Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
RWA Watering Hole #4 - Discussing Hot Tokenizations w/ Frens
Recorded: June 26, 2025 Duration: 1:00:00Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Happy Thursday, everybody.
We're just getting our speakers up here
welcome in welcome in thank you for taking the time it's going to be a great session today
hopefully you all will enjoy it too friday is nearly there friday eve as they say
man rockets gems stocks fun conversation today i am very very pumped
very excited for the rwa watering hole weekly basis yes the invites are going out so anyone
uh that is already scheduled to speak go ahead and check and join us up on stage
we're getting kicked off shortly. And for the audience,
as you guys know, go ahead and share this Twitter space, this X space here with your audiences.
Get your followers on. Let's have a productive conversation. Of course, any questions,
go ahead and tweet them at the RWA Foundation. patient
What's going on Zeus how are you this week?
Yo yo GM
GM it might be four o'clock here, but it's always a it's always a GM. I'm feeling great
Honestly by the day I get more bullish on the space of the sector as a whole so I'm loving life I could do with another coffee so you know what I'm
gonna make another coffee and I'm looking forward to chat today so yeah I
know I know agridex did like a coffee transaction for their their platform
can't wait for coffee to come on Shane what a good business coffee on train
brother I'm you know I'm there i mean honestly i will invest in everything and anything for the first year that everything's about and
then then you find your good ones but you need to do a bit a bit of trial and error before we find
out what's actually a good a good investment and what's not so we're all here to be on the same
journey and ride we got some other great speakers on here gem x welcome to the stage how's it going guys you know i'd actually tokenize those cats you know
with the that make the coffee i don't know if you know them the best coffee in the world
right that's what i would tokenize it's it's gonna happen we also got we also got remy uh
warrior what's going on roaring kitten
part of the gem x team i don't know if you're speaking as well on stage or just the gem x team
but welcome welcome uh hello hello sorry i was muted how's everyone going how's their day today
we are on fire we're ready to go and talk rwa's we also got the credit guy on here what's up oris
good morning or good afternoon depending on where you are dialing in from pleasure to be here pleasure
to be talking with you um herwig and ze Zeus and everybody, some great minds sharing some great ideas.
Oh, yeah, I'm trying to get some of our other speakers on here.
We're going to be talking not just gemstones, but also rockets,
because Republic is tokenizing SpaceX.
So we should be having our boy, intern the best source to tell us all
about it just make sure we get him on did you say tokenizing rockets well SpaceX okay
what's the Republic guys did you say that's right they are for anyone who's not familiar with Republic
They're a large platform here in the United States have been in the crowdfunding game for a long time
They're one of the first pioneers to start leveraging crypto into their whole ecosystem
They've tokenized a number of different
Products including a football team or a soccer club if if you're American, out of the UK.
And now they are tokenizing SpaceX tokens, well, SpaceX shares,
which, you know, is pretty hotly demanded.
So pretty exciting because that is exposure to rockets.
It's one of the best, they say.
Not investment advice, of course.
None of this space is, but we'll have to wait for him to get on.
And meanwhile, we also are expecting some other folks to join,
but we also have Jason on here from STM, stm.co.
We got a lot of great research and data and news for you.
Our podcast comes out tomorrow.
You can catch it after Zeus's Space, which is also tomorrow
that you should definitely check out.
But Jason, what's going on, man?
What's the latest?
GM, GM, everyone.
Always happy to talk.
Tokens, tokenization.
Zeus, I see you on stage as well.
But yeah, no, really excited.
I think the Republic announcement,
tokenizing rockets,
essentially you write SpaceX,
is really cool.
I believe it's a REG-CF offering, meaning it's open to everyone, which is also fantastic. It's
kind of a core thesis of theirs, right? And I'm curious to see if this is also going to contribute
to the Republic note pool, dividend pool, right, that comes out as well in exposure to that,
right? I think that part of the Republic portfolio gets allocated to that. I think part of the Republic
portfolio gets allocated to that. So it could be one
token impacting another token.
That's extremely exciting. I also wonder if there's
going to be any plans around
secondary because
having that trade also in a capacity
not just to be able to participate, uh, at a
certain strike price would be most interesting. We know they have a relationship with INX and
been building out a lot of stuff. So, uh, it would be pretty cool to see that happen.
We'll have to wait for hopefully the Republic intern to join us and otherwise we'll, we'll
dive into it a little later anyway. But meanwhile, we do have GemX on the stage.
So why don't we pass the mic to you?
Give us a quick introduction on what you're tokenizing and your business.
Sure, sure, sure.
I was just going to say on the topic of Republic before I go into my pitch.
It's actually quite interesting.
We had a talk with the guys from Republic a couple of weeks ago.
And building on what we talked about in the last Twitter space,
it's actually quite a good way to launch in the US through Republic
without having to do a lot of the nasty lawyer work
that you normally would have to do.
And since we talked about the Genius Act last week as well,
or I think it was, was it last week?
Yeah.
It's a good way to work with the Republic guys
because they really know how to launch a product there in the US.
So it's also something that we're exploring.
Yeah.
But on the topic of GemX, we were here already last time.
