How the Largest Asset Managers Think About Digital Assets with Mark Garabedian
Mark Garabedian is the Director of Digital Assets and Tokenization at Wellington, a leading US-based, global asset manager with approximately $1.3 trillion in AUM.
Mark has wide ranging experience in trading and financial markets and brings a highly informed perspective to the topic of financial market innovation through digital assets and blockchain. We find Mark’s views to be particularly valuable, because they skew heavily toward the practical as opposed to the theoretical, informed by decades of hands-on markets experience.
In this conversation, Mark and Will Beeson discuss the transformational benefits of digital assets and tokenization in investments and markets, step function improvements DeFi has delivered and the implications for traditional finance, the specific projects Mark and Wellington are working on today, the path that Wellington, a nearly 100-year-old asset manager, has taken so far on its digital asset journey, and much more.
Will:
Awesome. Great. Maybe to kick off, it would be great to get a little perspective on your vision of this world. You’re a finance guy — you’ve spent multiple decades working in markets. Tell us a bit about your background and how you got to the role you're in today.
Mark:
I spent the first two decades of my career in trading, and I’ve traded everything — every asset class, every way, across the globe. I was a prop trader, a market maker, and I worked on the buy side. I’ve traded equities, futures, fixed income, FX, commodities. I’ve traded in developed markets and emerging markets. I’ve worked every time zone: U.S., Europe, Asia — including the overnight shift here in the U.S.
In the last decade of that time, I focused on trading research. I was at MFS for a number of years, building out their trading research platform, and I came to Wellington in 2019 to build out the trading research function there.
Trading research encompasses market structure, microstructure, execution optimization, algo optimization. To simplify it: I became a market plumber. It’s about understanding how orders are created, routed, executed, and settled. How price discovery works, how trades flow through exchanges and venues, how clearing and settlement occur, and how all that data is used downstream to improve future execution and analytics.
I’ve loved trading, and I still have a real passion for it. So naturally, that’s how I found my way into this space.
A close friend I grew up with was big into online poker. One day, the platform he used approached him and said, “Look, we can send you a check, but it’ll take a month and come with crazy fees — or we can pay you out in Bitcoin, instantly.” He asked, “What’s Bitcoin? Can I convert it to dollars?” They said yes, pointed him to an exchange, and he took the Bitcoin.
Faster, cheaper — he was sold. And like many people, he began stockpiling Bitcoin in his account, since he could use it to place future wagers. He became an overnight millionaire. That got him deep into the crypto world. And because I was in trading and financial markets, he kept nudging me to pay attention.
Around 2020, during DeFi summer, I started exploring. My first step was opening a Coinbase account, like most people. Back then, there were maybe 100 assets on the platform. I was using their basic retail interface — it felt like a black box. You send in an order, get a price, get a fill — not particularly impressive.
Then I discovered their Pro platform. My jaw hit the floor. For the first time, I saw bid-ask spreads, price discovery, brokers, algorithms, volatility, volume, sophisticated charts. It felt like if you tore down traditional exchanges and rebuilt them from scratch, you'd end up with something like Coinbase. It was sleek, powerful, and you could use it on your phone.
As a trader, I don’t always need to know the asset I’m trading. I can trade off charts, sentiment, patterns. But I started digging in, asking, “What are these assets? They’re all called cryptocurrencies, but surely they’re not all the same as Bitcoin.”
Then I had another “aha” moment. I told my friend, “Everyone on crypto Twitter is talking about Polkadot. I want to buy some, but it’s not listed on Coinbase. What do I do?” He said, “You’ve gotta go to Uniswap.” I had no idea what Uniswap was.
So he came over, and we pulled up the site. I connected my wallet — which was on my phone — to the site. I swapped ETH for Polkadot. And again, my jaw hit the floor.
He was like, “What? It’s just Uniswap.” And I said, “You don’t understand. I just made a trade with no counterparty risk, no credit risk, no settlement risk — and I instantly increased the velocity of my capital. That’s a no-brainer in my world.”
I needed to understand how Uniswap actually worked. So I went deep: into AMMs, into how on-chain finance works, how blockchains operate. I started using Aave. At the same time, I was talking to colleagues at Wellington, raising a bit of a ruckus within the trading team — saying, “People need to see this technology. It’s incredible.”
