299: Pete's Next Chapter: Norio Ventures | Scaling Solana in Ireland | Stablecoin Growth | Tokenized Securities | Alejandro Gutierrez

0:10 Hey there. I'm Pete Townsend, and This is Money Never Sleeps. We look inside the minds of entrepreneurs and at the crossover of startups, enterprise, finance, technology and life as we know it. This week, Alejandro Gutierrez jump back in with me on the return from our summer hiatus. And as you all know, he's the driving force behind Solana Super Team Ireland. We get into how Alejandro was scaling the community across the island, but also zoom out to talk about the big theme shaping on chain finance right now. Stablecoins moving mainstream with new regulation and tokenized securities continuing to breakthrough with NASDAQ and others stepping in along the way. I share some details on my own big announcement kicking off Norio Ventures Fund One, an early stage venture fund backing unstoppable founders.

0:51 Building on chain finance. We also look ahead to what's coming up. The Payments Innovation Roundtable in Dublin on September 17th focused on stable coins, Crypto Mondays, Ireland and Belfast on September 22nd with our Building our on Chain Future event and still developing plans for episode 300 of Money Never Sleeps, a live recording with plenty of room for friends at a podcast studio in Dublin. If you're into the builders, the breakthroughs in the road ahead for finance on chain, listen up. So let's get into it with Alejandro Gutierrez. All right here on Money Never Sleeps Money. Never sleeps. Pal Alejandro, how you doing, pal? Pete, good to be here again.

1:33 How are you doing? Good, good to be back. The summer hiatus is over in nearly mid-september now. That's it's crazy isn't it, how fast this year has has gone. I know, I know, it's been nuts and it's I missed the creative part of making this podcast over the summer and it's kind of all the momentum to get back. I was very excited this morning bouncing around. I am on my second double espresso. So that explains a bit as to why I'm bouncing around a bit. All excited to be back here recording with you to kick things off for our fall season. Let's just call it that, right? Yeah, I know it's it's pretty exciting as well. I think getting back into full swing of things and getting their routine back, kids back in school, I think it helps. It helps and also, well, almost episode 300 beats so. Yeah, this is 290-9300 is coming up. We're going to do something special for that. I'm just back and forth in the last couple of days from the guys at Head Stuff who have a podcast studio that is big enough for a small audience.

2:41 So we're going to do episode 300 with a live recording. Don't have the date set yet, but it will be coming up in the next couple of weeks and we'll be inviting a few folks along to that. And we'll have a little celebration for episode 300. Hopefully some surprise guests, some old friends, some new friends. Obviously, Alejandro, it'd be great to have you there with us right up recording given how many of these episodes you've done with me now. So very much looking forward to getting that, getting that one done. There is more to come on that. I will leave that for now what we're going to do after episode 300. But there's more to come. Excited to be back doing this with you. I do have a couple of updates now. This is public information now that has been shared over the summer, but perhaps some of the listeners may not pick up on this by the fact that, you know, we were on the summer hiatus. But at the end of June, after we had finished the last Techstars Web 3 Demo Day in New York City, which went incredibly well. And we did the recording of that, that I shared his episode 298 back at the end of July.

3:37 In the closing comments that I made that day, I said there is an Irish poet and stage performer that goes by the name of Bono and he was on stage in 1989 at the Point Depot in Dublin at the end of the Love Town tour. And he said sometimes you just have to go away and dream it all up again, right? And I said that to the crowd. I said every summer Hugh and I get together, Hugh Mcgurr, investment principal and trusted investment partner that I've been working with the last four years and friend, I said, we get together and figure out if we're going to do this all again. And what we decided was that we were going to take everything that we had built with the Techstars Web 3 ecosystem over the last four years. We're going to make it available to all of the Techstars programs.

4:23 And what that means is that Hugh and I will no longer be running an accelerator for Techstars. The Techstars Web 3 accelerator is finished. We've done that for years. We invested in 38 companies, invested about 4 million in capital and we built a great network and we built a great portfolio. And you know I will continue to manage that. I'm staying close to Techstars. I am now a Techstars Managing Director alumnus and so I'm helping with a couple of partnerships. I am doing some mentoring of founders that are coming into Techstars just now this week for the kick off of the fall term. And I will be obviously continuing to help the founders that I've invested in over the last four years and doing my best to do that. That is the end of the chapter, but there's obviously new one coming up as well.

