In this conversation, Arnab Naskar from Stokr discusses the intersection of Bitcoin, tokenization, and capital markets. He explains how Bitcoin serves as both a store of value and a settlement layer, enabling the creation of decentralized financial systems. The discussion covers the advantages of using Liquid for tokenization, the importance of confidentiality in transactions, and the innovative financing opportunities in energy and Bitcoin mining. Arnab emphasizes the systemic shift in financial markets due to tokenization, the role of stablecoins, and the future of decentralized finance on Liquid.

Takeaways:

🔸Bitcoin serves as a store of value and a settlement layer.

🔸Stokr focuses on tokenizing financial assets on Liquid.

🔸Liquid offers confidentiality and stability for tokenized assets.

🔸Tokenization can reduce the need for intermediaries in finance.

🔸The market for tokenized securities is rapidly growing.

🔸Energy infrastructure financing is a key area for innovation.

🔸Tokenization opens up investment opportunities globally.

🔸Users can trade tokenized assets seamlessly on Liquid.

🔸The future of finance will involve both DEXs and centralized exchanges.

🔸Tokenization represents a systemic shift in capital markets.

Timestamps:

(00:00) – Intro

(00:59) – Who is Arnab and what is Stokr? 

(02:29) – Isn’t Bitcoin enough? 

(04:44) – How and why is Stokr different?; The importance of Liquid Network 

(08:35) – How does Liquid compete with other chains for tokenization of assets? 

(11:54) – What is CMSTR?

(15:01) – Does Stokr help finance SMEs & traditional businesses?

(18:23) – What is Blockstream Mining Note (BMN)? 

(24:34) – Trust minimising the ownership of securities; Whitelisting process 

(28:57) – How big is Liquid Network? How does it fare compared to other asset platforms? 

(33:43) – Who are the customers of Stokr’s tokenized products? 

(37:34) – What does the interface between Stokr and the end user look like?; The @Blockstream edge

(46:11) – Is TradFi embracing tokenization of assets?; Will Bitcoin be the base layer for tokenization?

(56:25) – Closing thoughts 

Links: 

• https://x.com/Arnab_Naskarr 
• https://x.com/stokr_io 
• https://blog.liquid.net/cmstr-note-tokenizing-public-stock-on-liquid/
• https://mining.blockstream.com/finance/bmn/  

Stephan Livera links:

• Follow me on X: @stephanlivera
• Subscribe to the podcast
• Subscribe to Substack

Transcript:

Arnab Naskar (00:00)
If Bitcoin positions itself as a store of value and kind of a new form of money free from state intervention, that infrastructure settlement layer can be used for other financial assets without any censorship. And this is where liquid became very interesting. So effectively what we are trying to do in the stock market is effectively using the Bitcoin infrastructure and the security of the infrastructure, building a new capital markets that not only smaller companies can access, but also asset managers, large institutions can also come in over the time.

So it’s creating an infrastructure for the new capital market which is not centralized and controlled by few players.

Stephan Livera (00:36)
everyone, welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast. Joining me today is Arnav Nasgar from Stokr. He’s one of the co-founders of Stokr, which is a tokenization platform building mainly on Liquid, which is a federated sidechain of Bitcoin. So a lot of things happening in the tokenization and RWA world. Do want to just give us a very quick background on yourself and what Stokr is?

Arnab Naskar (00:59)
Nice to be here, Stephan. think it’s lovely being here and I think we are doing for the first time in person this podcast and yeah, it’s great meeting you always and it’s great to be on your show. So, Stalker, like before, just I go into Stalker, just a quick background about myself. I am Arnab Naskar. I’m the co-founder and the business lead of Stalker. My background is I have a legal background. I worked as a lawyer in the past, entered the Bitcoin rabbit hole in 2014.

started the business in 2018, currently based in Germany and operating primarily in the European market. Stalker started in 2018 effectively with the concept of bringing financial assets like securities, bonds and those kind of ⁓ regulated financial assets on chain. That was a crazy idea. Back in the days in 2018, everybody was talking about ICOs and kind of avoiding any regulatory regime. And we thought, okay, why not issue securities on chain? And we started 2018. That was the time I would say that

Bitcoin layer 2 didn’t exist. It was just kind of some thoughts were there but nothing in concrete. 2019-20 onwards we started looking into liquid very deeply and we issued our first asset I would say in 2020 in that time frame on liquid and then kind of ever since after that we just purely pivoted to liquid. We right now have over 1.8 billion worth of assets on liquid. We are an asset tokenization platform, tokenizing financial assets but also an investment platform where investors can actually participate and invest.

into those assets.

Stephan Livera (02:24)
Okay, so now look obvious questions that most you know Bitcoin fellow Bitcoin maxis will have is like why even bother with this stuff? Isn’t just you Bitcoin enough like what’s the benefit of this compared to just having like a centralized Tradfire style database for these other non Bitcoin things? How do you answer that?

Arnab Naskar (02:43)
So it’s a very interesting question and this is definitely an obvious question. ⁓ I see it in this way, right? If you see the gold as a store of value, gold had a store of value and still has a store of value but never had a settlement layer. You cannot settle gold digitally or there is no chain or there is no infrastructure for settlement. You have to settle, take the physical gold, give it and that settlement is. Bitcoin is a store of value and a settlement layer at the same time. The first time we see that interesting angle, right?

you are a store of value and a settlement chain. Now when you settle a store of value, it’s definitely, you know, it’s a wealth creation, wealth preservation in that angle. But the same settlement layer can be used for settling other assets. USD for example, right? That’s where stablecoin comes in. But if stablecoin is in fiat or money like instrument is there, obviously there will be other financial assets which are also not gold, not bitcoin, but can be bond, but can be securities, shares and everything.

So I see like this way, right? You have the layer one where is effectively the Bitcoin store of value and it should be as simple, as basic, as vanilla as possible because that’s a core angle. But in layer two, you can bring stable coins, you can bring tokenized securities, tokenized financial assets because this I see a new capital market stacks will be not built on a strike like I would say a swift kind of infrastructure or some DTCC kind of infrastructure in the ClearStream model or clearance house model.

but it will be built on this blockchain infrastructure like Bitcoin. So you have the store of value in layer one and then you have stablecoins, stocks, bonds, securities, everything on the layer two.

Stephan Livera (04:20)
Out of curiosity then, if you were to compare this with, let’s say, just having a centralized, because you could have a Bitcoin denominated centralized database, right? Like there are other people out there, think like Roxam is maybe one example where they’re trying to do like just Bitcoin denominated, but it’s a custodial platform. So how does that contrast with your approach where you’re doing it more in liquid? And for listeners who aren’t familiar, we’ll explain liquid a bit later, but do you just give us your, how are you seeing that? Is it about the interoperability or what’s the…

What’s the distinction or the benefit of doing it in an on-chain way?

Arnab Naskar (04:53)
So the reason I think like a stock started on Ethereum, so because that time that was only option 2018, but we were very conscious that Ethereum has its own limitations. And when the crypto kitties came, the transaction fees, like we had some projects where the investment ticket size was $100. And at some point, because of crypto kitties, the transaction fees went to $60. Unsustainable, you cannot invest in that scale, right?