I wasn’t alone. There were others at the firm exploring it too. So in Q4 of 2021, Wellington formed a working group — 15 of us, global and cross-functional. They called it “Digital Disruption.” We were tasked with canvassing the crypto space, figuring out what was real and what could impact our industry. Then we were to compile a report and present it.
We built an 85-page research report and delivered it to the CEO and the leadership team. That’s where I had my third big “aha” moment.
During that research, I dove into stablecoins. I began to understand tokenization. Stablecoins are basically unregulated, non-interest-paying money market funds. But we could tokenize our own funds — gaining broader distribution, real-time settlement, and massive process efficiencies.
So rather than going in with a pitch like, “Here’s Bitcoin, trustless peer-to-peer money,” we framed it around tokenization — and that resonated. You can tokenize anything. You increase velocity, broaden distribution, streamline everything. And if you believe in that, then you believe those assets need a blockchain to live on. And that’s why Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, and others have value.
We got the green light. That summer, I was asked to lead the initiative. I transitioned into the role in October 2022, and I’ve been focused on it ever since.
Will:
Perfect timing to take on the role, I guess.
Mark:
Yeah, for a good three weeks I had the wind at my back. Even though the bull market was slowing and there were some fluctuations, sentiment was still pretty positive. People were excited about the future.
Then the news about Sam Bankman-Fried stealing the entire world’s money broke, and suddenly the brakes slammed on. Crypto became a dirty word across the entire industry. I went from playing offense to playing defense—having to explain how FTX had nothing to do with blockchains or blockchain technology. The assets themselves were secure. That kind of fraud could happen anywhere. This was a case of fraud—period. But of course, it set the initiative back significantly. It’s taken a while to get back on track. So yeah, really tough timing.
Will:
How would you characterize the energy and interest level at Wellington—and maybe as a proxy, the broader incumbent financial industry?
First off, it sounds like you focused on the right areas from the beginning. That 2021 research effort you led was directly aligned with the business and the points of intersection between TradFi and blockchain—areas that are going to be transformative over time.
If you trace it from there—through FTX, through everything that followed, and now even into the current presidential administration, which is potentially much more crypto-friendly—how would you describe the internal sentiment over that stretch?
Mark:
I’ll start by saying one of Wellington’s biggest strengths is our diversity of informed perspectives. That’s where our edge comes from. You don’t have to go far in the firm to find someone with a thoughtful, alternative point of view.
From my standpoint, the opportunity here felt like a no-brainer from the start. But not everyone saw it that way.
You asked about my background—I came in as a “market plumber.” I understood the downstream processes, the integrations, and the efficiency gains blockchain could bring to our industry. But others came in with different experiences—analysts, PMs, technologists, ops folks—and they knew the hurdles. They understood what it would take to integrate something like this into the existing financial ecosystem, and they also knew the incumbents that would resist it to protect their position.
So when I first stepped into the role, I had more skeptics than supporters. I’d group people into three buckets:
- The biggest group was, “I don’t know enough yet—I’d like to learn more.”
- Then there were the supporters—“I know what this is, and I’m in.”
- And the third group was the skeptics—“I know what this is, and I don’t think it’s going to work.”
A big part of my job was engaging with that third group—actively seeking out those dissenting opinions to understand what I might be missing. If someone raised a valid criticism, I needed to investigate it. Is it a real issue, or is there a counterpoint I can bring back?
Some issues didn’t have counterpoints. Cybersecurity, for example—we’re all aligned that in an on-chain world, cybersecurity risk increases. That’s a fact. It doesn’t make the model unworkable, but it’s something we all have to be prepared for.
Today, the group of people who don’t know and want to learn more has shrunk considerably. The outreach effort—with help from a lot of folks around the firm—has moved the conversation forward. Even among the skeptics, people have been generous with their time and open to listening. That’s part of our culture at Wellington. We seek out different perspectives. We don’t all try to swim in the same direction.
The number of skeptics has gone down. They’re not gone, but it’s definitely changed. A big factor has been the staying power of the space. We’ve been through real debacles. And yet, Bitcoin is still sitting near $100K. That resilience has helped change minds.
I describe the last administration as having its foot on the brakes as hard as possible. Whether that was to protect incumbents, to buy time for regulators to catch up, or just a lack of understanding—it was clear the brakes were on.
The current administration? They’ve taken their foot off the brake and slammed on the gas. This year has brought meaningful progress and a real sense of momentum.