We were basically fractionalizing the ownership of a full Emerald portfolio,
not as you would normally think about tokenizing gemstones,
single stones in terms of NFTs, as we've seen many, many times, but rather building
a fully, almost a stable coin on top of an asset. And we're doing this with a family office out of
Brazil that own considerable mining operations, not just emeralds they also have
stakes in copper rare earths and other other commodities and they also own a stake in a in a
huge uh investment firm called seabury capital basically get our funding from and we're an
institutional first product so we work with chain link as our proof of reserve. Grand Thornton audits are our gemstones in our holdings in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. And we put that on chain through Chainlink on the Avalanche chain and also Ethereum because we work with Zodiacustody. Yeah, that's basically the short pitch. But, you know, as you know, from last time, I can get really into more of a bit explaining.
We probably will. Again, if anyone has questions in the audience, now is the time. But I love how you gave us the infrastructure setup. This is a very important part to tokenization.
And can you tell us a little bit more about where you're based and who you're targeting as investors?
and who you're targeting sort of as investors?
As you were mentioning infrastructure,
just to point on that,
I think it's what a lot of people don't understand.
It's 2025.
It is super easy to tokenize anything.
Like there's templates online.
You can like tokenizing something
is not a big deal anymore.
What is a big deal is creating the infrastructure around it,
creating a proper proof of reserve,
creating liquidity around it. That's also a huge challenge for most projects.
And it's not about the tech anymore. It's really about a lot of other things. And this is where
we put a lot of focus on it. And our proof of reserve is really our main infrastructural
advancement that we created to make sure that all the tokens are 100%
actual physical emeralds in the vault. And where we are based, we're based in Switzerland,
out of Zug. We have a diverse team from around the world. CEO is Austrian. I'm the co-founder
as well. And we have basically people from all over the world. We're also trying to get a foothold in Dubai.
So as I was explaining last time,
we don't believe in having all the gemstones in one place
as we live and breathe decentralization.
So we have some gemstones in Switzerland,
some in Liechtenstein.
We're currently open a vault in Dubai in the DMCC.
This is where we have the onboarding at the moment. And the next stop
will be Singapore to have their own token and their own vault and then the US as well. So basically
not just have a completely decentralized token infrastructure, but also have the actual commodity
with different custodians decentralized across the world. And you can, I assume, claim your underlying gemstones and actually receive
them at some point? Yeah, yeah. 100%. Yeah. So we are an institutional first product at the moment.
Obviously, there's plans to launch for retail as well. And we will also create a liquidity pool
very soon to be able to do some DeFi magic. But institutional first is really our target.
But you can redeem all the gemstones in the vault with the token,
which is actually quite difficult to do if you think about it.
What we had to do is standardize an asset that's fundamentally non-fungible.
So usually you have something like gold that is fungible, like a gram of gold or an ounce of gold is basically the same everywhere if it's 99 pure
but for gemstones they are completely different each each emerald is unique has their own um
almost like a fingerprint they are really like a piece of art so we had to find a way we call
it the emerald standard unit, to really make this asset
fungible and give you the idea so you know exactly at any point of time how many emeralds or how many
kilograms of emeralds almost you get with your tokens. And this is what we did. It kind of would
explode this space a little bit to explain you all about the Emerald Standard Unit. But as you will know,
the most important thing is that each stone gets a specific number of Emerald Standard Unit,
and this corresponds to a value of stones in the vault. And the Emerald Standard Unit has a dollar
value assigned to it, so you know exactly how much emeralds you get with your tokens and how
much those are worth. Absolutely awesome. That's a really
well thought out platform to be able to, you know, I think, I don't know how easy it is for
these institutions in terms of vehicles that they invest in to get access to gemstones,
but I can't imagine they get this level of transparency and accuracy to their investment.
Very cool stuff.
So what, yeah, go ahead.
No, just one last point.
It's because I had an event last night and a guy came up to me and he said,
listen, I've been mining Ethereum
when it was like $1 per ETH.
And I've been in this space for a long time,
but why can I not just put this on an Oracle
database? And then I was like, okay, yeah, even my grandma would know if she was working with this
Oracle database, how to manipulate it if she had control over it. This is something that you cannot
do working with blockchain. So you don't have the risk of just, you know, a central party taking
advantage of the data itself, because it's not just an
Oracle database, it's written unalienable on the chain. And even for someone deeply into the space,
he just with that statement, just comparing our normal Oracle database compares to the chain,
he could see the value of RWA. And this is really interesting to me that a lot of people
that are deeply into crypto have not fully understood the idea behind RWA yet. And this
is also, you know, in terms of adoption and getting more people into the space, something that we have
to figure out how to really, you know, communicate the upside and the narrative around rwa to people from outside
the space no i i absolutely love it i i i'm a big fan i got you know we dug into it last time a
little bit at the market opportunity too over 40 billion in gemstones out there i do have one more
of a a little bit of a tougher question not too tough but before we do i want to see anyone else on stage want to ask any questions to gem x and welcome in uh ray from rwa world how you doing ray
doing fantastic always great to be here with you guys uh just joining with my
keemwa stir fry and uh that's yet to be tokenized but uh tokenized gemstones let's go
any hipfire questions?
Yeah, super interested in the custody and grading aspect.
I'm familiar with Diamond Standard and how they were able to get the diamonds as a commodity essentially to become commodified via the gradation, the cut, the clarity, and create
fungible products off of that.
Really curious how you're thinking about approaching the emerald market.
Is it a similar kind of landscape there?
I'm actually less familiar with emeralds as a gemstone.
Yeah, I mean, great question.
It was, we had this question last time.
So I'll try to approach it a little bit different
maybe than I did last time.
I mean, last time I really compared the diamond standard
with what we're trying to do.
So we're really not tokenizing single stones.
We're tokenizing a portfolio.
But to talk about custody and grading,
which is part of this proof of reserve process
that I was outlaying earlier.