5:08 That's pretty exciting, Pete. And look, if you ask me, I believe that's probably the right approach and continuation. Like we're seeing more and more now every single industry starting using the technology, which means that having probably chapter just dedicated to F3, yeah, it's still impactful, but it's probably better just to spread this in every single different industry and every single potential application out there. So I I believe these can have a bigger impact as well in the Techstars ecosystem. Definitely. And Techstars having a vertical focused accelerator program is an anomaly for Techstars. Techstars is very much focused on startup communities and in person communities. And there was a Techstars cloud program back in 2012 I believe, and they ran that once or twice.

5:55 But then you don't need a specific Techstars cloud technology program because everyone's just building on cloud, right? So we took that same type of call with Techstars Web 3 and the mentor group, which you were famously part of and as an All Star mentor, Alejandro, and thank you for that and thank you to all of our mentors over the last few years and that we still have a great community there and I'm staying in touch with everybody. We also have a community of founders and investors that we're continuing to manage that community and keep people updated on what's going on. So still lots going on. And that whole network is such a fantastic network for the next thing that I'm going to be doing.

6:39 But before we get into that, Alejandro, you've done quite a bit over the summer with Solana Super Team Ireland. What tell tell me how that unfolded? You know, it's hilarious because I was chatting to some more leads from the Super teams around the world and say, OK, this is the time to recharge batteries. And I think for us was not the case whatsoever. We we kept pounding and pounding and there was so much that happened just to cement that foundation for, for super team Ireland. We were extremely busy. Like numbers were keep growing and growing. We had our investors dinner. So this is the first time ever it happens in the Irish ecosystem.

7:21 Just getting together web tree projects with traditional investors and it was fantastic just to see how interested people are in the space right now. Have we tried to do this speed together a few times? I tried to do it probably 2 times. He never actually will never succeed on it. And seeing it now, it was extremely exciting, but also what was in in August actually. Yep, that was amazing, pulling people together in the middle of August. And you know, I, I think it's the approach that you're taking Alejandro in that trying to build bridges and connect the dots here and being able to show people that listen, building on Solana is something that doesn't just need to be focused on crypto natives and that if you are a tech founder, these things aren't that complicated to understand and that there is a benefit and advantage to building on chain.

8:26 And you may not actually have thought about that before, but have a look. The feeling that I get is that with Solana Super team here in Ireland that you've got the resources and the people to help to bring people on board. That's a big difference, to be honest, Pete, because we knew there's talent here. Like we know that we have tech talent, we have fintech talent. So you're doing that transition. It shouldn't be that difficult, but the fact is like we never have real support on the ground that that didn't really exist before. And that's the reason why we're seeing the, the growth in the in, in super Team Ireland, because you have people that are dedicated just to nurture the consistent North Shore talent scout talent scout companies.

9:13 And more and more we're seeing Web 2 projects that they have a technological gap, they have an issue and they're finding the solution in web tree and not just on the obvious industries like fintech and payments, because dozens are the easy ones, right? We're seeing these right now in some ordered industries like healthcare, right? We're seeing it as well into in pharma like a startups in pharma just reaching out, gaming, loyalty, all sorts of different applications that few years ago wouldn't be considered or you wouldn't see people in the web too looking for for these solutions in the in, in their own chain or doing a transition on chain. Yeah, and it's almost.

10:03 Exciting. Like I meant, you know, what the the cloud program back in 2012 and that a lot of what happened back then was those that were starting to build the hyper scalers like, you know, AWS and Google cloud and Azure. Just trying to turn people on to this and show them the benefit of actually building on cloud. And that there was a lot of, you know, a lot of folks that they had to help turn the corner on that. And you know, we're, I think we're at the stage now with blockchain where that's just the same thing that if you show founders and tech builders the benefits that they can actually in the same way that building on cloud back in 2012 allowed them to get off the ground for 50K instead of 500 K because you didn't eat all these on Prem servers, That building on chain now allows you to supercharge the tech stack of your business, right?