Will:
I know you're connected to your peers at other firms—you’re part of the broader dialogue. Do you think your experience and trajectory at Wellington is representative of what others are going through? Is everyone looking at this in a similar way?
Mark:
It’s happening in waves.
There are peers of ours who are out ahead. They’ve been at it longer, done more, and frankly have larger teams working on it. I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been made public, but BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Fidelity have done a tremendous amount. On the alternatives side, Hamilton Lane has been very active, and Apollo to a degree as well.
Then there’s the next cohort—I’d call them fast followers. These are firms like us who are actively engaged, making meaningful contributions, just not operating at the same scale yet as the leaders.
And then there’s a large number of firms that, as far as I know, don’t have a strategy, don’t have a dedicated person or team, and still haven’t caught up.
That will probably change throughout 2025. But we’ll see.
Will:
So I’d love to get into some of the specific projects you’ve worked on or are currently working on—at least to the extent you can talk about them. But maybe before drilling into the details, can we step back and look at the opportunity sets for TradFi in this space?
Certainly in the context of Wellington, but also across incumbent financial services more broadly. You mentioned some of the reasons tokenization is valuable for an asset manager—distribution, cost efficiency. Can you provide more color? What do you see as the highest-value, most immediate drivers of adoption?
Mark:
I’m a big analogy guy, so I’ll use one here. I think of this wave of blockchain and tokenization as the next wave of the internet—very similar to what we saw in the early 2000s.
In that first wave, companies realized they could sell products through a website. That dramatically increased distribution and created massive efficiency. Early on, people dismissed the internet—said it was just for drugs and porn. No one thought people would ever feel comfortable entering their credit card info into a website.
But pioneers pushed forward. Upstarts built entirely new business models. Amazon is a great example—born entirely online.
This wave is similar. But instead of selling products through a webpage, you're distributing financial products through tokens. The advantages are the same: broader reach, more efficient delivery.
To get a little more specific—one of our early proof-of-concept projects was with Citi, Avalanche, WisdomTree, and DTCC. We published a white paper on it in February 2024. In that simulation, we tokenized a private equity fund and used tokens to distribute it across different custodial platforms.
That’s something that’s extremely hard to do today in the alternatives space. We were able to simulate it instantly, using digital identity and an onboarding framework. Regulation, at the time, wasn’t fully in place to do it live—but we showed clearly that the hurdle isn’t in the technology. The tech works. It has product-market fit.
So again, the value is in expanding distribution and streamlining delivery.
Another example: in some Southeast Asian markets—smaller countries—it’s hard to offer financial services in a commingled vehicle because of regulatory constraints. You have to launch a fund specifically for that jurisdiction, which adds significant cost. In many cases, there isn’t enough AUM to justify doing that.
Tokenization can solve this. You can embed compliance controls directly into the token itself, so it can be distributed across multiple jurisdictions while remaining compliant. That lets you offer one multi-jurisdictional vehicle, much more efficiently.
That kind of structure unlocks new market opportunities. You can start collecting assets in these smaller jurisdictions, get economies of scale, and make the economics work.
It’s also about democratizing access. Today, alternatives are very difficult to access unless you're ultra-high net worth. Even mass affluent investors struggle, due to high minimums and onboarding friction. Tokenization makes it easier to deliver these products to a broader audience.
Now, we’re still in a world where tokenization often has to sit alongside paper-based books and records, which means it’s not yet a cost reducer. It can be additive. But in a world where you can fully digitize records, the cost savings become real.
There are also downstream efficiencies that haven’t yet been fully realized—NAV distribution, data aggregation, compliance tracking—things that can be automated or improved with on-chain infrastructure.
And that’s just the product side—how financial products are distributed.
On the raw materials side—tokenizing equities, fixed income, FX—there’s also massive potential. Just speeding up settlement times increases the velocity of money, gets it reinvested faster, and improves return on capital. That’s a real, measurable gain.
Tokenization also allows for manual, bespoke workflows to become API-driven, rules-based, and highly automated. It reduces error rates and friction. Tokens that embed compliance logic—jurisdictional rules, KYC requirements—can significantly reduce back-office cost.
So over time, you’re talking about a deflationary effect on operational costs—while expanding distribution and accelerating innovation.
Will:
On the cost side — I’ve heard incumbent asset managers talk about how fee compression on the product side has been significant over the past few decades. I don’t know what asset managers used to be able to charge for a mutual fund, but now we kind of assume five basis points is the default for a vanilla product. Maybe you can go up to 20, 30, 40 for something more exotic. But overall, product fees have come way down.