So the way that it works for us,
the international standard for diamonds
is much more, let's say, standardized
than it is for emeralds.
That is because, as I was explaining last time as well, the diamond market is really controlled by one entity, and that is the bears.
And they were interested in just selling as many engagement rings as possible, but not really if the diamond market goes up or down or sideways.
It's really about selling the stones.
But the diamond market itself is artificially blown up because it's you can think about an emerald or a ruby to be about 20 to 30 times more rare than a diamond.
And so but they had readily access to diamonds, you know, big deal in South Africa and stuff.
So they obviously blew up the diamond market.
But the emerald market much more fractionalized.
There's no player holding more than 10 percent of the full market and much more difficult,
really standardized.
So what we did, we created this emerald standard unit framework together with 40 gemological
experts, GIA trained gemologists in Brazil that are employed by the family office that
we work with.
They put together the portfolios then, because we obviously have to have another third party involved
this goes to gublin which is in based in luzerne one of the major um international gem laboratories
they also by the way fun fact they built their own private blockchain to verify the provenance
of each stone as well called provenance proof it's their own startup so they're quite forward
thinking they also employ ai really coolubilin, look it up.
And then we also use WGI, which is based in London, the World Gemological Institute.
In addition to grading, they also give a value to the stones.
So this is based on an international framework called GemGuides that gives you the current value for the stones
according to their quality.
So we have the quality from Gubilin
and the grading or the evaluation really from WGI.
This is then put into the vault, audited by Grant Thornton.
So Grant Thornton, they audit the process.
So make sure that the stones are there
and that everyone has followed process properly.
They give the number to Chainlink. And then with the data feed from Chainlink,
they rewrite it with Fireblocks onto the chain
or with Chainlink onto the chain and Fireblocks mince the token.
And this is done on Avalanche blockchain.
So this is really the full proof of reserve process, as you would say.
But grading is the most important thing for us.
So the standard portfolio that we have, the 1 million, will be published on the website.
So currently it's on the way to Switzerland.
We've done 100K already and the rest will be done very soon.
It's in the laboratory.
And then it will be published on the website for any gemologist to be able to verify,
is this grading done according to international gemological standards?
And this is really the transparency that we want to portray,
that everyone can really see what we're doing, understand what we're doing,
and follow our process.
Love it. Love it. Well, we're going to move on from, from gemstones for a minute, unless anyone
else has any questions. Now's the time real quick, stay on the topic. I'm going to come back to it
with my question later, but, um, Ray, you know, why don't you give a quick introduction to
everybody who is up here, uh, what you're working on. 100% happy to do it.
Absolutely love that comprehensive response from Jambeck's super fascinating stuff.
That kind of speaks to the heart of what we're doing over at RWA World.
Hey, everyone.
Ray Buckman, head of research at RWA World.
You can find us at, you guessed it, rwa.world.
We keep it simple.
We maintain the largest publicly accessible database here in the industry with over 500 entrants of tokenizers issuers and everything in between helping to give you a one
stop shop for business development market research whatever you need to do to keep your finger on the
pulse of what's happening in the tokenization industry we also offer a newsletter that's
subscribed uh from entities from the european central bank dtTCC, VanEck, KrakenCoinbase, JP Morgan.
They seem to like what we're doing.
You may as well.
So we try to give you a one-stop shop,
8 o'clock in the morning, every Friday,
Eastern Standard Time,
a finger on the pulse of what's happening.
Our current foray is into RWA data feed.
So really cool things coming down the pipe there
in terms of pipelining off-chain data on-chain,
but I've already taken enough of your absolutely valuable time.
So thank you all so much for having me
and super stoked to dive into the world of tokenization with you.
You always offer great insights. We're glad to have you on. Thanks to everybody being on stage.
Obviously, I'm going to tell everyone listening to give them a follow. They're absolute leaders
in the RWA space and can be your guides in many cases. Shout out to Zeus and Boz and Ray, of course. But also,
this is a community effort. We're all heard together. So there's no reason not to follow
everyone else that's in this chat. They're all interested in RWA. So I'm sure we all can learn
from each other and support each other this way, make the herd algorithm grow, if you will.
But with that, any questions that come up, or if you want to raise your hand and come join us, please do.
But I'm going to quickly turn it over and put the credit guy on the spot,
no other than Boris over there.
You had the liberty of having some time to dig through our rather large report long report on on uh
our recap of a three-day conference that we had in new york tokenize this actually ray was there
and of course jason helped put put on the whole thing with stm.co there and uh yeah tell us what
you think what any insights to share yeah i mean uh absolutely it was my morning coffee read this morning
and um i i i posted about it uh and mentioned that i think that the quality of what you guys
are producing is getting to this institutional standard which i think is what everybody should be aiming at in terms of the standard that they look to bring in terms of,
in terms of, you know, the quality of research and the quality of writing that needs to be presented.
But I mean, I'm biased, right? biased right I really liked what Anthony Morrow had to say especially with regards to you know
the speed of a rollout of stable coins and and you know other kind of related products because
what really gives me the heebie-jeebies all the time is when people say oh this is gonna be a
sea change and you won't recognize the world
by the end of the decade or by the end of the year or by the end of the month i'm like okay
everybody can we just pump the brakes and what he said about look there's gonna be a slower rollout
um you know akin to people adopting etfs uh rather than what happened with internet adoption and i
think that that's true because when a lot of people say,
oh, what we're doing in blockchain, what we're doing in RWA is like the internet.
