We return for a brand new season of our podcast this week with a discussion about tokenisation. What are tokens, and are they really going to change the way markets function?
Written off by some commentators as something of a flash in the pan, associated with the cryptocurrency boom, tokens could are still seemingly paving their way towards a quiet revolution for financial markets, and could even shake up established stock and bond markets.
On the podcast we speak to Philipp Pieper and Timo Lehes, the co-founders of Swarm, a blockchain platform that brings unique digitization and trading solutions to the world of traditional finance.
Swarm is the first organization in the world to offer digitized treasury bills and Apple stock via a regulated and decentralized platform. Day to day, the company works with real-world-asset owners to tokenize collateral and build trading infrastructure in a regulatory compliant way.
Swarm is something a hybrid between the ‘wild west’ of crypto and traditional centralized exchanges. Whilst the company still needs to satisfy compliance concerns, it also sees itself as a DeFi community at heart. According to Peiper, it is imperative that its users’ voices help drive product innovation.
Swarm launched tokenized stocks and bond ETFs on February 24th 2023, including Apple, Tesla, the iShares US treasury bond 0-1 year ETF and iShare US treasury bond 1-3 year ETF.
Between February 24th and May 23rd, three months after launching, Swarm’s user base grew by nearly one fifth (17.6 percent).
On the podcast we discuss the current state of play in the tokenization market, and why it makes sense to start to tokenize bonds and shares. Can this trend eventually replace stock markets? And what are some of the risks that investors in tokens need to be made aware of?