At the same time, the cost structure doesn’t seem to have improved much. In fact, in some areas, it might even be higher — whether due to technical operations, regulation, or something else.
Is that accurate? Do fund managers and asset managers look at blockchain and tokenization as a cost optimization opportunity — a way to win back some margin that’s been compressed out of the system?
Mark:
Anytime you're upgrading the system, you have to expect greater efficiency. Again, I’ll go back to the first wave of the internet. A company could sell products through a webpage instead of having to maintain brick-and-mortar stores across its entire distribution network. Obviously, maintaining physical storefronts is more expensive — so the internet naturally created cost efficiencies and scale.
To your point about costs increasing in finance, one of the biggest drivers — and I’ll say this is my personal opinion, but it’s based on experience — is data. Especially when I was working in trading research, I had a close-up view of this.
You need data for everything. But getting clean, reliable, actionable data is expensive. You’ve got vendors selling it to you — and they have all the pricing power. You need entire teams just to manage the ingestion of various feeds. Then you have to normalize and curate that data into a single model that fits your internal systems. And after that, you have to propagate it downstream so you can act on it — and once you do, you generate new data that also has to flow through the system.
It’s a cumbersome, costly loop.
One of the biggest advantages of blockchains is that all the assets and their associated information sit in a single, curated database. It’s API-accessible, so getting the information you need is much easier and more efficient.
We worked on a proof-of-concept in this area led by Chainlink — it was called Project C-A-L-M, or “Comm,” for Corporate Action Lifecycle Management. The first phase was published publicly, and it got a lot of attention — especially within the industry. It’s a bit geeky and technical, so maybe not everyone will immediately grasp the implications. But the core idea is powerful.
Today, every firm maintains its own “security master” — its internal representation of all the assets it trades, and all the metadata about those assets and their issuers. It’s big, expensive, and different at every firm. So when you go to settle a trade, you say, “I bought this asset,” and your broker says, “Okay, I know what that is, but here’s what I call it.” The exchange has its own version, and the counterparty has their own model of it, too.
Everyone is reconciling different representations of the same thing. That slows down everything and adds cost.
But if I want to trade Ethereum with you, Will, I can just point to Etherscan and say, “That’s Ethereum.” You’d look and say, “Yep, same asset — we agree.” It’s instant reconciliation. That’s the power of a shared data model — and that’s why blockchain-based assets settle so much faster.
Project Comm explored whether we could separate value transfer from data management. Instead of using blockchains to move ownership, we could use them to store the metadata — all the issuer and issuance information, plus corporate actions — in a universally accessible format. It would be an industry utility, API-driven, always up-to-date, with everyone pointing at the same data.
The first phase of that project was a success. And we’re excited to continue building with Chainlink and others on future phases.
Will:
One thing we haven’t touched on yet is payments. You mentioned stablecoins earlier and how your interest in them played a role in getting into the role you're in now. I’d be curious—are there any specific projects you've worked on or examples you think are particularly relevant and worth highlighting in the stablecoin or payments space?
Mark:
Absolutely. Let me start with my thesis on all of this, just to lay out the landscape a bit.
The original wave of crypto adoption for the general public was Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a very distinct and unique asset. I don't need to tell your audience—they already know—but it's digital gold, millennial gold, a diversifier, a store of value with 24/7 liquidity. It has its own value proposition and its own killer use case.
The next wave of adoption, in my view, is coming through stablecoins.
The value proposition of stablecoins is pretty straightforward. When you're in the U.S., you probably use Venmo—you can send money to friends easily and basically for free. But try to Venmo someone in Japan, and you can’t. Venmo doesn't work internationally. That’s where stablecoins come in. They offer the promise of global, fast, and cheap payments—essentially the same user experience as Venmo, but borderless.
Right now, we’re on the verge of regulatory clarity. It looks like Congress and the administration are set to pass stablecoin legislation this summer that will codify rules for issuance, reserve management, and oversight. Once that happens, I think we’ll see a rapid acceleration in stablecoin adoption and integration into mainstream financial infrastructure.
We've already seen encouraging steps. Visa and Mastercard have announced plans to support stablecoin payments, solving the last-mile conversion at the vendor level. It’s exactly the kind of infrastructure integration we need.
