It's inevitable that the largest banks in the world, some you've mentioned in your question, will be offering crypto services this year.
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and USBC. They will be supporting Ripples's upcoming launch of r l USD. So this is a really great rewards program and if you'd like to learn more, please visit the link in the description. Welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Edward, and joining me today is David Mercer, who's the CEO of l Max Group. David, great to have you on.
Hey, Tony, good to be with you today, David.
I'm excited to speak with you. I followed el Max over the years and your journey towards digital assets of course, and David, you have a plethor of experience in the markets, so I have a lot of questions for you and where you see things going. But before we get to all of that, tell us about yourself. Where did you grow up? How did you get into finance?
Wow, that's a long story. So I was born and bred in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Believe it or not, I left Darmerald Doll what I twelve years of age and arrived in London. So I guess my formative years were in London. I've been in London ever since. And then the sort of journey into capital markets went via accounting firms such as EY. I spent a decade at in investment banking at Credit Sueee, moved through various brokerages and
then arrived at Elma's Group in twenty eleven. Initially I was sort of hired gun at Elma's Group and then there's a famous advert and I did the advert, which is we bought the company in twenty thirteen, so twelve years ago. And yeah, we've just carried on from there. But I guess my whole working career has been in capital markets, particularly fixed income emerging markets, where I learned.
I guess I learned everything everything that we do today, and I'm probably doing exactly what I should be doing after thirty years in the market. So that's how we're, however, arrived here today, Tony.
And you know what you're experiencing capital markets? What was your first encounter with bitcoin and what was that moment like for you? What was your AHM moment when it clicked for you that this was different? Do you know what?
Great question, but I'm not sure we've had an a hard moment for me. Perhaps we launched el MIC's Digital twenty eighteen. In we started thinking about it in twenty seventeen. In two thousand and thirteen, it was presented to us first at what we call a brown bag lunch, and we didn't do anything with it, and in fact, we launched another asset backed digital coin first in twenty and fourteen.
We didn't get any traction. None of our institutional clients wanted to trade it, so we sort of dismissed it and I watched bitcoin from Afar. Then two thousand and seventeen, a whole bunch of our proprietary training firms, so you know, all the biggest banks in the world trade with us, all the largest prop training firms trade with us, and a few of them started saying, hey, we need some institutional, great infrastructure to transact this new digital asset. Can you
do it, David? So we went and went and had a look, and we went from field to fork, or from origin of idea to live launch within six months. So I guess, no eureka. There was just the case of this is another market for us. You know, in Elma's group we list we run six exchanges. El Max Digital was the latest at the time, that was fifth at the time. The small eureka for us was that it was the fastest growing exchange I ever built. We
got to break even within six months. I mean other exchanges typically take three years four years to get to break even as a company. I guess that took us four years, so digital took six months. So there's a little bit of a eureka moment there. I think it's a constant, constant small gains you see in the digital
asset world or the crypto world at the moment. So perhaps for me, the most recent one was just two months ago in Singapore, you know, paying for a meal and a bunch of drinks with a meta based credit card right which only had ethereum on it. So paying paying a bill in a bill that came and singing dollars with ethereum via a crypto back credit card. That was sort of the thing that made me go, this
is really real. And the you know, the the hospitality, the bar, the restaurant, they were unaware of what I had on this credit card. For them, it was just a master card. So that was probably the most recent one which has been close to eureka that made me think that digital assets, crypto assets can pervade everything we do through all our walks of life.
And what are your thoughts on how this asset class has matured because it started with Bitcoin and then came other blockchains like Etheroreum and so on and so forth with a proof of steak and smart contracts. And now we're seeing the move towards tokenization, putting traditional assets like stocks and other commodities on the blockchain, which will allow twenty four to seven trading, fractionalization, more global markets, and
things like that. What are your thoughts in the direction things are heading to?