ETH L2 started coming later and then we also saw Bitcoin L2s at that time. Lightning was in discussion. Liquid just came in and Liquid had the concept of between exchanges to move BTCs. But they also had a room to issue new assets, liquid assets, right? And that liquid asset can be a stablecoin like USDT is now on Liquid but also can be securities. Now when we looked into that angle for us was most important context was if Bitcoin we are considering is next

money or like as a new form of money, right? And this is a long discussion back in the days after the block size war and everything is a Bitcoin as a money and Bitcoin as a store of value. These two angles and this there was a debating topic between right, which has precedence over what? If Bitcoin positions itself as a store of value and kind of a new form of money free from state intervention, that infrastructure settlement layer can be used for other financial assets without any censorship.

And this is where liquid became very interesting. As liquid said, okay, you know, you don’t have to issue the assets on Bitcoin, but you can rely on the security principles of Bitcoin. Quite a lot similar code base. But additional element that you get is a confidential transactions. That is, a large hedge fund trading between themselves, they don’t want a third party speculators to really observe the transactions and do a trade. Sometimes they don’t want. So confidential transaction was what liquid introduced and I think

Till date is one of the most stable platform that has a privacy infrastructure and is running for long time without any issues and that’s liquid is one of that. And they the concept called confidential transactions. It means you know something has moved from somewhere to somewhere, know the assets, you do not know the amount, you just know that some transaction happened.

Stephan Livera (06:59)
You do not know.

So just while we’re here, let’s just do a quick for people who aren’t familiar with what liquid is, right? I’ll just give a quick, you know, a minute or two, just basic explanation. So in Bitcoin, we have main chain Bitcoin, right? You can send and receive that. Liquid is what’s called a federated side chain, meaning it is controlled by a federation. I think it’s like 11 of 15 or 12 of 15. Basically it’s a multi-sig. But the idea is with Bitcoin main chain, you can peg in your Bitcoin into liquid and it’s called LBTC once it’s inside the federation and then you can trade it around.

And it has a lot of similarities with Bitcoin because you can have an address and you can send liquid Bitcoin and liquid assets around inside of that, but it has different trade-offs, right? There’s no mining. It’s one minute block times and block signing, but not mining. ⁓ It can have confidential transactions. There’s confidential assets. Recently they have simplicity on liquid as well. So it’s a different context. And then the idea is people are using it for different things, whether that’s like transactional uses.

whether it’s like swapping in and out like Samson and the guys at Aqua or tokenized products and services like what you guys are doing with Stalker. And then the idea is you can be trading around inside of Liquid and then when you need to trade out, you can swap out or peg out and you might use a provider like Bolts or one of these guys who can help you swap out of Liquid. So that’s kind of just a very sort of overall basic idea. And so then taking that into, you know,

some of the trade-offs that liquid offers, I guess it’s probably a good spot here just to contrast liquid with some of the other ways that you can do tokenization. Now you guys have chosen liquid, but as an example, inside the Bitcoin world, let’s say there’s liquid, there’s RGB, there’s Taproot assets, there’s ⁓ BTKN, which I think is the Spark one, there’s ⁓ RSK. ⁓ I mean, these are probably some of the well-known ones. And then of course you have like in Altcoin or Shitcoin land, you have, know,

Ethereum and Solana and Tron and Base ⁓ and Robinhood is doing their own chain and Circle is doing their own chain and so on. And then even over in TradFi World, you’ve got New York Stock Exchange doing their own tokenization. So I guess that’s kind of a bit of the landscape of tokenization. So can you explain for us, you know, where you see Liquid competing with these other ways of doing tokenization?

Arnab Naskar (09:22)
I think liquid has come along a long way. would say it’s one of the most stable infrastructure for tokenization. ⁓ Definitely education is still missing for the market. then StockArt is kind of one of the, like as an issuer of tokenized securities and we are one of the regulated entities operating the market for last seven, eight years, I would say. And StockArt is managing over 1.8 billion and we are exclusively issuing right now on liquid network, right?

So we have kind of educated our user bases about the infrastructure and the strength. And as I was mentioning is a confidential transaction is a very key element of liquid because for a long time other info like a large financial institutions, they went to private blockchain because of the lack of confidentiality. You can go to Ethoscan, put a transactions, you can use some kind of channel analysis, kind of analytics tool.

Stephan Livera (10:12)
and they can find out your balance. They’ll find out what assets you traded.

Arnab Naskar (10:15)
that’s

became so that this is the imagine your kind of a hedge fund. You have one billion like a few hundred millions of USDC and you’re moving between that. People can really monitor your transactions. You can create a proper analytics if you ⁓ pay and you have the right data set in that sense. For financial institution, that’s problematic. They don’t want it. Liquid is effective as you mentioned is liquid is effectively sitting on top of Bitcoin and you can issue LBTC and

something like liquid tether. But if you’re going for securities, you go a different format. So on top of liquid, they have this element called AMP assets, right? It’s an asset manager platform, which is programmable, which is upgradable. So unlike in Ethereum smart contracts, once a smart contract is deployed, you cannot change. And there a lot of bugs and all the hacks, everything happens because of the rigidity of solidity and rigidity of smart contracts. Liquid does not have that rigidity. AMP is flexible. It’s

Stephan Livera (10:46)
That’s

Arnab Naskar (11:13)
You can based on new regulatory requirements, something you can upgrade, can change some rules and regulations and that definitely need to be reflected in the legal documentation because these are regulated financial assets but that gives the issuer, large asset manager the flexibility that based on regulatory development they can change the assets logic but on the other side they get the confidential transactions and as you mentioned the block time is one minute, have a less low transaction fees, all this thing. So if all these components come in together, it’s a perfect platform I would say.

for a new era of capital markets. Now, I think this is to another point which you mentioned about the RockSum platform, right? And issuing shares denominated in BTC. But there is no on-chain transactions for that. What Stalker did, and this is kind of we started in, I would say two years back, we tokenized first public listed stock was… Exactly. So we started with micro strategy. The reason we did, because we got an inbound investor, also I would say user request, said, hey, you know…

Stephan Livera (12:01)
Like Bitcoin treasure companies,

Arnab Naskar (12:10)
MicroStrategy has a very interesting MNAV based on the BTC volatility. And I would like to trade against the BTC to generate some good alpha. And it’s very interesting over the weekend where the Bitcoin is the most volatile. I cannot trade MicroStrategy because the market is closed. But there, if I can trade against the BTC in and out, that can be very interesting alpha I can generate. So what we did is we tokenized the CMSTR, we call it. It’s a C for 100. It’s one CMSTR equals to 100 MSTR.

And there is a platform called Sideswap, which is a DEX platform for Liquid. It’s effectively DVP Delivery versus Payment happening on-chain. It’s an Atomic Swap infrastructure where people are trading LBTC on Liquid and the CMS tier on-chain swaps without a central custodian infrastructure or something, you know, facing the transactions or becoming the middleman in transactions. And that’s the beauty.

