RWAs Episodes

The Drive to Five: Unpacking Citi's $5.5T Tokenization Forecast In June 2026, Citi Institute released "Tokenization 2030: Wall Street On-Chain" — a report that puts a hard number on a question the industry has been circling for years. Their base case: $5.5 trillion in tokenized financial assets by 2030, with a bear case of $2.7 trillion and a bull case of $8.2 trillion. For a market sitting at roughly $17 billion today, that's not an incremental forecast. It's a bet on structural change. Alejand...

Pete Townsend is joined by Martin Watkins, CEO of Montis Group, to discuss what a blockchain-native central securities depository actually does and why it matters for the future of tokenized assets.

Welcome inside the venue for the Techstars Web3 Demo Day 2025 , recorded live at Civic Hall in NYC during NY Tech Week, where we brought 5 incredible web3 startups to the stage for a standing-room-only crowd of founders, investors, and builders. These aren’t founders chasing hype - they’re building with traction, with purpose, and with an eye on the next version of the internet. Along the way, you’ll hear: A powerful fireside chat with Clarisse Hagege , founder and CEO of Dfns , on her journey f...

This week. I sat down with Timo Lehes and Philipp Pieper, the co-founders of Swarm, the RWA (or Real World Assets) platform that brings unique digitization and trading solutions to the world of traditional and decentralized finance. Swam is the first organization in the world to offer digitized US treasury bills and Apple stock via a compliant and decentralized platform

Alejandro Gutierrez, CEO of npayme Labs and co-founder of ETH Dublin joins me again as guest co-host this week. We recap our recent panel on working in web3 (‘Finding Web3 Talent’) at Dogpatch Labs, touching on market sentiment, the cyclical nature of crypto investments, and strategies for early-stage startups. We delve into real-world asset tokenization, highlighting key initiatives by firms like Provenance, PayPal, Circle and Centrifuge. The conversation also covers the evolving landscape for...

I’m joined by three of the founders from the Techstars Web3 class of 2024 to help me identify the mainstream adoption path for blockchain technology, including Andrea Miele, Co-Founder and CEO of The Colony, Fabien Arneodo, Co-Founder and CEO of SportSyncTech, and Nick Mason, Co-Founder and CEO of ProofSpace.

Paul Smyth and I look at Sam Bankman-Fried’s 25-year sentence before jumping to the brighter side of things with BlackRock’s new tokenized money market fund.  We then time travel back to 2017 with Copper’s sushi party (or so we thought), and close things out by questioning the correlation between fintech funding and the crypto bull run.

Alex Amartei is an Irish entrepreneur originally from Shannon and is also an investor, film writer, and producer. He recently won the Hollywood Icon award and the Monaco Streaming Film Festival Award alongside James Cameron and Mark Wahlberg. Alex is the producer of Antara - the first major DeFi Hollywood movie in history financed by NFTs and the power of web3.

Founder and CEO of PlanDail, Owen O’Driscoll, riffs with Pete Townsend on PlanDail’s mission to build Europe’s premier cross-border, seamless, regulated crowdfunding platform, powered by carbon-neutral Algorand technology. PlanDail’s aim is to connect high-impact focused entrepreneurs with ESG/impact investors of all shapes and sizes who want to fund a better future for the planet.

Tim Goodman is the founder and CEO of Your Diamonds, an ecosystem enabling the diamond industry to solve old-world problems through digital technologies and Web3.