00:00Let's start with this new partnership. What does it actually involve? Why start with a fixed income fund rather than,
00:06say, an equity income fund where there's a ton of demand or private equity, which gets so much attention?
00:12Sure. So thanks for having me again. This is a very exciting partnership. Neuberger Berman is a very large, reputable,
00:18you know, tier one asset manager.
00:20So it's following our strategy of, you know, partnering with the best on what they do. As we explained on
00:25the earnings call, we follow a strategy where we think that, you know, yield varying assets have high demand in
00:31the crypto ecosystem and are very good, you know, usually just collateral where you can actually borrow against them or
00:36lever them.
00:36And we kind of fill in the gaps on the portfolio in terms of, you know, risk, duration and yield.
00:41Right. So we have treasuries already with BlackRock and others.
00:44As you know, we have AAA CLOs with V&Y on the opposite spectrum. We have, you know, private credit
00:50with Apollo and Hamilton Lane.
00:52So this kind of fits in the middle. It's a high yield income fund. It has, you know, T plus
00:56one liquidity and it generates a yield.
00:59So we think it actually fills a gap in our portfolio and it will be a very good source of
01:03collateral for DeFi.
01:06Great. Great to hear. Congratulations on the announcement again, Carlos.
01:10So question on, you know, just coming back to your first earnings release, you know, the last couple of weeks.
01:17So congratulations on getting the first earnings out. Tokenized assets under management increased.
01:23Revenue up and revenue. I'm sorry, the transaction volume surge, but revenue was down 5 percent.
01:30Help us understand kind of what's going on about, you know, both sides of the picture in the sense that
01:34positive momentum on transaction volume, AUM.
01:37Stock obviously took a major hit. Just, you know, tell us what's really going on.
01:42So, look, we generate revenue from a number of sources. So AUM is just one of the metrics that we
01:47track.
01:47Transaction volume is something we we publish that we have just started to monetize.
01:52So it's not where we are driving revenue today, but we think it's an important metric for investors to understand
01:57the health of our platform,
01:58like how our products are being consumed and used and etc.
02:01etc. We actually are 16 percent up for the first half compared to last year.
02:06You know, Q2 was a bit softer, but we came from like a record quarter in Q1 with $19.5
02:11million.
02:12And look, as a small company, we're going to have a little bit of volatility on results.
02:17And that's expected. So I think that, you know, we keep focusing on the long-term opportunity, which is still,
02:23you know, massively there.
02:25And we're just scratching the surface about it.
02:28Sure, sure. But I do want to dig into the tokenization revenue, which also declined.
02:31And for some, that's concerning because that's the main growth engine.
02:35Why is tokenization revenue not growing proportionally with AUM and transaction volume?
02:41So AUM is more correlated with asset servicing, not with tokenization revenue.
02:45So because asset servicing means, you know, the TA and the fund admin business for the existing funds that we
02:50manage,
02:51where we take fees, tokenization revenue has more of a one-time component,
02:55depending on how many new, you know, products we're issuing, how many new protocols we're integrating,
02:59how many new, you know, funds we're tokenizing.
03:02And that's going to have more volatility because it's less recurrent than the other side of the business.
03:08Carlos, just to broaden the aperture a little bit, I mean, you guys have been and you've been a champion
03:13of tokenization for a long time,
03:15for the last seven, eight years that I've been covering the market.
03:18Tell us where we are in terms of tokenization of equities in the industry.
03:21Lots of development last six to 12 months, but put it in the broader context.
03:25Where are we at right now? How much more runway do we have for growth?
03:29Oh, we have a lot of runway because we haven't even started really.
03:33So as we explained in our next results, the total equity and ETF market is over $100 trillion.
03:38And there's barely like $2 billion or around 2.5 now, I think, on tokenized equities where some of the
03:45assets are like real equities,
03:47like say our own stock that we put it there or companies like Figured, et cetera.
03:51But there's most of the market today. It's just synthetics that are issued offshore.
03:57So and if you think about $2 billion against a market of, you know, $100 trillion, it's just barely scratching
04:03the surface.
04:03I think we're still experimenting with that asset class.
04:06But it's, you know, it's something that only if 2% moves on chain, it doubles the size of the
04:11entire crypto economy.
04:12So we're very excited about it. But we think we're still in the very, very early days of development.
04:16Yeah, you've consistently argued that tokenized equities are on the cusp of becoming a multi-billion dollar market.
04:21Is there any kind of concrete timeline here for when this is no longer promising and it's actually moved on
04:28to becoming significant in numbers?
04:31So as you do, so we announced a number of partnerships that are now coming to market.
04:36So we partnered with the first and the third largest transfer agent, ComputerShares and Continental, to be able to then,
04:41you know,
04:42help them as a tokenization partner to bring equities and ETFs on chain.
04:46We also have a partnership with the New York Stock Exchange, where they're launching in Q4 an institutional venue for
04:52trading,
04:52you know, native tokenized equities and entitlements 24-7 with instant settlement.
04:59That's not live yet. So I think that we should expect a lot of these things to come in fruition
05:03towards the second half of this year.
05:04But really, when I think that the growth is going to come is in 2027.
05:08Great. Carlos, one last question I have to ask you is, you know, what's notable about Securitas going public is
05:13not just that you listed on a major exchange,
05:16but you also put your own stock on chain. Tell us how that's going.
05:21Well, so you're going to walk the talk, right?
05:24So if we're telling people they should tokenize their equity, we should do the same thing with us.
05:28We wanted to also showcase that this is possible to do it in the U.S. in a regulated way.
05:33Like there's a lot of this noise in the crypto industry of people doing things offshore, claiming that, you know,
05:38there's no regulatory framework to do it in the U.S. This is not true.
05:41We've actually tokenized our equity on chain the same day of the listing.
05:45So you could actually go to, you know, let's say Robinhood and buy a traditional share or you could just
05:50go on chain.
05:52And it's actually live trading there with the partnership we have with Jam Trading.
05:58And we wanted to showcase that this is possible to be able to then, you know, attract more users to
06:03do the same thing.
06:04So it's very exciting. We put a lot of work on it and we made it happen at the same
06:07day.
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