When you come to liquid kind of infrastructure, you definitely can trade against stable coins, but you can also trade against coin denominated products without that Bitcoin be wrapped by some cent like WBTC kind of infrastructure where only as one or two centralized custodians is holding it.

Stephan Livera (13:11)
in denominated.

Yeah, so I guess the benefit in what you’re saying there is that because liquid has a has this federation that we said right and see what is it 11 of 15 or 12 or 15 multi-seg I forgot the exact number and so these are the liquid functionaries they effectively custody the Bitcoin that’s been pegged into the liquid, you know fit sidechain Let’s say but what you’re talking about here is Individuals using liquid they can trade LBTC which which can be you know swapped back out to BTC on chain if you wish

but people can keep it inside of liquid and trade it for CMSTR or some of the other treasury companies as well. And the idea is that they can trade on the weekends and if they believe they want to be able to trade, they believe they can earn LBTC by doing that or they might have their own reasons for wanting to trade on the weekends or whatever.

Arnab Naskar (14:07)
The federation cannot take out the BTC unilaterally, right? It’s the user have to be involved in that because they have to sign the transaction as holding the LBTC. So that gives a huge level of comfort to trade LBTC. Now there is definitely a question about the LBTC’s, you know, accessibility and all the things, but this nativeness that you bring the money like instrument like stablecoin like USDT on liquid, you have LBTC, which is more superior than a wrapped BTC. And then you have securities on chain, you’re creating a completely new capital market infrastructure.

Stephan Livera (14:36)
You can have like DEXs, decentralized exchanges, and this kind of thing. And who knows what people will build now that simplicity has recently come to liquid as well. there’s opportunities there that people will build. And I think even some of the ZK roll-up or ZK guys are doing some work with simplicity on liquid as well. maybe there’s some other interesting things that people will do with that. I guess let’s try to put it into what are some of the concrete benefits then. So as an example, you could be maybe a small or medium.

enterprise person who would otherwise, if you want to raise public money, you would have to go to an IPO level, which is like very costly, very time, you know, can take a lot of time. There can be barriers to that. Whereas I presume then in a liquid assets context, they could, you know, now they have to, they might have to work with somebody. There may be certain regulatory compliance and things that they have to do, but they can do it in a cheaper and faster way. So I guess that’s part of the appeal of what you’re saying is that people can, instead of having to be like,

paying 20 or 30 million dollars to do like a IPO in the TradFi world, they can do it at a lower cost in some kind of liquid or Bitcoin tokenized form. Is that sort of how you’re, one benefit that you’re seeing?

Arnab Naskar (15:58)
I see.

Stephan Livera (16:04)
And then you sort of go on up to other areas like BMN and companies.

Arnab Naskar (16:08)
So I think the first very interesting project that we financed is Infinite Fleet. That’s a gaming company. ⁓ The challenge of the early stage companies are it’s very high risk, definitely high reward, high risk. So it depends on the curation and the success rates are very low. The failure rates are very high. There’s a reason in Europe, generally crowdfunding, if you see this way, did not succeed tremendously. There is a plateau. Even in US and China, I think they still did a better job. But in Europe, it’s kind of a struggle heavily.

Stephan Livera (16:13)
That’s Samson.

Arnab Naskar (16:38)
⁓ Also like it’s kind of a culture of culture towards equity investments in Europe. It’s also the culture of entrepreneurs raising equity investments. So the number of psychological or historical factors are there and cultural factor. Where we felt more and more role of tokenization is coming and more and more this new era of capital markets is coming is infrastructure financing. It’s a private debt, it’s private credit. We are seeing now treasury products, the money kind of instrument, right?

If you see tethers with closer to 200 billion AUM, where it grew, I don’t think the full volume came from the crypto, but also from the real industry, real effects trades, real commodities trade and those kind of markets where people really required in emerging markets and the market which is not in the US, access to dollar. And stockholders is kind of in our journey for last 7-8 years, we kind of moved away from SME financing.

but much more in infrastructure financing because also after COVID, people’s disposable income decreased and is decreasing more and more. So people are looking for high yield on an immediate basis rather than a 10x multiple like a huge moonshot project that they can invest. So we started looking for projects where people can get within a short duration, a good amount of return and the structure as normal private credit products.

But we also try to be very innovative in finding, know, if you want to get a tokenized products, and this is question is why I want a tokenized format and I do not go to my wealth manager to buy that, right? And we started looking which projects can come in and there is very interesting, I will tell you a story because that’s how one of our biggest project on the platform came in, that is a Blockstream Mining Node is. What is Blockstream Mining Node is effectively an energy and Bitcoin play. And as we know, Bitcoin and energy goes hand in hand.

In my previous life as a lawyer, I used to help energy companies to finance themselves with a power purchase agreement. So power purchase agreement in a simple way is if you have an energy infrastructure and you’re building something, you get a tariff from the government that, at this price, I will buy it for you for next amount of months or next amount of years. That is your expected revenue. You can take that documentation and go to a bank and use it as a collateral to borrow money because now you have receivables effectively.

In Bitcoin mining, this concept didn’t exist for a long time. 2018 I’m talking about people who are borrowing money against the ASICs, which I always thought is a very crazy idea because ASIC is a depreciating asset and we saw all these issues that happened, you know, after the FTX crash and everything in the market. A lot of things started collapsing. We figured out kind of way, okay, why not we connect these two worlds from the energy infrastructure is where the energy infrastructure can finance against the power purchase agreement. Why not?

Bitcoin miner can finance against the hash rate. And we started working with Blockstream very closely. That time Samsung was there. Samsung ⁓ was, I would say, one of the key mind behind this. And Adam and Samsung, they came up with this very interesting idea is why not issue a hash rate back securities from Blockstream mining infrastructure and you tokenize it because they had a lot of family offices that were coming and saying, hey, you know, I want to mine. I want you to be my hosting provider.

But I don’t understand all these details of energy uptime, which ASICs I have to plug in, which pool to be connected. I trust you that you have the technical capacity. Here is the money. Give me a financial instrument with ISIN number, which my tax advisor will understand. And here is 500k. Here is 200k. Here is 200k. And they couldn’t take it because they were doing hosting for larger players, but not for the family offices.

And then Stockor and Blockstream team came together and we brought this concept of Blockstream mining node which raised 40 million in 2021. Effectively what it is, BMN equals to that point of time 2 petahash and ⁓ investors get 2 petahash per day for 1 BMN node and 1 BMN node was priced as 200,000 USD. It was quite high because it was targeting those family office segment. And 1 BMN was giving you 2 petahash per day for 365 days.

multiplied by three years, it’s about a three-year product. And whatever Bitcoin is mined, you get as an investor. So it was effectively giving an opportunity for normal family offices to invest into Bitcoin mining without the hassle of managing infrastructure. It was different than what that point of time, the cloud mining and all these things were there because the facilities are already live. So from the time you close the investment round, the next day the mining starts, you don’t have to wait for six, seven months. BMN started, raised 40 million in 2024.