The direction is inevitable, so there is there will be a convergence of traditional assets and digital assets or crypto in the decades ahead. I think the evolution to date has been slow. As an industry. We've got to challenge ourselves, right, we need to do better. Within Almax group, I stradd all the two. So if you like, I've been trying to drive this convergence, I've been ready for this convergence
for seven years, since twenty eighteen. I mean still to this day, ninety percent of my volume are in trad fi assets, so mostly we trade currencies or fiat currencies. So you know, last week with all the tariffs going on, or certainly through the month of April, you know, we would trade fifty billion dollars a day. Now, only ten percent of that, not even ten percent of those given days would be crypto assets. So but my strong, long held view is that by the end of this decade,
ten percent of traditional assets will be tokenized. Now, what does that mean. It means you're talking about a market the size of twenty twenty five trillion dollars, so slightly bigger than the market cap of gold today. But then perspective, the total value of crypto today is just short three trillion.
So I fully expect that to happen. And once that happens, there's absolutely no reason, nothing that can stop this going all the way so that eighty percent of the world's assets are tokenized by the end of the next decade. I mean, it's just inevitable because of the reduction and friction which exists today, and that's what's going to happen with the l like of tokenization, with fractionalization, with the fungibility of collateral, the ability to trade twenty four hours
a day, seven days a week. It's just inevitable. You know, everything we've done, everything we do in markets at the moment, and traditional markets is quite clunky, Don't get me wrong. I've been in there for over thirty years, and they're way less clunky than there were when I started in the nineties. You know, all we've ever done over the last thirty years is increased market access. Blockchain tokenization are the next steps on that path to greater democratization of
the market and more inclusive market access. And I think that tokenization and digital money, digital collateral will just accelerate what we do day to day and, if you like, amplify all of the excellence we have in capital markets today.
So do you see along the lines what you mentioned, the opening up a more liquidity, the financialization of certain assets that couldn't be financialized before. And then we DeFi people being able to transact with each other globally like they never have before. So if I want someone's in Germany and they want to borrow some I don't know, the crypto assets or digital assets I can facilitate that they don't necessarily have to go to a bank.
It's just going to be seamless.
I mean, look, I don't know whether I'm not gonna sit here today and say that we are going to disintermediate the banks. Right the biggest provider of credit in the world today are banks right, Everyone who owns a house needs some leverage, So it is possible a bit like crowdfunding, it is possible you could have that crowd staking crowd leverage. It's quite expensive today when ultimately the you know, the best lenders, well, our governments, but after
that our banks who will analyze credit rating. So I still think you need that leverage in the system. But certainly breaking down the friction in markets, being able to easily move from one asset to the other, or to earn an income, to earn interest on any asset that becomes enabled by blockchain and by tokenization, so you know, I think at the moment, the problem is we have
to pre position our assets days in advance. I mean, to be clear, I mean, if you want to buy you know, move into a new asset class and buy a new etf you have to preposition your assets. It's going to take you onboarding plus positioning your collateral. It's going to take you five to seven days. The reality is when we have fungible collateral, when we have digital collateral, when we have.
A market where.
Institutions will accept digital dollars ethereum bitcoin, which can where ownership can be transferred, you know, at the sort of not instantaneously as everyone says, but within a matter of seconds and within a matter of minutes. Then suddenly you're going to see much more fluidity in the markets. And that's all we've all been looking for. And what happens with that, by the way, is that all markets will benefit.
So you know, I'm in a foreign exchange market that trades seven trillion dollars a day that's doubled in the last decade. Guess what it's going to double again in the next decade. It just might be that a lot of the underlying will be digitized, so it'll be digital Euro's, digital dollars, digital yen and the like. So absolutely, what we're doing together is breaking down the friction that exists in markets. But I just want to say one thing to you know, all the crypto evangelists out there, we
need to do a better job. It's still really small, right, Gold by market cap has outstripped crypto over the last five years in terms of the market capitalization, right, so gold that gold today is over twenty trillion dollars, Crypto is still three. So you know, we need to do a better job are showing the use cases for crypto,
for digital assets and for tokenization. But another butt But what I want to say at the end of this is that we are huge believers at our MAX group that tokenization is inevitable and is the future of capital markets and you will see a fusion of the two by the end of this decade.
