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This week Petrit Berisha fills in for Simon Taylor, hosting live from New York City during Digital Asset Summit. He's joined by three heavy hitters: Rob Hadick, General Partner at Dragonfly, returning for a record-equaling appearance on the show; Robert Mitchnick, Head of Digital Assets at BlackRock, making his Tokenized debut; and Noah Levine, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and member of what Pet calls "the Visa crypto mafia," back for his second appearance.

BlackRock's Head of Digital Assets sat across the table from two of crypto's sharpest institutional investors and made one thing clear: tokenization isn't just an efficiency story - it's an access story. And the industry still has real work to do before it gets there.

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Tokenization as Access, Not Just Plumbing

The conversation kicked off with Larry Fink's annual letter and the idea that half the world carries a digital wallet but can't easily invest through it. As Robert Mitchnick from BlackRock noted, "tokenization, which we so often talked about as this efficiency story, is actually, in many respects, potentially even bigger as an access story," pointing to crypto-native investors who are "under allocated, maybe 0% allocated to traditional investments" and currently limited to the roughly $3 trillion in crypto out of the world's $400–500 trillion in assets.

Rob Hadick grounded this further by framing stablecoins as "digital oil" for the movement of money between tokenized assets - once assets share the same form factor as a stablecoin, swapping between them becomes dramatically simpler, particularly for emerging-market users facing costly regulatory and infrastructure barriers today.

The Tokenized Equity Spectrum

Noah Levine laid out a useful taxonomy: SPV wrappers (directional exposure but no direct ownership of the underlying), tokenized entitlements (off-chain origination with onchain representation, like what DTCC and Securitize are doing), and fully onchain stocks (net new CUSIPs issued natively on chain, as Superstate and Figure are pursuing). The third category unlocks cross-collateralization and governance rights - but requires functional ATSs and deeper liquidity to operate at institutional scale.

Mitchnick was quick to clarify that BlackRock's BUIDL fund was "not a SPV, was not a feeder fund - that was natively a de novo fund, and the shares are issued directly as tokens." But he acknowledged the friction: "Whenever you have to go through white listing, you add a significant point of friction that undermines liquidity, undermines usability."

The Exchange Race: NYSE, NASDAQ, and 24/7 Markets

The NYSE-Securitize partnership to build a 24/7 tokenized securities platform drew sharp analysis from Hadick: NYSE is considering "a segregated order book that's a completely different exchange," while NASDAQ is exploring a consolidated model where "tokenized and non-tokenized assets can be treated against each other and are functionally equivalent." Both approaches signal the same conviction - weekend and overnight trading is coming, and onchain rails are the way to enable it.

Stablecoins vs. Tokenized Deposits: Different Products, Different Users

On the Cari Network - five US regional banks building a tokenized deposit network on zkSync's Providium chain - Hadick argued the stablecoins-or-deposits framing "misses the point." Payment stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and tokenized money market funds will serve different purposes, much like their traditional analogues do today.

Levine reinforced this: "they're fundamentally different products... the primary user of a tokenized deposit is completely different than who the primary user of a stablecoin is going to be." For regional US banks, the value is wholesale - back-office money movement and efficiency, not serving retail users in Argentina.

Privacy: Capital Markets, Not Payments, Are Forcing the Issue

On the privacy front, Hadick made a counterintuitive point: demand for onchain privacy hasn't come from payments - because netting solved that problem. "People put an order into BVNK. And BVNK netted everything over the day, and then at the end of the day they settled in one block transaction to Ethereum... that was, in and of itself, basically privacy."

What's actually accelerating the conversation is capital markets. "If you're going to do weekend capital markets and you're going to do things like collateral mobility and management on chain, that becomes a much different conversation, because you can't necessarily do netting in that case, when you need to do a capital call when something's moving against you." ZK proofs help for certain transaction types, but Hadick acknowledged they're "not made for all types of transactions" - a point he noted competitors like Canton would be quick to make. He remains a "strong believer that more and more of this will happen on public permissionless chains," but conceded it's "continuing to be a very tough to solve technological problem."

Looking Ahead: Compressed Value Chains

Mitchnick closed with the five-to-seven-year view: "value chains become shorter... the number of intermediaries that process simple financial transactions today - an investor, a prime broker, an exchange, sometimes a CCP, a CSD, a transfer agent, a fund admin - a good chunk of that can be significantly streamlined, compressed, collapsed, automated." That's the institutional opportunity - for end investors, for asset managers, and for crypto exchanges currently serving their audiences "with less than 1% of the investable assets in the world."

The through-line from this panel: the infrastructure is being built in real time, the incumbents are showing up, and the question isn't whether tokenization happens - it's which form factors win and how fast the regulatory clarity follows.

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