Some other jurisdictions already have stablecoin rules in place, but since the vast majority of stablecoins—probably 99% of total AUM—are dollar-denominated, U.S. regulation is critical to move the market forward.
Once that framework is in place, stablecoins will enable faster, cheaper payments that feel just like using a fintech app. The technology already exists to make the experience seamless. And as volumes grow, you’ll see the network activity grow with it, which will drive more fees and more valuation growth across the crypto asset ecosystem.
That could be the catalyst for the next wave of the bull cycle.
In terms of what we’re working on—we’ve partnered with a Singapore-based issuer called FundBridge. Our goal, alongside our client FundBridge and our partner Liber (a blockchain integration platform), is to capture some of the growth in this next wave of stablecoin adoption and more broadly in on-chain finance.
It’s a similar model to what BlackRock is doing with their BUIDL product and what Franklin Templeton has done with their Benji tokenized money fund. These are money market fund vehicles that sit on-chain and can be used as reserve assets for stablecoin issuers.
For upstart issuers, this provides a regulated, transparent, and institutionally credible way to park assets. They can use a commingled vehicle with household name institutions. Those vehicles sit on-chain, so there’s proof of reserves, and users can actually point to where the assets are. That transparency and credibility help reinforce trust in the whole ecosystem.
This is shaping up to be a huge market. A lot of research right now is pointing to the strategic importance of stablecoins to the U.S., particularly because stablecoins generally hold Treasury assets. The U.S. has a large volume of Treasury bills slated for issuance over the next few years, and with declining demand from foreign buyers, stablecoin issuers could become that new marginal buyer.
So it feels like the stars are aligning. We’re likely to see a kind of Cambrian explosion in stablecoin issuance and usage—and with it, a need for trusted, regulated reserve vehicles. That’s where we see opportunity.
Zooming out a bit, those same vehicles can also be used within traditional finance. Just last week, the DTCC completed their "Great Collateral Experiment." It was live-streamed, and in my view, it was a huge success. They demonstrated how tokenized money market funds can be used as collateral in traditional margin trading environments.
That’s another example of how these two worlds—crypto and traditional finance—are starting to converge.
Will:
Yeah. Wow. As geeky as it sounds, I’m genuinely excited about the space you’re talking about—creating on-chain, risk-free reserve assets that can play the role that bank-rated core Tier 1 and Tier 2 equity or HQLA play in TradFi.
When you combine that with 24/7 instant settlement, all the efficiencies you mentioned, and the ability to automate financial flows through smart contracts, I think it's potentially transformative—maybe even for the biggest market in the world: the U.S. Treasuries and repo markets.
I'm working on something in that space myself, actually. Would love to share more on it sometime.
Maybe on the collateral management side—can you say more there? What was the core thesis that project was intended to prove out?
And I also remember seeing a study—forget which policy body was involved—but it looked at whether tokenized assets could be used as collateral in traditional financial markets. It seemed like the takeaway was that the form—whether tokenized or dematerialized—shouldn’t really impact whether an asset qualifies as collateral.
Mark:
Let me rewind to the first part, because I’m not sure this is fully understood by enough people.
When I took on this role, the original title offered was “Director of Digital Assets.” I pushed for it to be “Director of Digital Assets and Tokenization.” It’s a bit long, sure—but tokenization is really the core of what this is about.
Let me try to illustrate this.
When you think about the crypto asset space—Bitcoin, Ethereum, the whole lot—it’s like the size of my palm. But when you think about the total potential for tokenized assets, I can’t spread my arms wide enough. It’s everything. The tokenization of assets is the big opportunity here.
So when we talk about collateral, payments, and all the things we’ve been discussing—we’re talking about the biggest slice of the value stack. Tokenization is where the real transformational power lies.
This is about increasing the velocity of money, reducing credit risk, reducing settlement risk, and eliminating counterparty risk. And when it comes to collateral—those are all massive wins.
Even in my own experience using Aave for the first time—it blew my mind.
The ability to instantly pledge an asset, borrow against it, have that value in your wallet in seconds, and unwind it just as quickly—then repledge something else just as easily—it was like a revelation.
Now, obviously, a lot of that activity still sits outside the regulatory perimeter. And yes, things like legal title transfer still need to be codified and brought into compliance. But here’s the important part: the technology works.
And that’s the hardest thing to solve.
