Tokenization 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. A...

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.

Tokenization has a perception problem. The industry keeps selling it as an efficiency play — less friction, more transparency, better infrastructure. But if tokenization doesn't help you sell more of whatever you've tokenized, it's irrelevant.

Brian McNulty has been building toward this moment for a decade. When he co-founded the Post Trade Distributed Ledger Group with the London Stock Exchange back in 2015, he was helping the industry imagine what tokenized funds might one day look like. On April 21st 2026, he rings the bell at that same exchange to launch DVF — Lingfeng Capital's Digital Venture Fund — and the circle closes.In this episode, Brian and Pete trace the journey from FAC to the Apex exit to DVF, and dig into what VC 3...

Alejandro Gutierrez joins me to talk Solana in Ireland, stablecoins, and tokenized securities - plus I share the launch of Norio Ventures Fund I and what’s ahead for Episode 300.

This week, I’m joined by the ever-insightful and gloriously unfiltered Laura Walsh for a whirlwind spin through the crypto-political multiverse. From BlackRock’s Larry Fink flirting with Bitcoin as the next global reserve currency to Trump-World and Cowboy State stablecoins, this episode has more layers than a Siberian haplogroup.

Laura Walsh returns this week to help me unpack the whirlwind of events shaking up crypto, finance, and politics—from Trump memecoin mania to regulatory shifts and the ever-increasing adoption of crypto by institutional finance.

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.

Luis Martinez and Martin Liebrich are the co-founders of Staxe. Staxe is enabling music and creative production economies on web3 so that anyone can become an owner of music and creative productions, support their favorite artists, and become a part of their success.

On the show this week we have Filipe Pereira and Mario Frade from Crowdclass, a web3 protocol for online education using the power of blockchain, tokenization, composability and the metaverse to create new monetization models for online educators, and better learning environments for students to grow and develop.

Eugene O’Brien and Kurt Pittman from Ireland-based BigFan join Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend on the show this week. BigFan is reinventing sports collectibles through officially licensed NFTs that provide access to Metaverse-driven fan experiences

Carla Rosenkranz, founder of Barterchain, riffs with Pete Townsend about how the Barterchain idea is rooted in her own experience of exchanging English lessons for yoga classes, the core of her conviction to start building Barterchain, the network effects from connecting local communities and virtual communities, how to keep pushing back against the blockchain and crypto naysayers….and her psychic storytelling superpowers!

This week, Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend return from a 2-week hiatus and look at what’s driving Ramp forward so quickly with their $8bn valuation, the JP Morgan deal for western Ireland-based fintech Global Shares, and the latest with ApeCoin, Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs and Yuga Labs.

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend walk through Amazon’s new partnership with BNPL (buy-now-pay-later) player Affirm and what this means for the Amazon flywheel, and then answer the question ‘what’s a stablecoin?’ in the context of USD Coin and the Centre Consortium, before diving into the world of NFTs through Visa’s $150,000 purchase of a CryptoPunk NFT and the big opportunity for monetizing the metaverse.

Ernest Cantillon (CEO of DramEx) and Brian Elders (Founder of SORS Digital Assets and advisor to DramEx) join the show this week to talk about DramEx, a community governed digital whiskey marketplace. We get into the genesis of the DramEx business through Ernest’s life story as a hospitality entrepreneur and Brian’s path through finance and into digital assets, why the timing is right to bring DramEx into the $63bn global whiskey market, the bridge between whiskey and digital assets through NFTs…and training to be a chef and a mathematician!

Robert Alice, artist and creator of the ‘Portraits of a Mind’ project, shares his story on how bitcoin - and to quote Robert – “and its essential ties to the past instead of the perpetuated perception of its radical severance with it,“ was a catalyst for a melting pot of inspiration for his mesmerizing artwork Portraits of a Mind, the crossover from physical art into digital art with non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the intersection of artistry and entrepreneurship…and the joys of life as a triplet!

We’ve flipped the tables this week, with Ken Coyne from OpsTalent interviewing Pete Townsend on his own digital awakening, insights on the startups he’s working with, the origins of enterprise blockchain, the present and the future of digital assets…and who stole Pete’s car stereo in 1990!