I quasi disagree because with the internet adoption,
you had no skin in the game.
I mean, what's the worst that could happen with the adoption of the internet?
Okay, you got knocked off the modem, if anybody remembers dial up uh if somebody needed to take a phone call right but
you weren't putting your life savings into the internet i mean a lot of people lost money in
the dot-com bubble but it's kind of not the same thing adoption which involves people um you know
putting their nuts on the line um as the case may be uh from a financial
perspective that's going to take a lot more time because people really need to price that risk for
themselves and understand whether or not they want that kind of exposure so um yeah i really found
anthony morris takes about the um the true likelihood of adoption and the speed at which adoption will be driven.
I found that really interesting.
And I also am a big fan of the guys at Maple Finance.
So I was reading with interest what Sidney Powell and those guys had to share.
and those guys had to share.
I've actually written a little piece on Maple
with the help of our very own Titan of Tennessee, Ray Buckton.
And I hope to be publishing that in the next couple of days, potentially.
So, yeah, I'll have some kind of more involved thoughts
about Sydney and Maple posting on myX in the coming hours and days.
Oh, I can't wait for that. Can't wait for that. And appreciate that context. I mean,
Anthony Moore is a legend running the Providence labs over there, ProvLabs. And I actually think
his pedigree in finance helps him have a really unique insight running a sort of blockchain lab with Providence and Figure, which, you know, they have the most RWAs off the HELOC state power.
They do literally hundreds of millions, if not over four or five hundred million a month now in HELOCs on that chain.
So they have a lot of cool things going on in the world of Figure, Providence, ProvLabs and all that good stuff.
So some great insight. Boris, really quickly tell the folks here listening,
tell them about your story and your focus on private credit
and what you're doing in the space.
Maybe a little shout out to Kasu.
Yeah, absolutely.
Thanks so much.
I mean, yeah, so I'm head of capital markets at Kasu Finance.
Kasu Finance is bringing structured credit on chain in.
I just was singing Maple's praises, but now I'm going to maybe slightly shade them a little bit in a much less opaque, more transparent way than, for example, a Maple or even a Goldfinch or similar.
Every user can see exactly what they're investing in.
see exactly what they're investing in. They can track exactly what they're investing in,
rather than just putting capital into a kind of amorphous pool of credit opportunities,
which is what Maple and Co. currently offer. So I think that that's a really key differentiator.
What happens is you put your money into these pools, and then we go out and we leverage it.
We is a strong word. I go out and I speak to banks and credit funds
and I tell them about the very interesting
credit originators that we have.
We currently have an MVP credit originator called Absium.
We have several others that we're in talks with
and we leverage that capital
to drive more lending opportunities,
which drives more yield,
much of which is captured by users.
So I think that it's an incredible value generative opportunity and it's open to the public,
which is very rare as private credit. In terms of my story, I started my career in investment banking.
I then thereafter actually fell into doing non-bank lending advisory and walking companies through structured finance deals.
And I actually was watching Cassidy be presented on stage and was so enamored by the product that I ran up to the founder and CEO and said, you've got to securitize this.
This will be a hundred plus million dollar securitization.
And then, you know, so on and so forth.
And we kind of ideated and reformed the product together.
But really, I'm not very much a TradFi person
rather than a DeFi person similar to Mr. Morrow.
So much so that, you know, Zeus has had me pinging him. He calls me Uncle Boris
because I'll ping him and say, hey, how do I do a quote tweet? You know, what am I doing with this
X stuff? So thanks very much to the whole community. Herwig, Zeus, Ray, Jason, all of you
guys for showing me the way and being very, very patient with this
tired old ex-investment banker. We're excited to see the rise of the credit guy. You're going to
be a big influence in the space and you're helping a lot of us learn what you've learned in your
career and how that's applying to tokenization and private credit. So we're glad to have you.
And obviously it's the folks at Kosta
who are doing some cool stuff over there.
Awesome.
Well, unfortunately, we're not getting a communication here
with the intern from Republic,
but we can go through the offering.
So I'm going to pass it over to Jason,
who's pretty familiar with it,
just break it down for everybody on what they just did.
It's pretty big news, I think.
Yeah, no, it's definitely interesting.
It's an intriguing way that they're doing it, right?
So they're not tokenizing the actual stock.
It's what they're calling a mirror token.
And really what it is, it's a debt security.
So they have a little company called, or a side company called Republic X LLC.
And basically what my understanding is,
essentially Republic X is acquiring the stock, right?
They own it.
But you as the token holder, the mirror token holder,
you do not have access to the stock or the voting or any of that.
But what you do get is the financial upside upon a liquidation event.
So for example, if SpaceX in this case goes in IPOs,
any proceeds from that gets pro rata shared over to the token holders. Um,
if they get acquired, same situation, right? Um,
I think it's really cool that SpaceX is the first one that they're doing this
with because it's, it's a name brand.
I think a lot of people are excited about what they're doing, um,
and are familiar with that, uh that ecosystem, you know, all the
government contracts and whatnot. You can learn all about it on their offering page. The waitlist
is open for anyone who wants to check it out. Obviously, do your own research. No financial
advice here. And then aside from that, they also did announce the other companies that they're,
I guess, planning on also bringing to market through this structure. You know, Figma is one of them for any of the developers
and product managers on the call here.
Anthropic, you know, the ones behind some of the AIs here.
Ramp Canva, which is also a lifesaver.
I would do that one, right?
So it's really cool.
But yeah, I'll pause there.