11:01 And there's a lot of different applications. Sometimes it's not right, sometimes it is. And it's the it's the right thing to do to help deliver your value proposition in a better, faster and cheaper way, you know? I fully agree. I think that experimentation needs to keep happening and we are learning every single day more and more about how to implement this technology into traditional Web 2 interfaces, right? That is one of the key issues like we have been discussing this a lot, right? And for some reason I got blockchain should be a technology that is at the back like a blockchain hasn't been designed to be just up there. In like cloud. Everybody, it's like cloud. Exactly. It's going to be a huge impact. A lot of the users, they probably, they don't even know. They don't need to know to be honest. And I know you've been doing Solana Talent Hub Friday at Doug Patch Labs all throughout the summer as well. And I was able to stop by for one of them and I I need to get back for more.

11:57 That has been successful. And you took the show on the road last week up to Belfast, didn't? You. That's it. That's it. Like, I have a extremely busy summer, like the way before Belfast, we have more than 45 people coming, which is a number that if you asked me two years ago would have been unheard of. Like, and there's more and more people, younger people, students, web two people that are like interested. And the decision of taking it to Belfast. Well, super Team Ireland is is an island wide initiative. This is not just for the Republic. That is something that we have been telling everybody we accept with with open arms.

12:40 And it was fantastic actually to share with with that ecosystem. We we have already people building in the Solana ecosystem. We have OG members like like Key and Brenner that is leading right now Sky in Solana. And we have the chance actually to sit down with Vishal. He heads all the blockchain group in Queens University and just was a really fantastic discussion about how we can just bring all the talent, all these new talent from from Northern Ireland to look into Solana. Yeah, for sure. But look into web tree in general, right? I think the important piece is bringing people into the web tree space, bringing people into blockchain.

13:23 And then look, the way I see it, there will be people from every single one of those change. Like I will do our best to just attract them into Solana. But most important is, is just creating that, that ecosystem first, right? And, and I think Queens University is going to be a fantastic ally to, to make that happen. And I keep it growing. So there's going to be more of these events, probably doing a satellite of talent Hall in Belfast. We have the numbers. I will keep expanding across the island. Does does the the main idea we need to decentralize a little bit from from Dublin. I have this thing that is a double edged sword, right? Because it's a small enough, right that everybody can travel to Dublin from everywhere.

14:09 But at the same time that creates that centralization piece, right? We have people coming from Donegal week on week, which is fantastic, right? But Yep, well, it shouldn't be creating something maybe in Donegal and have the numbers. So that's probably next stage. Absolutely, absolutely no. I love it. Just reaching out across the entire island, as you said, and that we are, you know, was that Ian Brown in Belfast? Yeah, Ian was there team. And Ian Mitchell, obviously shout out to Ian Mitchell. He's been working on Mitchell with us. Yeah, I should have mentioned Ian. As soon as we mentioned to him, look, we're going to be doing this in in Belfast, he just jumped on it. Contact the guys at our more labs and all you go. Yeah, it was fantastic.

14:51 Yeah. So absolutely. And we're going to go back up to Belfast on the 22nd of September. We've got a few folks from Dublin heading up for Crypto Mondays. So we Belfast tech week is going on. I think it's kicking off that weekend before Monday the 22nd and we are doing an event called Building Our Unchained Future. That's with Super Team Ireland and also with me with Noria Ventures. I'll be sharing more a bit about that in a second. Like I said, bringing the show on the road up to Belfast. So that's Crypto Mondays Ireland. As we've said from the beginning, we did our first three events in Dublin and then it was time to bring it up north.

15:31 So looking forward to that. We also have our Payments Innovation Roundtable coming up and this is a closed event. I'm excited to be doing this as we're trying to get payment firms and banks and anyone building in fintech and payments, just bring them up the curve a bit with regards to stable coins and just get this round table discussion going. Have this setting where people are comfortable learning in public. You're not really learning in public because it is a closed session, but Co learning with your industry colleagues. And so just to try to open people's eyes a bit with what's going on with stablecoin. So looking forward to doing that as well. That would be pretty interesting.