And David, do you believe that part of the uh you utility and like you mentioned, the use cases that have to be put out there, we have to do a better job. Was the lack of clarity from the governments around regulations because certain institutions may not have wanted to touch this because they're risk averse. We don't know if this is going to get clarity. We don't know
if this is going to get banned. But now that things are opening up here in the United States where'rem at Congress's work in legislation, we have a more favorable environment. In the EU you have the MICA regulations and the UK believe they've passed some regulations. Things are starting to get clearer now. Once we have those things set in stone, it may kick off adoption like we've never seen before.
It needs to simple as that Tony. It absolutely needs to. It was somewhat of an excuse, but the lack of a framework never helps the growth of an asset class.
Right.
By the way, fighting the existing regulator is never a good There's never a good place to start either. But
I think certainly the US was anti crypto. But let's look at the if you look at the history of bitcoin, you know, going back to Silk Road, you look at some of the bad actors and some of the you know, the convicted felons we have we've had within crypto that hasn't helped, right, you know, you're trying to convince you know, you're trying to convince this The way I look at it is, I'm trying to convince two hundred and twenty trillion dollars of trade fire assets to move to this
new world of digitization, of tokenization and digital assets.
Right.
Having a couple of get rich quick bad actors, you know, being the spokespeople for this new asset class wasn't a great thing. I think the new administration in the United States should help. But then more importantly, after that, the industry needs to create infrastructure and product that the if you like, the centers of capital want to invest in, right, So we're going to talk, no doubt're gonna ask me
about ETFs and things like that. But you must remember something, right, The fastest growing ETF of all time is the bigcoing ETF. It's about forty billion dollars. That's tiny, right, It's really big in ETF land. But I look at the two hundred and twenty trillion dollars traded FY assets. Again, I look at the three trillion dollars of crypto, and I'm saying, well, okay, well, how important is forty one? So we've got to keep creating products that are accessible, that people want to trade.
And if you like, back to one of your earlier questions, we have to create those use cases. Let's get the frameworks established. They're not established in the United States, just they will come. I'm sure of that. We have a better structure or a better think tank in twenty twenty five than we had in twenty twenty two, twenty three, twenty four.
Good.
I think the same is true in the EU. I think there are some forward thinking regulators in Asia, like the MS, likewise in the Middle East. So I think those global frameworks being established will help the asset class to grow, and then as an industry, we have to demonstrate that we can act within those guidelines, right and let the industry thrive, because you know, one of the big things, there's three things regulators have to do. One
protect consumers. To be clear, within crypto, we did not protect consumers, right, look at those bad actors, look at the things that happen in twenty two and three. We did not protect consumers. So we need that regulation. The second bit is they have to create a wholesale framework. And the third thing is they have to harness innovation. Okay, So I think what we did a little bit in crypto is innovate, innovate, innovate without protecting or creating the framework.
I think now we have a structure that will allow it to happen, and then we must innovate. We must innovate, and we must demonstrate the convergence of tradi fi, DeFi, crypto digital assets and show the benefits of the digitization of markets going forward. So I think, to answer your question, in short, we have a better opportunity now than we've ever had.
And David, what do you think about this? I kind of see the crypto startups as almost being their kids. To your point, they weren't. They didn't have their i's dotted and their t's crossed for everything, FTX com mingling their funds and you know all that nonsense, right, But the Wall Street firm, the banks that you work with and things like that are here. They have the knowledge, they have the infrastructure, they have the pedigree to come set up the et apps and do the proper custody
and all these things. They're going to be the ones to kind of lead the charge in creating these financial products and things like that.
You can be careful soon, we have to be careful, but not disenfranchising either group. And I think both groups need to put the egos in a draw to a certain extent and take the best bits from both sides of it. I think an al Max group I were fortunate because we're working trad FI. We operate with all the world's biggest banks, prop trading firms, all the biggest asset manager in the world, and hundreds of brokers.
And then we work with a lot of crypto native firms.
So I think it's not a case of hear I do hear some institutions talking about pushing as you just said that using that fraight, pushing the kids out.
I don't think that's true. Right. Derivatives were built, you know.
Back in the nineties when I started, Derivatives were built by the latest rock stars, the latest engineers, the latest scientists. I think that's true in crypto today. So you know, I look at people who are running the digital side of our business or some of the more forward thinking parts of our digital business here, and they're in their twenties. That's the demographic their computer engineers. And I think we have to let them have their way. They have to, We have to let them show us the way.