And the last thing I'll add is that you're right, Herrig,
there could be a potential for trading in the meantime while any of these companies find
that liquidation event. And that could very likely be through INX as that acquisition
comes to fruition now. Appreciate the breakdown. That's a very interesting model, Mirror Tokens.
Republic's always coming up with unique structures. That's really on the
bleeding edge of tokenization here. I love it. I think there's a lot of potential with it. It's
probably one of the easiest ways they could get access to it and tokenize it because it's probably
filled with restrictions and rules that wouldn't allow for that case. So this is probably the next
best thing they could do to create some kind of exposure
to the to the underlying asset of course none of this is investment advice is what i talk about but
feel free to shoot from the hip guys any comments on this structure
or what republic is doing from the uh the speaker gallery here
I find it pretty interesting to consider how public companies will look at this once it's
done.
You mentioned some of the forward moving companies, some of the younger ones that are looking
for capital.
But what about, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on what about some of the more,
I guess let's call it senior companies, like when will a General Electric or something like that consider tokenizing their shares?
Is that something that they'd consider or you think this is more of a play by the up and coming scale ups of the world?
Honestly, like the GEs and the big blue chip name stocks have less of an incentive aside
from maybe getting rid of some naked shorts.
But they have less of an incentive, I think, to come on.
I think the opportunity here really is for, to your point, the up and comings and the
scale ups here, like Revolut, Stripe.
These are big companies with real business going on that just are private.
But I think it's really cool that Repolig is making it accessible this way.
And also, I think by making it a debt security and with this structure, to your point, Herbig, on the restrictions, like now it's available to retail.
You know, it won't trade for 12 months, but again, it could later on.
It won't trade for 12 months, but again, it could later on.
So it's an easier way to both make it easier to move as well as have that lower ticket minimum.
I think it's like a $50 minimum, which is pretty cool, opening up to a lot of people.
And again, these are the big name brands.
And Republic's not just doing it with big companies that might be household names, but also big institutions like Hamilton Lane
offering one of their typically institutional products that now you can get access to retail
for a hundred bucks. So that's pretty darn cool too. I think it's on Solana. So they're on,
you know, just building out a great shop, I think over there is good company to follow and a
proud foundation member. We got a lot of insight and support from them. But yeah, of course, do your own research, folks,
as we like to say. I'm going to fire back to DemX real quick with my question,
which is for diamonds, everybody likes to talk about diamonds, but there's also the concept of an artificially made lab diamond.
Is any of that kind of applicable to gemstones, or are we talking about truly rare, unique minerals?
I mean, you're absolutely right. Great question.
Obviously, in the U.S. at the moment, 60% of new, and this is probably already old data,
it's higher now probably, is actually lab-grown diamonds.
I mean, it's not as big in Europe yet, but we're seeing more and more jewellers coming out with their lab-grown, you know, jewelry, you know, like designs and everything.
So lab-grown diamonds have really become a thing and they're here to stay and they're really disrupting the market. We've seen that diamond market really tumble and not just because
of tariffs, but also because of the pressure, you know, that they're under from the synthetics.
Emeralds actually have been, synthetic emeralds have been a thing much, much longer than synthetic
diamonds. They were actually, the first synthetic diamond was,
or the first proper one was produced in Austria,
my home country.
But they have never taken a foothold in the market.
So you can currently trade a synthetic emerald for around $8 a carat.
Similar emerald would be around maybe like 10 to 11,000 a carat natural one.
And this is the reason for this.
And this is really important is that every single Emerald is unique.
So it's almost like a Picasso.
You know, of course, I can, if I was a good painter, I could maybe paint Picasso.
That's almost as nice or, you know, maybe 99% like a Picasso, but it probably would trade for a couple hundred bucks. But the real thing, and Picasso is one of the most traded artists out there,
is always gonna trade for millions
or at least a couple hundred thousand.
So this is really the difference in the market.
It's that the synthetics in the gemstone market
and the whole color gemstone market,
it's talking rubies, sapphires and emeralds,
have not taken a foot hold at all
and are not a thing in
the jewelry industry. Only used in really in the industry and then in the like for lasers and stuff
there or for the watch industry there you use synthetics. Fascinating, fascinating. I'm always
learning that a really great answer and I get the emphasis on, you know, the infrastructure you've developed to really show not just the custody and the value of the asset, but also that you guys have, you know, done all that work to make sure they're real, real emeralds and soon other gemstones, as I understand it.
When I first entered the space, I was so surprised to hear, you know, some of the emeralds, for example, from Zimbabwe, they're older than organic cells themselves.
So you have, they're older than the atoms in our bodies.
They're millions of years old.
And this kind of history is kind of, you know, just time that the earth took to create this asset.
I think this is, this counts for something.
And it's almost like Bitcoin where a lot of energy,
a lot of time and a lot of compute has gotten into producing the,
the tokens or the Bitcoin that we have today.
And that's actually very similar with Emeralds as well.
That's, that's where I can't wait to keep following this journey.
Consider us, consider me a huge fan.
And Zeus, I know you're a fan as well.
I want to turn it over to you real quick.
Shout out to all the work you're doing in this space.
The conversation that I want to switch gears to is RWA utility tokens.
So instead of just buying the emeralds themselves or buying tokenized assets themselves, you
can now also buy RWA utility tokens that are tied to the infrastructure or the providers
behind them.
We've seen a lot of success, some multi-billion dollar tokens like Ondo and Syrup and Proppy
and many other great tokens that are out there as examples.