Sorry, 2021, we paid out in 2024, that is the maturity, over 80 million in Bitcoin. This product outperformed Bitcoin by 32 % in a three-year period. And at dollar basis, it became 104 % in a three-year period. It was the biggest payout in the history of the real-world assets or tokenization space. I think till date is one of the biggest payout. But that’s if… and the entire product was issued on liquid.

And when in subscription you could have invested with LBTC. But what with the interesting part when the payout happened, you as an investor holding, let’s say the liquid BMP.

Stephan Livera (22:00)
Good

asset, the BMN, the token for that, yeah.

Arnab Naskar (22:03)
swapped that with the liquid BTC and was all done atomically. You didn’t and we did it so we can verify that you hold the wallets because you sign the transaction to send the LBTC and in that wallet effect sorry you send the transaction to the BMN and in that wallet we send the LBTC and this made the processes and we process 80 million amongst I think closer to 100 plus people it’s a massive operation but we did it seamlessly because it is on chain.

Stephan Livera (22:33)
Yeah, and so because you were able to just do the payouts in liquid and so then that investor can invest liquid BTC in and take LBTC out at the end of the three years or whatever. Even if they were trading, they can trade it in LBTC.

Arnab Naskar (22:46)
A lot of people traded and the thing is that trading happened more on a decentralized exchange than on centralized exchange.

Stephan Livera (22:52)
Right, so do think that was a friction thing? Like it’s just less friction and therefore people felt easier to, felt like it was easier to trade it around. Whereas maybe if it was on a centralized platform, maybe not everything has like a slick interface with a phone, like with an app and stuff like that. So do you think that was it or why do you think it was? I think they wanted to play the market there.

Arnab Naskar (23:09)
I

think they wanted to play the market but on the other side when they were using decks they didn’t have to change the wallet infrastructure because it is in their own. So that kind of helped them quite a lot. But that’s a very interesting that people are open because in traditional finance you don’t have a decentralized exchange. The concept doesn’t exist.

Stephan Livera (23:17)
was all kind of in a liquid wallet, let’s Exactly.

Yeah, because I mean, most people just think of it as like, ⁓ they’ve got their brokerage app, they just log in and do their trades on that. And that’s it.

Arnab Naskar (23:35)
Now imagine this thing, this is very interesting, I tried to move some securities from one brokerage to another last year, it sometimes takes more than two months.

Stephan Livera (23:42)
really, you gotta fill out forms and you have to wait and you have to do all the stuff.

Arnab Naskar (23:45)
Now if it’s a liquid securities or any kind of tokenized securities in a blockchain wallet, move from one wallet to another, it takes maximum few minutes.

Stephan Livera (23:52)
Right, yeah, so there’s kind of this ease of trading around and transferring things around when it’s like in an on-chain world. So maybe that comes back to this kind of this interoperability benefit, let’s say. So even if it’s not as theoretically perfect as having like just one centralized database where everything is, because that’s been the critique is, ⁓ if you’re trusting these issuers anyway, just have a centralized database. Like that’s been probably one of the main critique angles. But I guess what you’re getting at is like,

is sort of a bit of a more subtle point around interoperability and maybe this environment in which people can trade around more easily, like whether it’s LBTC or liquid tether and the assets themselves of the equity or debt that’s being tokenized.

Arnab Naskar (24:35)
I see it in different way. I see it in the ownership way, right? What Bitcoin brought effectively with the concept of ownership, not your keys, not your coins, right? ⁓ You are today in Dubai, you have the Bitcoin, you move tomorrow to Hong Kong, you can just take the Bitcoin with you. You don’t have to ask the permission for Dubai bank to transfer it to your bank in Hong Kong. This concept…

We started losing now in money, the bank account as you know, the fiat, how it is going. Even if you try to move thousand dollars, soon they will ask for KYC in Europe and they will ask, know, why do you get a thousand dollars? But ⁓ this concept is also problematic in a securities world because there is so much middleman that could create it over the years in the name of different regulatory requirements that we are coming into a systemic risk. If one falls apart, things can crash down. What effective tokenization is doing, as I say, is it gives ownership back to you.

you own in your own wallet, you have the ownership and you want to move, you want to trade, want to interface, you decide. But on the other side, you also reduce a lot of intermediaries between you and the issuer of the asset.

Stephan Livera (25:38)
Okay, so sort of like you’re creating in a sense some intermediaries, but you see it like you’re reducing the net intermediaries. Exactly. It’s kind of how I guess I would understand. Right, but the thing is, still the problem and you know, there’s still AML, there’s still KYC, there’s still like sanctions and these things. So a lot of that compliant stuff still exists though. So how do you sort of balance that or how do you like, because obviously you still have to do that.

Arnab Naskar (25:47)
Trust minimization.

Stephan Livera (26:04)
Can you explain how that works in the liquid context that like some of these users, let’s say they’re doing liquid BMN or CMSTR or these other things, they still have to do KYC, but once they’ve done that, then they can still trade things around. How does that work?

Arnab Naskar (26:17)
So if you are investing in any of the stock or issued assets, you need to create a stock or account, do the KYC, do the AML checks, do any professional qualifications, it depends on the product’s criteria, ⁓ provide the information like tax IDs and what are relevant for reporting purposes for the issuer and connect your liquid wallet.

Stephan Livera (26:38)
Okay, and this is like, this is your liquid address or you can get paid out there.

Arnab Naskar (26:41)
So we call the concept is called whitelisting is whitelist that blockchain address. Now we know that Mr. X owns this blockchain address as ownership is with Mr. X. This blockchain address is with Mr. X. Now when you’re subscribing to any of the Stoker securities, the securities will be issued to that wallet. You can have multiple wallets depends on how you manage your wallet infrastructure and everything. And when you’re using interfacing a DEX, what you need to do is if you are on a Stoker whitelist,

that after you do and there are number of investors around stock or whitelist. You go to a DEX wallet, you can trade with another whitelisted investors without any permission peer to peer.

Stephan Livera (27:20)
Gotcha, because once you’re whitelisted.

Arnab Naskar (27:22)
If you’re not whitelisted, transactions will fail. Right? What it helps also the issuer, issuer has KYCML obligations. So they need to know who are holding the securities at any given point of time. Now, as it’s whitelisted, immediately the trades are happening between the whitelisted investors from the stocker issuers dashboard. The issuer sees, okay, now Mr. X has sent to Mr. Y at that fraction of second when the tokens get transferred to that wallet.

If they try to transfer to some unwhitelisted wallet, their transaction will fail. So, effectively what is the DEX’s role is, DEX’s role effectively here is just a front-end interface and that relies on the whitelist of the stocker’s infrastructure. Now, the entire tokenization world effectively works like this way. There’s issuers managing the whitelist database and we as issuers provide the infrastructure to the issuers. So, we provide the token whitelisting infrastructure to the issuer and they manage that.

