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This week our host Cuy Sheffield is joined by:

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The Prime Broker Gap

ICE and OKX announced a 50/50 joint venture in June to bring NYSE tokenized equities and ICE futures to OKX's 120 million users, following ICE's $200 million investment in OKX at a $25 billion valuation.

Most commentary focuses on the CSD layer - who holds the master record of ownership. Eric Saraniecki thinks the real bottleneck sits one level up, at the prime broker and FCM layer. "Imagine you're a prime and you don't know how to do bilateral intraday 24/7 margining," he said. "It doesn't matter that you can do it technically at the settlement layer - you're not prepared to do it." OKX runs continuous derivatives settlement; traditional primes don't have that muscle.

Theo Golden, whose firm buys US stocks through ICE regularly, was blunt about what institutions want from tokenized equities: "No one wants their portfolio managers working over the weekend." Fast finality, less slippage, cheaper custody - not round-the-clock markets.

Eric pushed further. Access isn't the interesting part - US equities are already globally available through CFDs and international brokerages. The real unlock is twofold. First, securities lending at retail scale: crypto users already expect to earn yield on idle assets, and tokenized equities make that possible for smaller portfolios. Second, onchain structuring - the ability to say "I love this ETF, minus these two names, rebalance, boom" and have the unit economics of a personalized separately managed account actually work, because spot liquidity lives onchain.

Baillie Gifford’s BAGEY: No Wrapper. No SPV. Just the Fund

The Baillie Gifford Enhanced Yield Fund (BAGEY) launched June 22 on Ethereum and Solana with BNY providing tokenization and wallet infrastructure - the first publicly available, fully native UK-regulated tokenized fund.

"Unlike other tokenized funds where it's an SPV wrap or a beneficial ownership structure, you just own the fund," Theo said. The blockchain serves as the legal source of truth for ownership. "When you transfer the asset or use it as collateral, those transactions are held to be legally true." That eliminates the operational risk of daily syncs between off-chain registers and onchain tokens that most tokenized funds carry.

The portfolio is long-only - 50% government bonds, 50% investment-grade corporate credit, no leverage - targeting roughly 7% yield. "As unsexy as it gets," Theo said.

The fund accepts USDC for in-kind subscriptions and redemptions, and up to 10% of NAV is available for T+0 redemptions, enabled by a credit facility from a Tier 1 G-SIB bank bridging blockchain settlement and traditional bond settlement cycles.

Theo Golden had a warning for the broader RWA market: don't confuse the quality of the underlying asset with the quality of the product. "If you put a AAA asset through a triple-C transfer agent, it's a triple-C asset," he said. The yield looks like a money market fund; the counterparty risk from a startup wrapper doesn't. The philosophy behind BAGEY: "People in the crypto space deserve the same respect as our current clients. A client is a client."

Why Stablecoins Can't Scale Past Payments

The Bank of England scrapped its proposed £20,000 individual and £10 million corporate holding caps for systemic sterling stablecoins, replacing them with a temporary £40 billion per-coin issuance guardrail and lowering required central bank deposits to 30% from 40%. Theo was pragmatic: "If a sterling stablecoin issuer gets to £40 billion in the next 12 months, we will all be ecstatic."

Eric steered toward a more provocative thesis. Today, stablecoin users pre-position idle cash balances to make sure funds are available when needed. Eric argues that's a transitional phase. "If we get everything right about rewiring the connection between capital markets and payments, cash becomes a just-in-time concept," he said. His metaphor: a "financial capacitor" - a treasury instrument or fund that converts into cash at the exact point of sale, eliminating the need to sit in stablecoins at all.

The barrier, as Eric put it: "You have a 24/7 front end and a Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-three back end - and that creates massive friction." He pointed to the Lehman weekend, when counterparties realised they couldn’t necessarily get out, as the reminder that a prime broker won’t wear stablecoin‑issuer risk at yards of size over a weekend if it can’t exit around the clock.

Theo flagged a related hurdle: the burn fee. For payments, 5-10 basis points is tolerable. For capital markets, it kills the trade. "The idea that I would take a 5-10 basis point haircut on a position, particularly when I'm fighting for a single basis point, is not comprehensible," he said. Eric's view is that stablecoin issuers face an existential business model problem - outside of Tether, they monetize the float, not transactions. "It should be oriented around velocity," he said, pointing to Visa's interchange model as the design pattern stablecoins need.

Noah Levine saw the logical endpoint. Burn fees will likely compress to zero under competitive pressure, and interest-rate revenue is inherently volatile - so stablecoin issuers will be pushed toward vertical integration, owning more of the product stack rather than just the settlement layer. The tension: "Once you do that, does that limit your ability to be a network? You're effectively competing with players that otherwise would be supporting the growth of your stablecoin."

Where This Lands

Every panelist described a version of the same gap - the front end runs 24/7, the back end doesn't. Eric's 12-month forecast was the most aggressive: "The acceleration is going to be mind-blowing." It landed because nobody was hand-waving - each panelist could name exactly what needs to be built, and in several cases, said they're already building it.

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