And even arguably some really large top 25 ones,
like I think Chainlink and Ripple are going to be completely RWA companies in the future.
So what do you think, Zeus?
I saw you posted that you added some new tokens to your bag.
Tell us your thesis on all this.
Yeah, I mean, I'm a man who's obviously very into RWA's.
I've been here for years, or what feels like years anyway.
And over the last, I'd say, six weeks to kind of two months,
there's been a big influx of new tokens, new projects
that I've never heard of.
People are tokenizing anything
and everything. And I do love it. But it's obviously important to understand that not
everything needs to be tokenized and not everything actually will have good yield. Any post I do on my
Twitter is usually just off the cuff. It doesn't necessarily mean that that's going to work.
Today I've done a few posts. I spoke about tokenizing avocado farms i spoke about nuclear energy which boris was um is really into i spoke
about uh solar farms and wind turbine farms as well um and yeah it's really interesting to kind
of look at the potential yield there but like i say i want to clarify that not everything needs to be tokenized um and my posts
are just a bit of you know a bit of education and a bit of you know what if this was tokenized type
thing um so yeah i've been chilling and i'm loving all the new projects coming in even today i heard
there's people tokenizing like duran fruits and just everything and it's just every day there
seems to be a new thing in a and i just love how the space is growing every day.
I hate to say that it's only going to get crazier and crazier.
It's going to be awesome.
I got to ask, man, was there a red pill moment for you for RWAs?
Like what got you into the space?
Tell everyone your story on that.
Yeah, I mean, I've been been working with me for quite a while
doing you know kind of cm work um and you know i was into rws of course like you know when you're
working within within the business you're you also have to have some kind of interest um and
then i don't know something kind of when i just a week before i maybe opened up the lounge i don't
there wasn't actually a moment but but I was just sitting there,
and I think I had a question,
and I couldn't get the answer on Google,
and I was even asking ChatGPT,
and I couldn't get a good enough answer,
and I was just like, you know what?
There needs to be a place where we can all go ask questions
and kind of have conversations about, you know,
RWAs, tokenization, whatever it is.
And I guess you could say that was the moment I was like,
right, shit. If no one's going to do this,'ll do it and i'll i'll bring the people together and we can
all kind of kind of grow from there and it's been maybe god i don't even know it's maybe been two
months or so and we're at 520 530 members um and it's still kind of invite only i only want the
the proper people to come in the ones that are actually interested i don't want any old person coming in who's going to join in and give nothing to the
group so yeah i'd say that was my moment and i'm just looking forward to the next 500 joining in
oh no i have no doubt it's gonna grow to that but definitely i can speak to the quality of the
curation there's a bit of a who's who in there, as well as a lot of good, just active, passionate people about RWAs
and moving the conversation forward.
So it's nice to have a safe space to be able to talk about this.
So shoot Seuss an invite.
Make sure you're following him.
Give him a DM.
And just maybe you might get that invite link.
And I see a hand raised from Remy.
What's going on, dude?
Yeah. get that invite link and i see a hand raised from remy uh what's going on dude uh yeah well to bet to return back to the topic i know that zeus your your posts about tokenizing farmlands and everything
so on that's just a fun aspect but is there like some some uh building that you would really like
to get tokenized which one would you you choose if you had to pick?
It's a good question. One of the ones that comes to my mind is actually an abandoned building in Saudi Arabia, in Jeddah.
It was meant to basically rival the Burj Khalifa. They started the construction of it and it got abandoned halfway through and so it's just sat there and I feel like that's like that's a thing where they might not have the funding but if it was tokenized worldwide
and institutions and retail could come in and fund it then you know I think that's something
think I think in in general not necessarily just that building but I think abandoned places and
buildings have got a I think there's a decent sized market there where you can come in and
kind of fix stuff up and and make kind of good yield on it so yeah no good question well that's also that's also a good point
but i was thinking something maybe like the that's it that new city in saudi arabia uh i'm not sure
how it was it called like the line or something like that oh the line yeah yeah that looks like
a very big investment opportunity from my side.
I'm not sure what you think about it.
Oh, yeah, 100%.
I mean, you know, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, they're all preparing for the future.
They want to be the place where everybody goes.
And if they change some of the laws, I don't think, personally,
I don't know if Saudi Arabia is ready for the world to come over there yet.
There are certain laws that I don't think suit us people over here.
But I think if they can kind of fix stuff up and make it suit us more,
I think that Saudi Arabia will be a place where, yeah, I think investment will be good.
I still feel like right now Dubai's miles and miles ahead,
and I'd personally be investing in the new PAM.
There's a new PAM coming to Dubai, and I've heard that that might be an investment opportunity again,
not financial advice, I've just heard stuff about it and so I'd be looking more there than
Saudi Arabia at the moment. Well could you explain us a bit more about what rules are
there in Saudi Arabia that's not allowing us really to accelerate in that space because I'm not really
that old into RWAs. Yeah yeah no it's not even necessarily RWAs I just mean in general for people
to move over there that one of the big laws is the is the no alcohol and I think I know as bad
as it sounds that stops a lot of people from going over. I know it does. And I understand it's, you know,
it's a Muslim country and that's just their religion,
but I think it's going to prevent a lot of people,
you know, from going over.
You see Dubai, you know, they've taken it away.
It's only certain areas where you can't drink.
And I just think that, you know,
you're not going to get people going over there
if you can't drink, unfortunately.
Yeah, yeah, I totally understand you.
I was thinking more of the tech aspect.
The tech, to be fair.