16:12 I'm really excited. But look, in general we have been talking about creating these or, or or hosting these for for long feet and, and seeing it happening now, it's exciting. I think it's the right time is the right moment. Stable coins are at a peak. Everybody wants to create a stable coin. Now, do they need them? Probably not. But I think important is that people want, I think it's important to for people that are in the industry to understand what the impact of this technology is going to be for them. Because probably some of them know, probably some of them are just digesting what is to come and let them know that if that's the route that they want to follow, there are options, there are alternatives, and that there are people in the ground that can help.

16:59 Definitely, and it's not shilling that's the big thing in that this is about opening people's eyes to innovations and innovations in their industry and that this is something that you can choose to do. Now if you take stable coins, for example, stable coins are a lot more about the importer in Dubai paying for coffee beans that are being shipped in mass from a farm in Kenya and being able to do so and it with instant liquidity, instant settlement and without all the cross-border hassles of getting from one local domestic currency into another, right. In thinly traded FX markets where you have the Fiat currencies that are on legacy rails. And it's a lot more about that type of transaction on the B to B level than it is someone walking into a cafe in Nairobi in Kenya and buying a cup of coffee. With all of these discussions, so much of this in the past in crypto, people take that word cryptocurrency and they think that we're talking about changing the world's currencies into other means.

18:09 And that's not what it's about. I wish that word cryptocurrency was never created. I wish it was just crypto asset because that's what these things are and that you're looking at alternative forms of payment, being able to do so in a way that is better, faster, cheaper. And so always love to have conversations with folks about this. So looking forward to leaving that round table with you. So Speaking of doing new things, I do have some news to announce. So I am finally, after all these years, kicking off Nario Ventures Fund One and. Should I do the the the the drums? The drums, the gone baby, right?

18:53 But what I'm doing is that I'm backing unstoppable founders, the precede and Seed stage, who are building on chain finance, particularly in the areas of decentralized infrastructure, global capital, mobility, and universal UX, all accelerated by AI. Got to be doing a ton of work around the narrative and a ton of work around exactly what I'm doing and why. I started talking to my network about it, started telling them what I was doing, getting ideas, getting feedback. Obviously, I've worked with a ton of founders on raising their rounds, but when you're raising from limited partners that are investing in funds, it's a different kettle of fish completely. I'm talking with a lot of folks about their experience in doing that. This is a niche fund in a niche segment with a niche strategy. And this is something where I'm talking to others who have taken that same approach, raising their first time as a solo GP. And as I've done this in the past, working with others who are doing the fundraising and I was the OPS and structuring guy. And now I'm at that point where I'm like, listen, it's about damn time.

19:58 I've been working in this space for 10 years. This is what I've been driving towards. Just do it, right? Just get out there and do it. And if I fall on my face flat, who cares? At least I gave it a shot. No, Peter, I'm I'm so glad to hear this because you say I was going to ask you. I took you so long actually. The first five years of me in this space, those were the hustle years. And that was me trying to figure this space out and get to know founders and work closely with founders and get myself onto advisory boards and boards of directors and all of that. And then Techstars came along and Techstars was about me doing two things. One, getting my reps with 38 investments, reviewing 2 1/2 thousand applications, doing over 1000 founder calls, right? And the second thing was about building the network and building those relationships with mentors, with investors, but most importantly with the founders and being able to truly understand what an unstoppable founder looks like. And this culminated in our 2025 cohort where we said we're not doing 12 investments this year.

21:00 We're doing 6, we're doing 6 high conviction bets only. And that's what's been built into my own patterns and my own processes. And it feels right. It's high conviction. And it's not me spraying and praying. It's saying these are founders that I believe in that will build the next wave of moving finance on Chain I. Think that's probably a good approach because the last you don't you don't want to be known in the industry, right? As an investor, as someone that is placing money, disappearing, then coming back, extracting value and off you go. Oh yeah, and the knowledge that you have paid will be on value for a lot of these companies opening doors. Why you call it smart money, right? That's exactly what you want.

