Chris Perkins, Franklin Templeton | From Iraq to Wall Street to Crypto

Thanks, Chris.

Yeah, truly exciting.

times and it feels to me with that um response that perhaps the the mission is bigger for you and more exciting than you know being hell-bent on it all being um your own platform that you've created of course you've created many uh and so franklin certainly make uh quite a lot of sense as you know who's going to make a huge impact um you know i believe that um markets innovate, and there can therefore be a feeling of, okay, the institutions are in now, and this is all going to look pretty samey.

And let's suggest that some of the individuals who've enjoyed crypto and digital assets being its own small whilst fanatical, philosophical, building out entrepreneurial vibe.

are probably not as excited about it becoming traditional and corporate whilst, you know, having spoke to Sandy and certainly, you know, we had a chat before in prep.

You're incredibly entrepreneurial.

You're incredibly optimistic.

You're thinking, how are all these user cases going to be great for the end customer? Therefore, the tension is how do you retain that if you believe that? How do you make sure that the optimism stays now that this is in a large corporation structure, now that the main customers that you're serving are institutes? How are you going to navigate that? And I suppose to ask a specific question, what is going to get left behind if we do take that approach, if anything?

I think you have to start with your first principles and your vision.

And as I mentioned, I see the robustness of Franklin as being able to accelerate that mission.

What can this technology do? The first thing that it does is it provides a lot more access to financial services, a lot more democratization of access to financial services.

It allows people anywhere in the world to access technologies.

It also unlocks new fiduciary capabilities.

What do I mean? This technology, tokenization, allows for 24-7 markets.

And guess what? Markets don't sleep.

People do.

And prior to that, when...

When the Trump administration invades Venezuela on a Friday night, I couldn't risk manage my position.

When Epic Fury starts off on a Saturday night, I couldn't risk manage my position.

With tokenization coming to the forefront and the opportunity is immense, the equity markets are $127 trillion in market cap.

Okay.

those markets are going to eventually tokenize.

It's going to be slower than all at once.

And I almost look at it as the old bond futures.

If you know your history, bond futures were traded by life, open outcry in the pits, and it was very manual.