In many ways.
But there are things we can learn from tradifi that work. So let's use that plumbing for example. You said it, said it first there, Tony. Let's have separation of function, Let's have segregation of funds.
Right. I'm a little bit dismayed within.
The crypto industry even right now, when I see brokers pretending to be exchanges, when I see exchanges wanting to be custodians, and I don't know why they want that to be the case. Right, you have to have that separation of function and that segregation of funds it's for a reason. It protects consumers, it protects the market, and it also allows specialization in every part of the market. So let's take the best bits from.
From both of the markets.
Let's have that true fusion, and I think together we end up with a much better, more accessible capital market structure than we have today.
Yeah, well, put it tell us a bit about Elmac Digital's services that you provide to the banks and institutions that you work with.
So look, I'm going to take you back a step and say Elmac's group operates exchanges. We match buyers and sellers, simple as that, up to fifty billion dollars a day, right, and we cover the whole spectrum of customers from banks all the way to asset managers all the way to too brokers. So what happened in twent twenty eighteen was that a big part of that. Let me say, forty percent of my client base were training digital assets already,
and they were their proprietary training firms. Some of the biggest names or you know futures futures trainers you'd see in Chicago and around the world. They were training crypto assets and they wanted to do it with institutional grade infrastructure.
They did it with us.
So the core thing we do is provide liquidity and match buyers and sellers. Now, what was different with crypto as opposed to FIAT, so I say ninety percent of our volume every day would be in FIAT, was I didn't have prime brokers. So all I do in foreign exchange is are match buyers and sellers, and then I send the trades down to a prime broker or to a bank who aggregates those trades settle them. Guess what I couldn't do that in crypto, So we had to
integrate directly with the blockchain. So guess what we had to settle? We had to pay twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. From twenty eighteen, we've been doing them. The next bit in my core business and my Tradifi business, the customers deposit funds with us, but they don't deposit them with Elmac's group. They deposit them into a bank account with Elmac's Group. And I've got one hundred and over one hundred seventeen Nostro accounts across seventeen different currencies
in trad five. But they're all you know, G ten banks, G ten bank accounts. Guess what, that doesn't exist either in crypto. So people wanted to posit bitcoin with me or with ethereum with me, then I have to I have to store that summer. So we built our own custodians, so, if you like, since twenty eighteen, I have been storing, settling, matching, and providing liquidity to institutional clients, so for the last seven years.
But doesn't mean, by the.
Way that we always expect to be every part of that chain.
I now have a.
Digital custody hub, so we integrate with some of the best custodians in digital assets. If my customers want to use those custodians, we're very happy for them to do that, as long as I can transact and settle with those custodians,
so we do that. I'm very, very hopeful that the logjam and institutional markets that is credit will be solved by some really big names moving into the prime broker space, because again I just want to our core business is to match buyers and sellers, so I'd be very happy that a customer on boards with two customers on board with me, I match the trade and they both with the same prime broker. Or with different prime brokers, and
that settlement happens between those two prime brokers. So I hope down the line that we can get to that true separation of function again and segregation of funds, and we can go back to doing what we're best at, which is building world leading proprietary technology. In all my exchanges are one hundred percent proprietary, right, so we've been doing that since two an intent, so I want to focus on that and then creating the best liquidity pools
in the world. I think there was a there was a survey out recently that said, you know, Elmes Digital has a multiple of the liquidity you see on all other digital.
Exchanges around the world. So that's what we do well.
We match buyers and sell as well, and we create deep institutional liquidity pools.
Mm hm.
You know you mentioned sevening up Nostra accounts, and I've studied Nostral and Vastra accounts around the globe. It seems so there's a lot of capital just locked up there. Do you think stable coins or some form of tokenized fiat, you know, it will eliminate the need for that because you have instant settlement and you know instantaneous transactions.
I'm a total I'm a total believer in that. But what I would say is, you know, please don't be telling me that stable coins today are are more efficient than fear. That's one way to destroy value, right, people talk about crypto and digital assets being a store of value. Okay, pay me interest. Right, there's over two hundred and thirty billion dollars of stable coins. Then you know who who the big names are, pay me interest. I'll happily hold them.