No, I'm not saying anything to do with tech-wise.
I just mean in general, as in getting people over there.
I think that's a bit of a speed bump.
In terms of, you know, they've got all the ideas
and all the money in the world to build anything they want.
But actually attracting the people,
they will need to change certain certain aspects lifestyle's lifestyle's fundamentally more
important actually 100 tech regulation yeah i mean i mean i'm not the biggest drinker on the planet
but i think that um a state which enforces capital and physical punishment as part of its legal codex is not a state that
I want to live in. That's why you wouldn't catch me relocating to Dubai or Saudi Arabia for that
matter. And I mean, just from a architectural perspective, the line is one of the stupidest
projects I've ever seen in my entire life. It might be good from an investment perspective
because the entire country is floating on top of an ocean of crude oil, but I don't really see it.
And when the oil runs out, they're going to have to have some serious thinking about what are they actually doing as a country to develop their economy beyond being effectively a banana republic that is food for cars.
That's where I think blockchain is a big part of their narrative.
That's where I think blockchain is a big part of their narrative.
And they're definitely putting in place the laws, the regulation, and what's needed for tokenization to invite that.
And I think you might see a lot of people say, you know, this might be a good investment.
I don't need to relocate there, but via token, I might buy and get some exposure to this.
exposure to this. And they might offer some good incentives too. But yeah, no, I think
And they might offer some good incentives, too.
what's more exciting is that anything around the world that can be tokenized, at least
you didn't say power plants and nuclear power plants, or we wouldn't hear the end of it
from Boris.
You know, another country that I want to throw into the ring is Qatar. I don't know if you guys have really followed what they're doing.
We've been in contact with the government and some officials as well.
And they're really trying to get more business into the country.
They offered us great support to build a customer success center there.
So it's incredible what they're doing. Also, they have, you know, I'm not exaggerating, but like they have trillions in cash to throw at projects.
So, you know, obviously similar issues than Saudi Arabia, maybe not to that extent, but it's also a country to take a look at or to keep an eye on.
Yeah, it's exciting that in the next couple of years
you can basically just point to a map and say hey i want to invest here and find some token deals
that hopefully you can get access to pretty easily uh that's that's one of the big trends
for sure well we're we're gonna top near the hour soon so again uh want to make sure that everybody
in the audience if you have any questions if anyone's working on a cool RWA project, raise your hand.
We can do a quick little lightning round and let some people speak on what they're working on.
But otherwise, we will keep the conversation going.
And just a shout out to the folks out there, Alpha.RWA always pulling up.
I see you, George, Miro, and U Lisa you and blaze and Doris line and many many
often faces on here love to see it go give everyone a follow that's how we roll but in the
meantime any comments from the the gallery here any topics we want to discuss in the final 10 minutes otherwise we will switch gear to
to some uh wally updates go ahead zeus yo yo i had one more question for gem x um i don't think
i've asked this before but i wanted to know the kind of yield comparison on you know emeralds to
sapphires to diamonds to rubies um and ultimately is our emeralds the the best yield burn uh asset or like yeah that's my question
so in in general uh you have obviously you have the big three right so ruby sapphires and emeralds
um emeralds are right between sapphires and rubies so rubies tend to have somewhat of a more stable gain on the very top.
So the most, let's say, prestigious rubies,
they have a bigger gain than the most prestigious emeralds.
However, having said that, emerald is a very, very common stone
or very, not common, but very popular stone in the US.
So in the US, you have a higher yield on the more liquid quality grades.
So the ones that we're using four to eight, they tend to outpace rubies. And what you have with
rubies, they come from like the most prestigious rubies. They come from Myanmar, for example,
which historically, or not just historically, like recently, has had some trouble with, you know,
just some internal troubles and also with sanctions from the US.
So there the supply chains are not properly or not as easily accessible.
Having said that, we're still planning on tokenizing rubies as well in the future.
And we're very bullish on rubies and sapphires as well.
Sapphires is actually the ones, blue sapphires I'm saying here, are the ones that are most difficult to evaluate because Kashmir sapphires, it's an interesting story.
They were only mined for about two years.
It was a rock fall in this, you know, between India and Pakistan, this Kashmir region that fell and it had some sapphires in it.
And it's actually the most sought after and prestigious sapphires you can find in the world.
They're extremely rare.
We used to have one, a seven carat stone valued around a million.
But, you know, those are the outliers.
The normal sapphires, they're obviously below what an emerald would get,
but still very bullish on these stones.
So you're looking at an annual appreciation between those stones around seven,
8%. And in the last few years,
we've even had 13% for the emeralds that we're talking about.
That's awesome. I can't wait to, to be able to play in that,
that playground of different gemstones, I should say.
So I get the vision you're building.
And again, we'll be supporting you along the way.
It's absolutely awesome.
Any predictions around the gallery
that we can go on real quick
in terms of what they think
is going to be the hottest topic
if they have to name this year,
the year of the RWA what what topic would that be uh for to define 2025 what should
we look forward to for the next half of the year i would go around the room uh but i'm gonna start
with uh ray i am so sorry i was uh corralling a two-year-old out of my uh my office successfully might i add
um could you kick that question that is a fair excuse uh and sounds like you were successful
so that's good uh no the question was what would you define 2025 as in in like call it the year
of the history books for rwas what's's the main topic that you would define 2025 for?
Oh, 100%.
I would call it the year of the Cambrian explosion.
It's really the year, having been aware of tokenized assets since late 2018 and really
working deeply with them since 2023, this is the year where really it's on everyone's
mind, not least because we have the Genius Act, we have the legitimization of the form of stable coins.