21:44 Yep. And and that's the bad look, I I'm extremely excited. I'm really happy. I'm really glad for you and believe that Irish ecosystem. I'm going to welcome this with open arms and look for for the grassroots. This is going to be so important. This could be one of the cornerstones that will allow us just to build a proper startup ecosystem in the web tree space in Ireland. Definitely. And you know, I've been referring to what you've done, Alejandro, when I speak with people about creating investment opportunities where they may not otherwise be in that where you find a founder building an AI who may not have thought about building on chain.

22:24 And that where they look at that when you kind of prompt them and they say, wait a second, yeah, if we actually built this into our stack, this would allow us to do XY and ZA whole lot better and things like micro payments in AI and agentic payments in general, right? All that type of stuff. So being able to do a lot of the stuff that you and I have been working on together has allowed me to create this little extra thing that is interesting. And on that note, people said, Pete, where you going to call your new fund? I said, you know what? I created Norio Ventures back in 2016 with purpose. Norio is Japanese for man of principle. OK, Norio is also an anagram of the word Orion. Orion is the hunter.

23:08 I've always been a hunter for unstoppable founders, for new deals, new ideas, new things that are worth pursuing. Hunter is also a family name going back to the 13th century in Scotland. It means a lot to me. I could have come up with another name. Someone said Pete, just call it on chain ventures. I said no. Somebody suggested Pete stars. Yeah, yeah, Pete stars. Yeah, absolutely could have done that as well. But you know, it's I'm, I'm sticking with it and I'm excited, as you can tell. I think like with your experience and what you have done actually with tech stars before that and there would be a lot of people interested. I I have no doubt about it. I'm really excited. I'm I'm extremely excited about the like the launch of Mario adventures and how and out there. Like I believe it's going to be terrific for the ecosystem for you personally.

23:57 So well done, Sir. Thank you, thank you, me and AI. You know, GPT has been my best friend in this so far. So we have to thank GPT as well for for getting things to this stage. So given the summer hiatus and given that so much has happened over the past few months, I just wanted to do a quick rewind on a few of these things. These are important topics for what you're building through Super Team, but also with what I'm going to be investing in through Norio Ventures Fund 1. So, and it's no surprise that these are the topics that you and I speak about regularly anyway, because this is the lifeblood of why I'm doing this to begin with in that we had the huge event over the summer with the passing of the Genius Act and that is fueling stablecoin mainstreaming as a regulatory framework for stablecoins.

24:46 So think about things like full reserve backing, mandatory audits, state federal permitting. It's basically mainstreaming digital dollars with a great foundation of regulation behind it. McKinsey have predicted that 2 trillion will be driven into stable coins. So that's $2 trillion in stable coin value predicted by 2028. And that also Europe is going a bit of its own cautious route. Mika has a stablecoin framework. It's a bit unwieldy, right? I don't think we're going to be seeing any depth of liquidity in euro stable coins anytime soon, OK. And that will be a topic of conversation for our Payments Innovation Roundtable.

25:27 We're talking mostly to those who are operating in euro and how do we actually enable firms to take advantage of the stable coin infrastructure when this is operating primarily in USD? There's this stable coin sandwich. I won't get into that for now, but you know, you know what I'm talking about there. It would be really interesting to see how it develops in Europe, right, Because now you're seeing every single big economy in the world push in that direction. I don't, I don't see the appetite in here. There's a lot of discussion still about CBDC's and Euro like a detailed euro by like a like minted directly by, by the European Union etcetera, etcetera, which is personally I don't think is the right approach for this and we know that is not.

26:16 But not at. The same time, at the same time, I believe that the European Union has or is a bit afraid on losing some sort of dominance from the currency perspective, because if the dominance goes straight into the USD, what's going to happen with the euro? Yep. Yeah, I've had some conversations about this with people who I cannot get into, Right. So I'm right there with you. The, you know, a digital euro is not the answer. It was at least encouraging to hear that. There was talk of that being on a public blockchain, but their original plans for the digital euro had nothing to do with blockchain.