So, it’s compliant according to the rules and regulations. It gives the flexibility for the investors to keep the control of the ownership of the assets and still trade on their own terms or move to a different wallet and all these kind of things. But on the other side, issuers get the full visibility. Now tomorrow, if Stalker 1 needs to be replaced by the issuer, they can replace us with some other, I would say, white listing agent.

who supports Liquite or maybe they want to go to some other chain, they can go it if they want, right? So they have that flexibility and the ownership and control. Because effectively, the investors are connected to the issuer via a stalker, but it’s effectively the relationship between the issuer and the investor directly.

Stephan Livera (28:56)
Let’s talk a little bit about the size of these different markets and how big you think they can get. I think the other big one is for years people saw it like liquid was this ghost chain, Lowen’s using it, this kind of thing. Do you want to touch on that? Like the size of liquid and explain liquid assets compared with other asset platforms.

Arnab Naskar (29:15)
So I think the definitely I think liquid to quite some time to come to a little bit I would say a fraction and that’s also differently it’s the marketing budgets of you know the EVM chains definitely are much more higher than the Bitcoin chains because you don’t have a native shit coin that you can just print the money out of thin air and pay for it. But I think now the volume is closer to five billion which is growing and I see a lot of it’s a total volume TVL of the infrastructure. The total volume.

Stephan Livera (29:37)
See you

As in yeah, the sea

Arnab Naskar (29:45)
But one of the interesting angle I would say always see the metrics between how much the volume is coming effectively from retail audience or smaller use cases and how much institutional adoptions. We are seeing some very interesting development happening with Aqua as you mentioned, a lot of users are coming. Transactions are increasing because we also see the transactions per block is increasing and it’s a one minute block. So transactions are increasing. We have certain months where the transactions were quite like in double digits each minute. So that’s quite very interesting.

A lot of peg in peg out are happening. We’re also seeing people are using quite a lot Liquid for Bitcoin L2 transaction which is also very interesting because Lightning is definitely one of the main use case for that. But Lightning channel sometimes the UX wise you have to generate the invoice and all these kind of things and you have to be online. So there are a lot of factors that was restricting on Liquid you don’t have that it’s a bit seamless in certain way. And the acquired is doing a great job.

because they don’t explain the users, the complexities of liquid lighting and everything. They simply say it’s a Bitcoin L2 which is faster. Just go ahead, right? So there I see a lot of demand coming for stockers and as we are working in the tokenized security space as I mentioned is 1.8 billion. Last year we reached 1 billion mark and then 1.8 was very fast and some of our assets are very much exposed to the Bitcoin value.

Stephan Livera (31:02)
Of

course, if a Bitcoin run happens, then you’re going to be like 4 billion.

Arnab Naskar (31:06)
Exactly, so it’s growth. If it goes down, we also go down, but it’s kind of growing and we are seeing a lot of interest coming into the space. And Stalker’s one of the strengths is we tokenize securities, not just because of the sake of tokenization. I’m not super excited to tokenize real estate asset, right? Unless there’s an edge. So our focus is tokenizing at the moment and for a long time, I would say, is Bitcoin derivatives and Bitcoin structured products. And thesis is if Bitcoin is a two trillion plus asset class, you have few hundred billion of derivatives that you can tokenize. Why don’t we tokenize that?

and that’s the reason we tokenized Hashard Back Securities, that is the BMN. Now BMN itself is closer to 1.1 billion in size. We have another product that we launched, it’s a fixed income product called PKH, which takes the BMN as collateral and provides 20 % annualized yield. And there are some hedge funds that have subscribed to that kind of product because the high yield generated from mining infrastructure. We also have few funds as Aquarius Fund that provides Bitcoin back loans. Now there is a new fund called Goldstream. It connects gold

tokenized gold like Tether gold, yeah, and the Bitcoin angle. So the fund’s asset is in gold. It borrows dollars against the gold and gives the dollar as a loan against over collateralized Bitcoin. So effectively the fund is giving an exposure to the gold minded people like Peter Schiff kind of guys. Effectively they can, any gold buck can see, we believe the gold is going to grow up, but this fund is effectively giving a bit of alpha, a little bit yield on top of the gold yield.

exposing itself to the over collateralized Bitcoin backed loans. So that way we manage the risk. So this kind of products are coming on the platform and that’s the thing if you are a good exposure in Bitcoin and you understand a little bit and your philosophy and you believe in that economic angle which is where we are heading at the moment of this realistic we do not know where it’s heading but there is definitely some huge question mark in the global economy where it is heading. The demand of gold, demand of Bitcoin will increase.

And there may be some derivatives. So that’s what Stalker is primarily focusing. And definitely we’re quite keen into energy infrastructure because yeah, as civilization grows, consumption of energy will increase, not decrease. And we are seeing a massive, massive growth in energy infrastructure. And we are trying to also bring such projects on the platform and bring

Stephan Livera (33:19)
Especially now with all the AI, mean, there’s like massive, it’s like through the roof, the demand for energy from these AI hyperscalers. And even a bunch of the Bitcoin miners have pivoted into doing AI data center stuff. And some of that was, as I understand, because they were Bitcoin miners, they had already been going around getting cheap energy contracts. And then these AI companies were interested because they want cheap energy or just energy full stop. And so there’s that angle. ⁓ So with like liquid and stocker and doing these tokenized assets and things,

Do you see it as like most of your customers or the people who are buying these products, are they people who already have Bitcoin or are you seeing it as like it’s another way to bring in people who don’t already have Bitcoin and they want to get into this because they want to invest in some of these different projects and as part of that they have to get some Bitcoin and or LBTC, liquid Bitcoin.

Arnab Naskar (34:07)
So what we see is most of our users at the moment are very much deep into Bitcoin. They understand Bitcoin.

Stephan Livera (34:12)
already Bitcoin hodlers and they maybe they see it like I’ve already got this this pile of Bitcoin and they want to carve off some of that and put that into whether it’s tokenized equity or BMN or

Arnab Naskar (34:24)
I don’t

think that most people also, but they are also constantly buying BTC. What they are seeing is effectively is the cost to accumulate the BTC as what cost basis.

Exactly, exactly. The BMN, it output from Bitcoin. So for them, okay, I can buy the BTC on spot. But if you’re buying BTC on spot, you have to be very, very confident that’s the bottom you’re buying on that specific period or else you are overpaying.

Stephan Livera (34:48)
So they don’t fancy themselves as timing the market in Bitcoin. They fancy themselves as investing in Bitcoin Alpha generation, loosely.

Arnab Naskar (34:57)
So that’s kind of one audience, then you have the audience like hedge funds who generate, so who have some Bitcoin exposure and they want to have some high yield product from that infrastructure.

Stephan Livera (35:07)
Bitcoin

beta, sorry maybe I used the wrong word but yeah go on.