But this is the point in time where traditional financial institutions are beginning to look at our industry, not with confusion and kind of scratching of heads, but general enthusiasm where they say, hey, there's something here.
Now, naturally, I definitely agree with what Boris was saying regarding Anthony Morrow, his perspective saying that it's going to be more like the adoption of ETFs.
But ultimately, we are starting to see kind of that adoption curve where we are at the base of that hockey stick growth pattern.
Because thus far, our industry has really just been kind of looks of derision and confusion.
And now it's looks of curiosity and enthusiasm.
So year of the Cambrian explosion for tokenized assets.
That's a big one. That's a big one.
That's a lot to do with I never would say, never thought I would say that
Trump helped spearhead a lot of making that possible.
I don't know why he didn't do it the first term. Let's go over to
Zeus. How would you define this year so far?
How would I define this year? far? How would I define this year?
How am I meant to go after race just fucking read off all that shit?
How would I define this year?
I mean, I'd say so far it's a year of, I don't know if I want to say adoption is the word.
I want to say a year of education.
And I'm just going to leave it there.
I love it. I love it.
Jason, how would you describe it?
Not an official STM.co opinion.
No, no, personal opinion here.
But yeah, I would say it's the year of consolidation.
Piggyback off Ray's point on institutions paying attention to this.
I think a lot of them are either making investments into, heavy investments into RWA companies or acquiring them.
And then even within the industry itself, right?
So seeing a lot of that already in the first six months of the year.
I can see that continuing for the rest of the year as people kind of get their ducks in a row for their strategies and how they want to enter the market if they haven't
already. Love it. Love it. Remy, Remy Warrior, what you got? You can't say gemstones. Yeah,
of course. Don't worry. I'm not going to say that. Well, to continue with Zeus's opinion,
I also think that education was a big part in this year,
especially with the rise of info finance that we've seen with Kaito and other projects.
Oh, yeah.
No, for sure.
For sure.
GemX?
Yeah, for me, it's, I would say, the year of the stablecoin.
And maybe not just of the stablecoin, maybe the RWA-backed stablecoin.
And maybe not just of the stablecoin, maybe the RWA-backed stablecoin.
I guess we're going beyond the stablecoin as just a hedge or like a way out in bear markets.
We're producing yield on top of stablecoins.
We see DeFi doing incredible things with stablecoins.
I just love what's happening with stable coins at this moment.
I just love what's happening with stablecoins at this moment.
There's so many.
There's so many, and it seems like more and more innovation
and also legislation coming out on stable coins.
It's just a great evolution to see.
No, it totally is.
Finally, credit guy.
I guess I'll get to go last, but where's my office?
Well, I was going to say it's the year of
the stable coin so i was i was stabbed through the heart when jemex got me but i'm gonna say it
you know yeah it's the year of the stable coin and private credit will be the proving ground of that
of that year um as off-chain assets increasingly find an on-chain expression, I think stablecoins will necessarily become a preferred medium
for capital deployment and repayment.
They're going to get rid of wires,
or banks are going to realize that wires are less efficient
and FX causes massive headaches,
and they're going to increasingly navigate
towards instant programmable liquidity.
Private credit funds especially will be adopting stables
to improve transparency and speed settlements
and tap into global capital.
I had a meeting just yesterday about somebody
who's building at the heart of this.
And I think LPs are just going to demand this increasingly.
Borrowers are going to prefer it increasingly.
And service providers will build around that tech increasingly.
So I'm excited to watch it play out.
Yeah, stable coins are really the backbone.
The RWA hidden in plain sight, as I like to say.
It seems like that's where the rescue of this conversation is.
that's where the rescue of this conversation is. And I would absolutely agree. It's that year
And I would absolutely agree.
that the Genius Act, that Circle IPO-ing with incredible success. Obviously, the fact that
we're going to have a lot more new stablecoin providers entering the space and the fact that
it's probably going to double potentially, at least $300 billion by the end of the year, that's a nice amount of on-chain money that can flow into RWAs now.
And I think private credit is absolutely going to be one of the things that are chased.
That's why my favorite topic is always vaults.
That's probably going to be next year's defining topic, I think, that's really going to drive the adoption and mass, mass money coming into RWAs.
And it all is a combination of everything we're talking about here.
So I want to thank the panel once again.
Everybody follow everybody.
And let's stay connected.
Come join us in the Telegram.
We're going to have some big announcements coming out soon for some new partners. We're going to be announcing
some of our ambassadors and educators
as part of WALL-E.
And we finally are getting close
to our big reveal
on how you'll be able to participate
in our plans to go live with our token.
We had an incredible conversation
with Ray before this.
Man, if y'all could have listened to that,
you would be going crazy.
We cannot wait to build in the open with you, but for now we have to perfect this little bit before we go live with our plans. Uh, and, uh, we're getting
closer and closer by the day. So all we can do is get loud trunks up everybody. Uh, you know,
let's, uh, support each other's uses, uh, water, water, Zeus's egg space is this tomorrow.
You got Ray's, I believe, today at 2 p.m.
Correct me if I'm wrong, Ray.
And yep, it's at 2 p.m.
And yeah, can't wait to see everybody again next week.
We do these every Thursday.
It's the RWA watering hole.
We want to push RWAs forward together.
So no idea is a bad idea.
Let's make it happen team
thanks everybody happy tokenizing thanks guys great conversation everyone cheers guys
adios