26:59 It was a closed system, OK. And when you have a closed system that's issuing digital instruments, digital dollars, digital securities that can't be reused elsewhere, and that is part of the global capital mobility. Part of my investment thesis is that we need these assets to be able to move around the world into institutions, hands into individual hands in ways that bring them surprise, delight and joy from the user experience. And with a closed loop system, you're not going to get that. And it was Tony McLaughlin who is the founder and CEO of Ubix and he is a stable coin maximalist and he spoke about this on LinkedIn and talking about the difference between stable coins and tokenized deposits in CBDC's. Now I worked on something a few years ago with a early player in the common, early player in the stable coin space, and they were responding to a tender from the Treasury in the UK, in England, and it was on CBD CS.

28:08 And they said how do we do this? And they said there's two models. There's one, the central bank itself can issue a digital currency, but what that brings with it is the need to have a consumer service attached to that. You have people worried about that a transaction didn't complete correctly. Can a, can a central bank really support that? No. So the alternative was is that you create the digital currency as a framework, but then you let the commercial banks deliver that and you let the commercial banks issue their digital currencies in that local Fiat currency. So you have HSBC, you have NatWest, you have Barclays, whatever in the UK that are all issuing digital pounds. And they're all fungible against each other. In the same way that if you pick up a euro coin and you flip it over and you see that that coin was actually minted in Greece, and then I've got in my pocket another one that was minted in Ireland.

29:06 It doesn't make a difference. They're totally fungible. And so you can. And that was the model that was being proposed. This was five years ago and then when I saw the whole tokenized deposits model coming out of JP Morgan, it looks the same. And that the tokenized deposits model is that you have a bank that takes a part of its balance sheet and says we're going to issue a stablecoin basically backed by the bank's balance sheet. And that's all this is. Now JP Morgan are doing this initially with JPMD, but it is a it's a bit of a closed loop system only available to their customers, but at least it's baby steps in the right direction with this stuff. I think we're heading, we're heading there, we're heading there and Genius Act was kind of the trigger for people to put forward the plans that they have because all of these guys have plans like it's not possible that Genius Act is is passed and a week after everybody is unveiling stable coins, layer ones for payments etcetera, etcetera.

30:06 Like I have been working on this for a long time, right? Yeah. What what I don't, I don't like it, but I, I think it's part of of the marketing component is the hype that is coming out of it. Everybody now is launching a layer one. Everybody's launching again a stable coin. For what purpose I have no idea, but they're all in there. What can happen is that we're getting distracted from from what is important, right, and is the application and the efficiencies that the technology will bring to a lot of the players and consumers, right? Because it's not just the players, it's the consumers as well. Absolutely, but you know, and, and I, I think we're living in a world right now, at least for those in the, you know, crypto native and crypto fluent, if not crypto curious where, you know, Tether and USDC, the two biggest stable coins can live, can cohabitate, can cohabitate in my wallet together and I can use them for different things. And I kind of when you know, you have a look at your app, it adds it all up together for you anyway and saying this is your cash, right?

31:13 So, but when we're looking at 10:20, 30-40, that's where things start to get a bit unwieldy. So yeah, and I, I, you kind of see this in that like Stripes Tempo blockchain that they just announced last week and, you know, some very notable names that are working on this. It's that they, they're talking about it being credibly neutral, OK, And that they want developers to build on that. Now, what does Stripe get from that? That gets a benefit of the transaction fees that are coming through the chain, right, Rather than having that accrue to Circle or to Tether or to Athena, you know, or to somebody else, right? And it's good to see that the business model for several coins is changing, right?

31:59 Because we always knew that the business model of leveraging like rates, that's not sustainable, that's sustainable now because like our interest rates are, are high. But realistically what happens when interests go low, we knew that was not sustainable to see. So now. I saw that today. There was something, it was in CNBC. It was in CNBC. Wherever it was, it was, hey, there's a 7 trillion cash pile that's in money market funds right now. That is, if the the Fed drops rates to, you know, four and a quarter or even 4% or whatever it is, that 7 trillion will all be ushered into Bitcoin. Like that's that's not going to happen. You'll see, you may see some of it, right? But it was like, OK, people want to risk on, but I don't think your average institution or individual that is holding shares of a money market fund will jump and push that into Bitcoin as a risk on asset, right? I doubt it.