Arnab Naskar (35:10)
So like a derivatives exposure, this kind of guys are coming in. But also we are seeing some family of like we have also products which are not directly connected to Bitcoin but have some flavor of it like gold and BTC and everything. And they understand gold but they don’t want to get full exposure to BTC. So they can take this product which underneath gives you exposure of BTC without you actively taking the exposure in BTC. So this kind of products come in. One I’m very much interested and this is some conversation that we’re happening is

We need in Bitcoin layer to effectively money market kind of products like which is a cash or cash equivalent but can be used as a collateral and this is money market like products that are tokenized at the moment we are seeing other chains. I see there is a huge opportunity for those products to come on chain on the Bitcoin layer because it will be effectively kind of a similar form of stable coins.

Stephan Livera (35:59)
like I mean now the big one I think it’s gonna be really big is the whole stretch thing which is the STRC it’s the MSTR probably the biggest I think it’s you know Michael has called it there it could be their iPhone moment right they’re getting massive demand on this it seems to be having its moment now maybe there’s a space for some kind of tokenized form of that and we

Arnab Naskar (36:17)
We

are actually working on it because it’s right now 11 % they are providing and it’s perfect instrument and we are tokenizing I think in next few weeks it will be also live on the platform.

Stephan Livera (36:27)
there you go. then, then I presume then they would, you know, earn that, that fiat yield. And of course, depending on the tax situation, I think in the U S they have what’s it called? RSC return of capital. So then there’s like another tax benefit that like, if it’s 11 % actually after tax for an American investor, it might be even above that.

Arnab Naskar (36:46)
And

here is a very interesting what I see is this kind of fixed yield product or fixed income product. ⁓ Money market kind of it can be some large asset managers money market or SDRC. You can convert the yield to Bitcoin.

Stephan Livera (36:58)
Right, so you’re stacking the yield and then you flip it into LBG.

Arnab Naskar (37:01)
The

is in dollar. you see, I… So, base principle, some guys, as you mentioned, they’re conservative. They say, Bitcoin, I do not want to go into that risk at the moment, blah, blah, stuff. But I can put in the money market fund product where my base principle is constant, but yield is converted to BTC. And this then definitely require LBTC kind of products because then it’s a small accumulation, but it should not be super costly in transaction fees. So, that’s really makes sense. So, I see there is quite a lot of room to really…

connect the traditional finance with the Bitcoin with the tokenization angle.

Stephan Livera (37:33)
In terms of how users actually interface, as I’m understanding this, might be like they use a liquid-based wallet. So Blockstream app is one example, but there are others who support, think. then they have, there’s other, let’s say, platforms where they’re doing some of the swapping. So SideSwap is probably an example in the liquid world. ⁓ And as an example, if they want to keep the keys offline, that’s where they get their Blockstream Jade as an example. And they pair the Jade with the Blockstream app on their phone.

and they’re using that to manage some of their assets. Is that the normal way people are doing this? Or how do they interface? What does the interface look like for an end user or even for these, you know, corporate or larger, like just not end user, but like not, let’s say everyday pleb per se, but family office or small business or.

Arnab Naskar (38:22)
That’s very interesting, we are quite fortunate to have the users which are very sophisticated as I mentioned. So they are very comfortable using a combination of Blockstream, Green I still sometimes you know.

Stephan Livera (38:33)
⁓

The

Arnab Naskar (38:36)
the

block stream app and connection with the Jade so they connect that and they structures with some 2FA or something like that. Some are still using sites, Sitesop also has a wallet so there are also a lot of apps on the phones that’s also easier. I hope in this year there are some few other wallets that is coming. Definitely to see the market is looking for some browser wallet that’s very much similar to Metamask, the EVM ecosystem.

Stephan Livera (38:39)
the hardware device.

because that has all the security challenges too with browser security.

Arnab Naskar (39:05)
Exactly,

but the convenience question is always the paradox that you’re trying to solve, right? ⁓ We’re also seeing now growing demand from institutional regulated custodians coming into the liquid space. are some very large institutions looking into that space or providing custodian support to tokenize securities on liquid and tokenize assets on liquid that is still ongoing at the moment. But right now, most of our users, at least on Stalker, are storing it in a self-custodian way in the wallets that they’re controlling, like as you mentioned.

Stephan Livera (39:34)
And in a block stream app and this kind of thing.

Arnab Naskar (39:36)
insights

for the likes of those infrastructures.

Stephan Livera (39:38)
When it comes to participating or interfacing with a DEX, as an example, there may be standing orders, and they can take that order, this kind of thing. Can you explain a bit of that? I remember chatting with Adam a bit, and he was showing me some of these. Because he loves, as you know, I’m sure he loves trading some of these treasury company in liquid things. So can you explain a bit about what that looks like for the user in terms of seeing an order book and then saying, I want to take that order, or I want to make an order, or take an order?

Arnab Naskar (40:07)
So on Siteswap, like the infrastructure is similar to a normal trading platform. It will be a bid and offer and you choose where you want to participate. Do you want to buy or do you want to sell? It can be also, you put the offer of purchase or offer to sell and it can be also partial filled. So it doesn’t have to be fully filled. So you want to buy X amount of CMSTR, somebody selling, but then it’s partially filled. So you can also, it’s can be partially filled, can be full filled. So it goes definitely, a lot of things are getting improved over the time.

Its experience is similar to normal trading venue, effectively. It’s nothing different. The only difference is there is no login on Siteswap. To use a Siteswap, you have to connect to that whitelisted wallet that I mentioned, which is whitelisted on Stocker. And on that Siteswap, you get even the notification that, are you sure your wallet is whitelisted? If not, please register on Stocker.

Stephan Livera (40:53)
So in that context you could be using either the SideSwap app itself with its own inbuilt liquid wallet or you could be using let’s say Blockstream app with its liquid wallet but white listed and connecting to the SideSwap platform to do your trade. in this case you could either, is there like market order and limit order and this kind of thing as well? So you could be like…

Arnab Naskar (41:12)
If

you go for more sophistication, then Bitfinex Securities comes into the picture.

Stephan Livera (41:16)
Alright, and they have their own Bitfinex

Arnab Naskar (41:19)
Bitfinex is normal like they have there’s one of the biggest like the web interface more sophisticated they launched Bitfinex securities few years back the first asset that got listed was actually Blockstream mining node right one and the BMN2 is now listed on Bitfinex security so if you want to get more sophistication of the trading angle and also more liquidity you go to Bitfinex security

Stephan Livera (41:21)
Creating interface Standard Exchanging

So that’s where like, let’s say the big boys go and play there. And if you’re just kind of doing some smaller trades, you might be doing it on your phone app or kind of connected stuff.

Arnab Naskar (41:46)
And I think the Bitfinex securities is also very interesting piece of the puzzle of tokenization because that’s the first large exchange who went in the direction of kind of the angle is every exchange will be a tokenized securities exchange or securities exchange to an extent and they embraced it and now they have some very interesting assets but I think what they build the infrastructure and the infrastructure is built on the existing Bitfinex infrastructure which is

one of the most stable and sophisticated one. And I see a lot of demand is also coming there. So we are bringing quite some assets now over there. So I see the future of this market will be a dance between the Dex platform and the centralized exchange and there will be different audiences targeting this tool.