I'll happily hold them. But right now, you just destroy value, right, So okay, we're probably back to regulation. So okay, let's get them regulated and pay interest. But absolutely, over time, you will be earning interest on a second by second, minute by minute basis on tokenized assets. Now those tokenized assets might be you know, currencies, money market funds. So the moment what has to happen, unfortunately with the stable coins is I have to put it into a a
money market fund and those are quite small. Right Again, billion dollars is sort of the biggest tokenized money market fun today. I've got to put it in there to somehow earn interest. But over time, if I can earn money in my UK guilts, my US treasuries I.
Expected or in my bank account.
I expect the same to happen with digital assets so or tokenized assets and unstable coins. So absolutely up. I think that's the whole point, going back to an earlier question and Tony about accelerating the money flow that we see in capital markets today and leading to an explosion actually of all trading volumes in capital markets is because
of the power of that fungible collateral. So being able to move your bitcoin, your dollars, your etheroreum into into other assets at you know, the click of the fingers. So I mean you can trade the es pee Monday to Friday and then you can you can flick that into bitcoin theorem over the weekend, or you can state that and DeFi over the weekend and then you can move it back into euro dollar, or you can move that back into UK guilt or US traders on Mondays.
So you know, twenty four to seven market access and acceleration of capital markets is what we should be looking for. And you know, people really will be getting more bang for their buck and being able to sweat their assets more efficiently than they can today.
Now you mentioned you work with a lot of the banks globally, and we're seeing some of the biggest names coming out and talking about crypto now they want to launch services just here in the United States. Bank of American CEOs that they want to launch their own stable coin. Standard Charter has been partnering with a lot of folks. And you know, what type of demand are you seeing, you know, within maybe they'll pass year or two from
these banks. And has that been growing? Are they coming knocking at your door saying we want to participate, you know, have you seen that increase?
Yes, sir, look, I think the increase is notable since the November election, that's clear. So the biggest a lot of the biggest banks in the world are in the United States of America. Right they were slightly hamstrung by regulations such as SEB one twenty one, such as all the enforcements will go that were enforcement actions in place by the SEC. So I think that's all been freed up, certainly since the inauguration in January twenty twenty five. All
of a sudden, the banks are enabled. Now, don't get me wrong, they haven't yet been enabled by the FED, but they're starting to think about the services and you know, quote unquote, you know I trade with the top forty banks in the world, trade with Delmas Group, so quote unquote from one of them that the event I was that just two weeks ago. Listen, when we trade, we're going to trade with you. Why because it's the same tech stack, right that they trade trade fight with. Right,
It's exactly the same technology, exactly the same API. We've been trading with them for fifteen years. It's just a different IP address, right. So that trusted institutional partner is where we come in. But it's a trust, it's the technology, it's the regulation, it's that credibility. So suddenly some of the conversations are educate us. Some of them are more specific, how do we partner with you on custodian what's the
best practice for customing assets for our customers? Some of them are what's the best way to start up an agency business so we can offer spot crypto trading for our customers. Some of them are are, you know, how do we interact? How do we accept digital collateral deposits? Some of them are how do we offer wealth management products? So I think there's a whole range, but what I would say was that in twenty and twenty three and the first half of twenty four the conversations had.
Almost slowed to a hold.
Right twenty twenty one, the last sort of bull run every bank was readying themselves. I think that died away in twenty two, twenty three, in the first half of twenty four. They have now been re enabled. It won't be quick, I'll say that to you now, Tony. It
won't be quick. But I imagine that a handful of banks will be offering spot crypto services to their customers by the end of this year, and by the end of twenty twenty six, I would expect double digit banks to be offering crypto trading for their customers and crypto custodian services or certainly digital assets services. So I think it's going to happen quickly. There's a few dominoes that need to fall into line.
You know.
We still need that the official regulation, the first bit is going to be stable, point of course, So we need that to fall into place. We need the FED to approve the holding of it for those particular banks, and then we need the banks themselves to partner or create custodial services and prime breaking services. But look again,
I use that word a lot. Inevitable. It's inevitable that the largest banks in the world, some you've mentioned in your question, will be offering cryptos services this year.