33:03 No, not going to happen. But listen, the stable coins in general moving towards 300 billion as an asset class, right, with tethering USDC dominating that. But there are more and more creeping up like I think Athena is now the third ranked stablecoin. So obviously what goes hand in hand Alejandro with tokenized cash or tokenized dollars is tokenized securities. And we saw a ton of action in that over the summer. And it was particularly around Project Crypto, which was SEC Chariton's was speaking about where where he saw things going with the tokenization of financial markets. And basically the whole speech that he did in the transcript of that was like a hit list, a laundry list of everything that we've been looking for and everything that we wanted to open up when it comes to super apps and be able to integrate with crypto, Being able to integrate with tokenized securities and stable coins and making sure that you have the right regulatory framework around this because you're bringing together what are these regulatory permissions across payments, across derivatives, across securities and money transmission and things like that that have all these different regulatory frameworks right now.

34:09 Don't want firms that are building the space to have to go get 10/20/30 fifty different regulatory licenses here. So there there's some good progress happening there on the regulatory front. What we also saw was the market, and this is on RWA dot XYZ and I'll put that up in the show notes as well that the tokenized security market, a real world assets on chain is approaching 30 billion right now. Again, still small number when you combine it with stable coins, it's above 300 billion, but let's keep it 2 separate. But the tokenized security market is is expected as well to move up into the 1 to 5 trillion range by the year 2030. OK. And little hints of what's going on with NASDAQ. Just yesterday announced that they've proposed the SEC that they want to enable tokenized securities to be traded on NASDAQ.

35:02 Now this won't be fully native digital issuance of securities on chain that are then issued by a CSD and then trading on NASDAQ. This will be it's basically a settlement option. You know you're trading on NASDAQ, but then you have the option to hold the tokenized form in your wallet rather than or in an institutional wallet rather than holding it in in street name through a through a brokerage account or something like that. So. Yeah. So like they're announcing this for 2026, which is pretty interesting. It's quite soon, like I think it's early 2026, right? Yeah, it is. Going alongside that, we had Galaxy Digital, they're already tokenizing their own common stock via Super State on Solana.

35:42 So giving that 24/7 trading in real share rights to shareholders rather than what we're seeing happening, which are these wrappers where you have a SPV and Liechtenstein, for example, that is created to hold shares of NVIDIA that then trade on a tokenized exchange. Again, baby steps going the right direction. Are these SPV related tokenized securities? But what we're looking for is truly native digital issuance and that's what Galaxy Digital have done. They're publicly traded company. They're saying we're going to take a tranche of our shares, we're going to issue them digitally so that they can trade on super State. So that was another interesting. Development there, that was a fantastic one actually because it's saying like I look it is possible.

36:24 It's not just about the rappers that you say now we can have these assets that like on chain have been the utility creative for, for this purpose only 24/7 at a completely more efficient manner, right for capital markets. Definitely, and this is obviously one of the, you know, these are great steps forward, but there's a ton of infrastructure still to build. We built so much great infrastructure in crypto, but in order for institutional traders, for financial services firms, for day traders, for everybody that's trading the traditional financial markets for them to be able to have all the same tools and utilities and expectations when they have the on chain experience time to build.

37:09 And that's why I'm investing in the space. So good place to wrap. Thank you, Alejandro. It was great to step through all of this with you and I'll be seeing you next week. Thank you very much Pete. Pleasure as always. Really looking forward to episode 300 live from somewhere around Dublin I assume. Yep. And well, great news about North Venture, so looking forward to catching up next week. Wonderful. Thanks, Alejandro. Thank you. Bye. Bye. That does it for this week, folks. You can learn more about the topics we cover in the show notes on our website. Money never sleeps that IE. Thanks to Alejandro Gutierrez for the awesome insights he shared in Co hosting this episode with me. If you like what you heard, please leave us a rating and or review on Spotify, Apple or on Money Never sleeps dot IE slash rate.

38:01 Thanks to Conan Brophy from Create Sound for mixing and editing this episode. Conan is an excellent media man to work with on your own podcast. As for me, I'm general partner of Norio Ventures, an early stage venture capital fund backing unstoppable founders building on chain finance. There are plenty of links in the show notes on Money never sleeps that IE and how to get in touch, so don't hesitate to reach out. Finally, till next time, thanks for listening. See ya, Money never sleeps. Pal.