I always lean on analogies—here’s one: this moment in tokenization feels a lot like when Uber first launched.
At the time, hitchhiking was illegal, and when you hailed an Uber, you were essentially hitchhiking with an app. There were very valid reasons why hitchhiking was illegal—you didn’t know who was picking you up. It was risky.
Uber, in its early days, operated outside the regulatory perimeter. It faced tons of legal battles. But over time, the regulations adapted.
Today, when you step into an Uber, you know the driver has had a background check, the ride is GPS-tracked, payments are seamless—and in many cities around the world, Uber is safer than a taxi. Who would’ve thought that when it first launched?
That’s where we are right now with tokenization and blockchain-based collateral. We're at that early stage—figuring out how to build guardrails, run background checks on the "drivers," and codify the rules that will allow us to take full advantage of this technology safely and at scale.
Will:
Maybe just as a quick service to listeners — the words “collateral” and “collateral management” get thrown around a lot, especially in the context of tokenized assets. Usually by people who, frankly, don’t have direct experience with institutional collateral flows or use cases.
Can you break that down for us a bit? Why is collateral such a big deal? Why is there so much of it moving through the system? What are some of the actual use cases where collateral is involved in large volumes? And what are the real, tangible benefits of managing it better?
Mark:
Honestly, I think your listeners probably understand this better than we’re giving them credit for — especially if they’ve used perp exchanges or protocols like Aave. Anyone who’s interacted with that world has some understanding of capital efficiency and leveraged returns — and that’s really what this is about.
Collateral is what you pledge in order to trade on margin or with leverage. It's about getting more capital efficiency — using less capital to take on the same exposure — and, in turn, improving your return profile.
This is a core part of how hedge funds operate. For example, if I want to take a $100 million position in the futures market to bet on a move in interest rates, I don’t necessarily want to post the full $100 million upfront. That’s not efficient — it ties up capital that could be deployed elsewhere.
Instead, I pledge collateral — enough to cover potential adverse price movements. Then I can use the rest of the capital elsewhere: earn yield on it, deploy it in other strategies, or keep it in reserve. That’s the power of leverage, and it’s all driven by how effectively you manage collateral.
It’s a huge part of how the financial system works — but it’s also difficult. Today, much of it is still paper-driven and siloed within prime brokerage relationships or centralized clearing platforms.
This is where blockchain-based infrastructure really shines.
In a blockchain-native environment, you can meet margin calls instantly. You can move assets globally, in real time, to satisfy obligations in different jurisdictions or time zones. You can reuse the same collateral across multiple positions, even across platforms — which opens the door to things like cross-margining and intraday leverage.
Projects like the one DTCC just ran, or some of the work happening at Canton Network, are exploring exactly that: how to use real-time settlement, tokenized collateral, and smart contracts to reimagine margin workflows.
What it all comes down to is this: you dramatically increase the velocity of money. And in finance, increasing the velocity of money is almost always a good thing. It unlocks liquidity, improves capital utilization, and helps boost return ratios across the system.
Will:
One of the reasons I find you to be such a credible voice in this space — and a great partner in the work we've done together — is really grounded in how you came into this.
To your point earlier, your background in market structure, your deep understanding of how the system works, and, honestly, your childlike curiosity and excitement about the innovation happening here are incredibly compelling.
The fact that you got into this by actually using crypto and DeFi — trading, experimenting, engaging directly with platforms like Aave — really sets you apart.
DeFi is a huge part of this conversation. You've referenced examples like Aave multiple times today. We haven’t even talked about MakerDAO, but the concept of an on-chain central bank — that kind of thing — I know really fires your imagination.
And for me, that’s where I see the biggest gap today: the divide between those who have experienced the real value of this technology — who have used it, traded with it, built in it — and those coming from traditional finance who may understand the benefits around distribution or cost optimization, but still carry a fundamental skepticism about what’s being built in crypto.
What you do so well — and I’ve seen it firsthand — is bring those two worlds together. You fully grasp the relevance and the importance of both sides. And in doing so, you help move the entire conversation forward — for DeFi, for TradFi, and for the broader financial ecosystem.
Mark:
Those are very kind words, and I truly appreciate that.
I have a lot of conversations with people across the industry, and I often kick things off by saying, “I’m a Degen.” For those on the TradFi side who might not know what that means, “Degen” is a term in the crypto space with a very specific connotation — it basically means I’ve tried everything.