Stephan Livera (42:24)
And it’s sort of like you can have your wallet and play in the different I mean you could be on both right you have your block stream app or your side swap app but also connect with Bitfinex and do stuff or put some stuff there and be trading around on there and We’ll just see a competition naturally evolve over time of like centralized platforms as you said and then some of these decks is and maybe with Simplicity, there’ll be like other more fancier Custodial forms of doing this kind of trading but it’s like programmatically done where people can put in like orders

Arnab Naskar (42:45)
This is the next video.

Stephan Livera (42:53)
that can be like a standing order or various things that they could set up with simplicity.

Arnab Naskar (42:57)
I said simplicity, I’m coming in in a minute. But before I go to the Bitfinex securities, I think one of the use case where I see the market can massively grow is let’s say you are having 50 million worth of MicroStrategy shares in tokenized format, right? You can go to Bitfinex and theoretically, definitely Bitfinex has to support that and agree to support that. But in a theoretical world where I believe in that can be very interesting is you can actually borrow against your MicroStrategy shares on Bitfinex securities and then trade BTC or something else, right?

A lot of trading liquidity providers, trading proprietary trading firms, hedge funds, they would love such a trade.

Stephan Livera (43:33)
That could be interesting on both sides of that trade, right? Because you could be on the borrower side or the lending side of that house. And you might be like, let’s say you’re a big family office or some fund and you’ve got fiat and you want to get yield. Exactly. Then we’re kind of playing and to some of this is like maybe a little bit into like the Debitify world where they’ve got like similar kind of they’re doing like a platform where borrowers and lenders can meet up and do liquid based trades of like tether for Bitcoin and borrowing. Similar kind of thing, right? Exactly.

Arnab Naskar (44:00)
And there is I think there’s role is the micro strategy kind of shares even STRC can be a very interesting product. People can do arbitrage between if you’re getting

Stephan Livera (44:08)
Right,

because if stretch is paying 11 % and they can get loans somewhere else at like lower than that, you’re going to see people who going to make that play of like, oh, they can borrow 6 % and get stretchy at 11%.

Arnab Naskar (44:17)
Exactly,

there are a lot of things that can happen. I see there is a good room to bring all these things together and that will massively explode. Now coming to simplicity, you have in the Ethereum the idea of vaults right now, right? There are different vaults, means this kind of liquidity pools where liquidity providers participate and put liquidity and if you borrow from that, the yield gets generated and distributed to the liquidity providers. This kind of vaults concept in the smart contract basis did not exist in Bitcoin world. But with simplicity, you can actually build

a complete decentralized borrowing lending infrastructure and you can bring and the best part is in the Bitcoin you have the pristine collateral that is a Bitcoin with that you can create number of interesting stuffs and I’m quite excited you know what gets built using simplicity in that

Stephan Livera (44:58)
Yeah, because I think this is another thing for a long time as you were touching on before a lot of even like even in like shit coin world They’re dealing with a lot It’s like borrowing against this to borrow against that but underlying some of that may be like a wrapped form of Bitcoin So WBTC is probably a big example from bit go and I believe Justin Sun is like, know He’s the kind of the main players of that But I guess instead of having WBTC or some wrapped or CB BTC, which is the coinbase base form of wrapped Bitcoin

It could be like LBTC, which is the liquid, a federated. So, okay, of course, it’s not the same thing as main chain Bitcoin that you hold in your multi-sig or whatever, but it’s custodied by that federation and you’re trading liquid Bitcoin against these other assets, it’s Blockstream Mining Node or treasury companies or tokenized equity and debt or energy investments and these other aspects of it. it is kind of fascinating to see that this broader world is sort of being built up.

There’s this competition though of like, you’ve got the Bitcoin ecosystem in space and then you’ve got like altcoins and TradFi world and they’re kind of all in some ways meshing together or in some ways competing against each other. ⁓ And so I guess where do you think it all goes like with things like even New York Stock Exchange? Like we mentioned this earlier, they’re doing a tokenization platform now and they’re going to have like this, they’re kind of normie nine to five or whatever thing and they’re going to have a 24 seven tokenization platform.

Where does it all kind of shake out in like a Bitcoin?

Arnab Naskar (46:29)
I tokenization is happening, right? This is no question right now. think institutions are understanding and it’s a very interesting angle if you see this way. In last couple of years, the banking sector required a lot of regulatory capital and that is creating a lot of problem for a lot of banks and much more smaller banks and mid-sized banks. And think like this in traditional market, the settlement doesn’t happen instantly.

Stephan Livera (46:53)
Right, T plus 3 or T plus 2 or whatever.

Arnab Naskar (46:56)
For those days, the liquidity is a big problem. You need to have some kind of reserve capital or regulatory capital to support that delay.

Stephan Livera (47:06)
Like parcel, capital requirements, kind of things.

Arnab Naskar (47:09)
Now, you because of tokenization, what is very interesting is we can do the transaction instantly. A lot of people says, okay, you are creating a lot of problems because a lot of infrastructures are relying on that T plus, T plus 2. Yeah, it’s correct to some extent, but I think it’s protectionism principle. You are not getting any officials, you’re trying to protect your existing players, which are not relevant. But see this way, if you have instant settlement, you’re coming to the phase where banks may not be required to keep those regulatory capital. That means those

assets can go to the market and that’s the reason I think player like NASDAQ DTCC and all these guys and BlackRock effectively they all pushing to that angle is if the settlement is instant you don’t require those regulatory capitals and that can effectively go to the market and generate more yield and can more liquidity right. So I see tokenization is not just an efficiency of an infrastructure but effectively a drastic systemic shift.

Stephan Livera (48:02)
In regulatory capital required, you think?

Arnab Naskar (48:06)
It’s a fundamental transition of the infrastructure where it’s going, where we are bringing a drastic amount of massive change in not only efficiency but also how we see the risk management process of the whole infrastructure.

Stephan Livera (48:17)
guess summing up a few things that we’ve spoken about, earlier days of tokenization, guess part of the message was, quote unquote, democratize the access and let anyone be able to issue. And I guess people would sort of argue, ⁓ it’s unjust that only so-called accredited investors can do this. Why can’t anyone do this? Whereas now I think what you’re saying is maybe that was an earlier narrative. And maybe to some extent that’s still true. But now maybe the focus is a little bit more on, let’s say, high net worth, family office.

funds and people like that who are interested in Bitcoin denominated projects that can get them some Bitcoin yield.

Arnab Naskar (48:55)
That’s one, that’s a very narrow approach. What I would say is bigger approach is there is a systemic change coming in financial markets, capital markets. Stablecoin will be one of the leading player and leading this and this is what with USAT, I personally believe there will be massive growth in the things and we are seeing the stablecoins is actually creating a huge positive impact in every angle. Now, if you have now money on chain, you will definitely require the securities on chain to be the capital markets. Now, this is a systemic shift. This is not about just a Bitcoin as ⁓ asset class.

