31 - Network State Conference 2026 - Xen Baynham-Herd on Capital Without BordersDescription:

Hi, I'm I'm Zen from Bass. We recently launched tokenized stocks. These are issued by Coinbase, fully backed by shares held within a regulated custodian and give you complete legal ownership over the underlying share. You can use them in your wallet. You can use them on DeFi and you can trade them 247. And tokenized stocks will expand who can invest, who can raise capital, and what people can build. For many people around the world, buying a US stock is painful. It can mean very high fees, lots of friction, lots of paperwork, and finding a broker willing to serve you. With tokenized stocks, buying a stock can be as easy as ordering a takeaway. In under a minute, you can download a wallet, sign up with email, and buy a stock with Apple Pay. So this clearly dramatically increases the amount of people who will be able to buy stocks. And so for companies, companies can now access funding and capital far beyond their home markets. And so companies but also startups and communities now have more options for financing. Physical location is no longer such a barrier for investing in assets and raising capital. And once the shares are onchain, startups can build new products and services on them. We launched tokenized stocks with over 50 partner apps. And that's why as of today you can trade the stocks 247 on aerodrome. You can invest in a managed portfolio on bitwise. You can borrow against your stock on Ave and you can even have an agent manage your position with banker. Now of course this is only the beginning. Startups are going to build new products and new services we haven't predicted and we couldn't have imagined. And at Bass, we're here to back them. We're backing startups building on tokenized stocks through base, which is our accelerator, the base ecosystem fund, and our partnerships like that with the network school. Now, I think tokenization in general combined with AI will transform markets. And here are five reasons how. Number one, AI makes it much cheaper and easier to do fundamental research across the world. At the same time, tokenization makes it much easier to act on that research. And so the combination is that good fundamentals get discovered quicker. Number two, whilst fundamentals remain increasingly important, so does social media. A live stream can move a market. Individual creators can drive sentiment and individual creators can sometimes move markets. Older investors might listen to Goldman Sachs whereas younger investors are far more likely to listen to their favorite streamer. And so that's why social media will become so so important in financial markets. Number three, power laws will go global. Local companies can now access global capital. And so this means that local winners can attract more capital but also compete for a global market. We'll see the winners get bigger faster on a global scale. Number four, we'll see more interconnectivity between markets. Tokenized stocks are obviously global by nature, but they can also be used as collateral for loans and derivative positions. This increases the interconnectivity between different markets, different assets and different instruments. This is great because it means markets are more efficient, but it also means uh shocks can be amplified across markets more quickly. And number five, countries will compete for capital and for the businesses building these markets and good regulation is how they do that. Coinbase has issued tokenized stocks out of Abu Dhabi and the tokenization framework. Uh the SEC has recently come out with a route, a conditional route, but a route towards tokenization and trading in the US. This is the chart showing the total value of tokenized stocks today. It's now just gone over three billion and is now approaching four billion very soon. And the chart reminds me of the chart for stable coins, which about seven years ago were at a very similar place to where tokenized stocks are today. And since that time, we saw stable coins have dramatic product market fit, growing to hundreds of billions of market cap and trillions in trading volume. And I think we'll see a similar thing happen with tokenized stocks. I think we'll look back at 2026 as the inflection point for tokenized stocks. The year when tokenized stocks enable global access to assets, global access to capital and new financial products for the world. The year that tokenized stocks enable capital without borders. Thank you very much.