I’ve bridged to all the new chains. I’ve experimented with the latest protocols and platforms. I’ve played on-chain games. I even set up a MetaMask wallet for my son so he could play Gods Unchained — and he loves it. I’ve experienced this technology firsthand, and that’s where my education has come from.
Just yesterday, I was talking to a colleague who wanted to learn more about this space. She kept asking me the same question I hear over and over again: “Can you just give me the book? What’s the book I can read to learn all of this?”
And my response was, “Have you never used a smartphone?”
Sure, I could give you a book that explains what a smartphone is — but it won’t help much. A phone is also a music player. It’s a television. It’s a camera. It’s a computer. It lets you browse the internet. But unless you actually hold the phone and use the apps, you won’t really understand what it does or why it’s so powerful.
You have to get your hands dirty. You're not going to understand this technology unless you experience it directly.
When people take the book-learning route — or just listen to explanations — they tend to get bogged down in the wrong details. It’s like trying to learn how email works by studying TCP/IP protocols and encryption standards. That’s not what you need to know.
What you need to know is that you can pull up a screen, type a message, drop in a few pictures of your kids, enter your grandma’s email address, and hit send. That’s what matters.
It’s the same thing with crypto. Don’t obsess over how it works. Focus on what you can do with it. And the only way to really see that is to use it. Touch the technology. Experiment with it.
And I always tell people — I’m happy to help you get started.
Will:
One last question for you. What are you most excited about in this space right now? Of all the things you’ve seen, the projects you’re working on, the areas you’ve got visibility into — what’s capturing your attention most right now?
Mark:
I'll throw out a few things.
I spent 20 years in trading, and the last 10 of those focused on trading research. I've explored countless execution venues — particularly in the equity space. At last count, there were something like 49, and I’m sure there are more now. I’ve seen all kinds of market structure.
Uniswap is the most significant trade execution innovation I’ve seen in my entire career. That may sound bold, but for me, it was jaw-dropping to experience it for the first time. I know there’s still room for improvement — and I’m sure it will get better — but the product is phenomenal.
That was the gateway for me. It was what really drew me into the space. Since then, I’ve used Aave, Maker, GMX — I could go on. On-chain purpose-built platforms are remarkable. But Uniswap gave me that first realization: this is what on-chain finance looks like. And it’s incredibly powerful.
Zooming out, you mentioned the “end-to-end” stream earlier — I see opportunity on both sides. On the raw materials side — the inputs into fund products — we’re looking at how that ecosystem can be made more efficient, cheaper, and lower risk. On the final product side — tokenizing funds, for instance — we also need to ensure there’s a value proposition for the end client. It’s not enough for us as issuers to benefit from reduced costs. Clients need to gain something as well.
That was one of the most exciting parts of the proof of concept we ran with Citi, WisdomTree, and DTCC. It’s all published online. What we were able to simulate was a fund holder — someone holding tokenized fund units — pledging those units as collateral and taking a loan against them.
That’s potentially transformative.
Take private assets today — most are drawdown funds with 7- to 10-year lockups. Minimum investments are in the mid-six to low-seven-figure range. Once you invest, you have no liquidity. That locks out a huge portion of the population.
What do ultra-high-net-worth individuals do when they need liquidity? They don’t sell their assets — that would trigger taxes and eliminate future upside. Instead, they pledge those assets as collateral and borrow against them, often at low rates through private banking relationships. They meet their obligations without losing their investment positions.
This technology — tokenized funds, on-chain lending platforms — could democratize access to that kind of financial flexibility. With the Citi POC, DTCC spun up a collateralized borrow-and-lend facility that looked a lot like Aave to your average crypto user.
This is how we take an illiquid asset class and create new liquidity — responsibly, with haircuts, but in a way that opens up a whole new value proposition for a broader segment of clients.
That’s what will bring people on-chain. That’s what excites me most.
Will:
Wow. One of those final lines—DTCC spinning up a collateralized borrow-lend facility that looked a lot like Aave—kind of sums up the whole conversation. Mark, thank you so much for making the time.
Really fascinating. Always love getting your perspective.
Mark:
Really appreciate it, Will. This was a great conversation. I know I can get a bit long-winded with this stuff, but as you can tell, I'm really passionate about it.
I love talking about it, and I’m genuinely excited about what’s ahead.
Will:
Incredible. Mark Garabedian, thank you very much for joining us today.