But how, and this is what I think the Bitcoin as you mentioned, why Bitcoin then, right? Why can’t you not do it some public, other public infrastructure? The Bitcoin as a tech will be used because that’s if the set store of value that is ⁓ all the ExaHash that is supporting that infrastructure, that infrastructure will be required to support the global capital markets infrastructure. You don’t want it to be supported by a few guys in few data centers, right? You want the global infrastructure supporting that.

Stephan Livera (49:34)
Exactly.

Arnab Naskar (49:54)
and that’s what Bitcoin is providing, the settlement layer. So effectively what we are trying to do in the stock market is effectively using the Bitcoin infrastructure and the security of the infrastructure, building a new capital markets that not only smaller companies can access, but also asset managers, large institutions can also come in over the time. So it’s creating an infrastructure for the new capital market which is not centralized and controlled by few players.

Stephan Livera (50:16)
I see, yeah. But it’s kind of a nuanced vision as you said because there’s still like KYC whitelisting, there’s still some of these elements of it and there’s still certain compliance elements of it where let’s say the state or a particular government or regulator may say, hey, this guy, we don’t like this guy, cut him off or like there’s still elements of that. But to be fair, that already exists even in the centralized world too. You can be a sanctioned individual and not allowed to hold certain whatever or certain companies maybe blocked from providing service to.

Arnab Naskar (50:43)
And

better shares, better bonds also went away. So it’s happened. But what is kind of what I see is UAE maybe using the same capital market infrastructure as in US or maybe the same in Venezuela or something like that. So this accessibility of infrastructure is not restricted because you as a country cannot pay that money, but it is you just require some technical infrastructure to plug it in. And this is what I see. So I’m seeing a systemic shift and systemic visibility and systemic infrastructure change because of tokenization rather than few efficiency gains.

This is where I am kind of more and getting.

Stephan Livera (51:16)
In

practice, you see that translating as more people can invest or more people have you have more opportunity, you have a broader universe of investment opportunities, or is it that more people can invest or all of the above?

Arnab Naskar (51:27)
I would say the first is definitely your investment opportunity in this, let’s say for example in this region as we are in Dubai or UAE effectively. It’s very hard for people in Europe or people in US or people in Latin America or something to identify and invest, right? Now, because of stable coins, they can move the money instantly. Now, if it’s tokenized, they can also access the data reporting and everything in real time.

Stephan Livera (51:50)
can access equity or debt investments in that particular country that they otherwise it would be a bit like they would need their local stockbroking app to support exactly UAE security and the custom

Arnab Naskar (52:00)
in that stockbroking app and all these kind of things. Now this became kind of I would say more accessible. Definitely the question is accessible at what price point that’s democratization angle comes in. That definitely depends but people need to create wealth. People need to get the opportunity to create wealth, right? And tokenization I think will slowly slowly bring that opportunity and your wallet you will see the Bitcoin, you will see the tokenized gold, you will see the tokenized shares and you move the country, you take it, you don’t take a permission from somebody to you know to close your account or open your account.

And that’s what actually it’s bringing is this ownership concept back to your financial assets.

Stephan Livera (52:33)
So it’s like you can have on-chain ownership of some of these different assets around the world with certain caveats as you said KYC and whitelisting and yeah Even some of the regulators in some countries may not be okay with that They may say ⁓ we don’t want any investor from XYZ country exactly So there’s still going to be certain levels of whitelisting involved Yeah, but the broad net net even even with that you’re saying in on net there will be more investment opportunities and you can maybe people from ⁓

other countries can access opportunities that they could not have otherwise. Or maybe they could have done it, but it wasn’t practical.

Arnab Naskar (53:08)
You require number of middlemen to go and know that. Right. Now you don’t require because if I’m transferring from Latin America to US investment to the USD, how many banks, steps and and with the stable coins is very accessible. I can see the assets, even the reporting as I’m holding the token, I transfer the token, the issue I can see now you are the owner of the token. They send the reporting to you, not to me. These kinds of things, if I do in traditional way, the back office cost will go massively.

Stephan Livera (53:38)
I see. Yeah, so it’s kind of a more expansive vision. Yeah, it’s interesting because I think in earlier years I’d sort of shunned this kind of tokenization because I saw it as like, oh, it’s just kind of a bunch of shit coin people grifting and but now I sort of see of course I’m still a maxi. I still believe, you know, Bitcoin is going to be the money of the world. But in that world, there’ll still be Bitcoin denominated securities and other investments and equity. And it’ll make sense for people who want to invest in things like that. And of course, it’s not going to happen on main chain, but it might happen on liquid as a side chain of Bitcoin.

And so I think I’m sort of coming around a little bit on that aspect of it and I think The other big thing is in all of quote-unquote crypto really it’s Bitcoin and stable coins, right? I think basically everything else in crypto is a shit coin But like stable coins we can’t deny that like there’s hot like 400 500 million users of tether like around the world You just can’t deny that there’s a clear product market fit there. So I think it’s sort of understanding that aspect of it

⁓ Of course, with that long-term view of everyone’s going towards Bitcoin and Bitcoin denominated things. That’s kind of the long game, isn’t it?

Arnab Naskar (54:45)
I think I totally agree. I there was one interesting session. It’s long time back between Paolo and Giacomo. I think back in the days when Tetherford was a big thing, right? And I still remember, I think Giacomo was mentioning, I Paolo also mentioned stablecoin can actually expose a lot of people to the idea of private keys, pair and blockchain assets, crypto assets. But once they are there, then it’s easier for lot of people to understand Bitcoin and store Bitcoin, right?

And the same thing I see tokenized securities, that if you are into a stable coin already, for you it’s the next is definitely you should go into Bitcoin. After that definitely you should go to tokenized securities, private debt like STRC or kind of an energy infrastructure of your own country that is providing, you know, good yield on a dollar basis or the local currency basis. And these infrastructures you couldn’t have done without a private bank in the previous era. Now you can actually do it in a much more tokenized format even with 10k or 15k or something. But that’s opening up accessibility.

And that I’m quite excited about. And the other thing is that like exchanges like Bitfinex Securities, right? Which are some of the largest users of digital assets and crypto assets. Now, they will not trade all the time. So how many things they can trade? Bitcoin, Ether and few other assets and the rest are all volatile crypto speculative coins. So they are looking for other assets like maybe tokenized STRC, tokenized MicroStrategy, maybe energy infrastructure, maybe fixed income. And then they can move between these two infrastructure, the crypto digital assets exchange infrastructure and securities tokenized infrastructure.

to borrow against it, do different stuffs and different kind of investment strategies and everything that can get developed. I think that will change quite a lot of the market how we see the digital asset space. It’s a new era of capital markets and Wall Street I see.

Stephan Livera (56:23)
Excellent, well think that’s a great spot to finish up. So just let everyone know where they can find you online.

Arnab Naskar (56:28)
You can find me over Twitter, can find me over LinkedIn, my email id is arnab, a-r-n-a-b at stocker.io. Please feel free to drop an email and yeah, thanks for inviting me Stephan, it’s a pleasure.

Stephan Livera (56:40)
Thank you.