Wow.
And then with elmax, can the banks plug into elmax is infrastructure so to speak, where they it's a kind of white label. Maybe they're offering the service on their front end, but you're actually powering the trading.
All of that's possible, and we're having those conversations today because look, we've been offering it, you know, full service.
It's twenty eighteen.
You know, I said to you earlier, I don't believe one entity should be offering all those services.
Don't get me wrong.
Banks can because you have the state and church idea within banks and within a group such as I'm actually just have different regulations. So for example the United Kingdom, I have one regulation from the exchange business and I have another regulation for the broker business, as it should be. So yeah, we're looking to partner with the banks for
some services. My focus is on exchange matching technology. Some of them come with excellent balance sheets, huge balance sheets, which means they can deliver a much bigger and better custodian service and much bigger and better clearing or p and breaking service. So absolutely we're looking to partner with some of the biggest names to accelerate this growth in tokenized and digital assets.
Talk to us a bit about institutional defive. You know, I'm familiar from a retail perspective doing small DeFi transactions, and you know DeFi one point zero had a lot of exploits, a lot of hacks and things like that. How are the institutions approaching this and how are they looking to mitigate things like that happening to them as they transact.
I mean that's interesting. I mean, you know, wat's this space. So you know, we've built hybrid hybrid decentralized exchange here at elmac's group. Smart contracts are actually quite simple, right, and they're if they are If they are simple, I can read them. Put it that way. That's they must be simple if I can read them. So a lot of the security risks go away just with the simplicity
of those smart contracts. Now, I think how the institutions are looking at as a more efficient way of settlement, right, and in many ways, selmon risk disappears, Like in talk to everyone in crypto today. Unfortunately, they've reintroduced settlement risk, right,
because it's like DVP, someone goes first and someone goes second. Right, So you introduce this thing called hoshtat risk which disappeared, which was named in nineteen seventy eight, and when bankers that went went went bust, and then it was it was solved in the FX market through the creation of cls some twenty four years later. So that risk exists, right, So that settlement risk exists in crypto today smart contracts
and defied the away with that. So a lot of them are are look looking at that as a as a mechanism again to put it, simply to speed things up, right, to accelerate the movement of funds. I don't think you know a lot of one point zero As you say, DeFi was very much everyone trading.
With everyone and not knowing each other.
I think that's very unlikely from an institutional perspective and actually doesn't pass fat F guidelines.
It's just as simple as that.
You're not going to get past AML muster with one point zero DeFi.
But the best bits of.
DeFi trading anything anytime, anywhere, right and eradicating settlement risk and credit risk is immensely powerful. I think that's how it's going to be harnessed. I believe you're seeing that internally in some banks already, right you mentioned one bank mentioned in their own their own stable coin. You know that already exists within within JP Morgan for example. But you're going to see that amongst institutions where we start
just settling and moving funds on using smart contracts. So I think that's going to be a big transition in the markets. But you know you're not going to be able to get away from KYC. I'm very hopeful again that we can develop zero knowledge proofs and move to more digital KYC onboarding than we have today. But for now, that's what's slowing us down, and that's what's slowing down institutional DeFi adoption.
That's such a great point. I didn't think about the banks are not going to operate outside of KYC mL and knowing who they're transacting with. So do you see that, you know amongst the banks globally they can do defire transactions more again with standard charter wherever they're at right, ubs and this banker in another country and things like that.
Oh yes, The question is whether they need it. Remember, they have a huge credit lines with each other, right, so it makes it more efficient. Remember the benefit of the spot contract, the benefit of that settlement is for instantaneous settlement transfer of ownership. I'm not sure that group banks need that so much today because they just need Ledger entries, right. They have enough credit with each other
Ledger entries. The ability they have though, to actually have digital dollar in their own Ledger T zero rather than T plus two is advantageous. I get it frees up the credit behind that. So I'm not sure. I'm not sure they need it per se, but certainly it should.
It should add to the velocity of money I think.
