global investors all through your phone or all through the internet. So we find that to be really powerful to go to our ethos of the democratization of finance. So what we've done is, stable coins is definitely here to stay. I know we'll talk about the Genius Act and I'm sure Clarity later, but really what our focus has been is around the tokenization of real world assets. We also have crypto ETPs and ETFs, a healthy part of our business and the traditional space. But really the tokenization of real world assets is where we think you're going to get that new found utility. You're going to be able to do things with your money that you couldn't do before in a really powerful way for both retail and institutional investors. So what we've done is we've built a platform. So we own our own technology, we run our own full tech stacks, so very different than some of our competitors. And what that enables us to do is to not only issue products, but also issue really experiences and user journeys that make use cases very clear for our own clients. So if you're a CFO and you're managing money across the world, and you want to be able to move between a stable coin or a money market fund seamlessly 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year, you don't have to go through a bank. You're able to use our platform to do that. If you're a retail investor and you want to buy Bitcoin or a US 500 large cap product or tokenized gold, you can do that through our retail app. So really creating defined user journeys that are enabling the access of money in a really differentiated way is what we're focused on. So it's not only products, but it's also platforms.
Right now, like a lot of us, but really where we've technically excelled is through our money market fund to provide access to yield, that you're not getting through a stable coin, but it can move and it can trade like a stable coin, which I think is really powerful.