For so I probably the top if you look at that matrix top twenty banks in the world, there's a four hundred you know, there's a four hundred square matrix where they all have credit with each other. Just outside of that, I think is where the smart contracts become useful. So it's clients of the banks depositing funds, depositing digital funds and transacting immediately with those banks and having that instantaneous transfer of ownership is hugely beneficial and will add.
To the velocity of money.
So I think it's there. I think it's in the asset manager segment particularly. I think you move into the broker segment, that becomes hugely powerful. And again back to what I said, it's just speeding things up, making you know, faster payments, faster money, right, making everything more fungible, making everything sort of removing the friction right from those markets.
So that's what's going to happen. I think that's the advantage of smart contracts, and I think you're gonna see a lot of settlement happening and using that mechanism in the years ahead. But we're not quite there yet, and we've just got to keep increasing the ecosystem. So if you imagine, you know that you're at the center of the onion, you've got to go all the way out to the outer layers of the onion, so everyone it transacts in that ecosystem can utilize the power of those
smart contracts. And if you think about it, it just freezes up credit. And then when she free up that credit, once she transfer ownership instantaneously, then you provide greater facility to trade. Again, So back to what I said at the start. I mean, you're going to see trading volumes and the sort of the amount of money that's transacted every single day being multiplied in the in the decades ahead.
Mm hmm.
It's exciting, a brave new world. I got to I know we're coming up in time, but I wanted to ask you about all coin ETFs because bigcoints, as you mentioned before, the most successful ETF in the history of ETFs, etherey metfs did Okay, I think the staking component being missed or missing from the ETF here in the United States at least, didn't give it as much inflows. But there's demand for Salona, XRP and other assets. Are you
seeing that demand from your institutional clients? They want access to other things beyond bitcoin.
Honest Donson though, Okay, so that's today in the future, ETF of everything, ETF of everything, every asset that is significant and the investment community needs to needs to is to have an But remember bigcoin and ethereum today are what seventy seventy five percent of a total crypto market? So do you need it? Do you need everything else?
Yet?
I'm not sure they're significant enough. And look before everyone you know shouts at me and hits me over the head and says, David points amazing, and so that was amazing at whatever you say. Look, seventy five percent is two point two trillion dollars, right, so you've pretty much covered crypto, right, Crypto is just short three trillion. Remember the ETF world, the tradi fi world is two hundred and twenty trillion, so it's quite small over time. I
think what's more important is the step before that. We have got to make some more digital assets, some more crypto assets, more useful, have more utility, and prove their worth. I think when you look at it by pure value, I'm just doing it based on data, ladies and gentlemen, Right, don't hit me over the head, just on pure data. It's today it's bitcoin, and today it's ethereum, but tomorrow it could be you know, a whole raft of coins.
And if you go back to where I started, I expect digital assets to be thirty trillion dollars by the end of this decade, right, I expect them to be over one hundred and fifty trillion dollars by the end of the next decade, which means you're gonna have a lot of digital asset ETFs.
So yeah, it's it's that bit is inevitable.
Short term, You're gonna have some that don't work out right, just the same way you're gonna have some. These are all scientific experiments, so some of the underlying coins aren't gonna work out, some of the ETFs aren't going to work out. But you know, as sure as eggs as eggs, you're gonna have etf on on digital assets going forward.
Great point, all right, I got some wrap up questions here for you, David. First, if you could creat your own metaverse, what would the theme be?
That's interesting?
I'm not even I'm not even sure I play that much. I'd probably be Look, I'm a sort of global guy. I like wherever I go. I like running and things like that. So it's gonna have to be a running or cycling or a golfing metaverse where I can just be anywhere in the world and do what I like doing, and at the same time be able to transact in transact in those markets whilst I run a cycle or play golf there.
Okay, rapid fire questions, favorite food, Japanese, favorite musician or band David Bowie favorite movie, Rockie two or three favorite book, The Long Walk to Freedom Nelson Mandela. When you're not working at al Max, what are you doing for a.
Fun Playing golf, going for a run, David?
Absolute pleasure. I appreciate your knowledge and insights, and I would love to have you back on Thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks Tony, I've enjoyed it today