Making Tokenization a Reality: Bringing Assets Onchain | Samara Cohen
Episode publishedPodcast: EmpireEmpire
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How's everyone doing today? Thank you. Thank you. One person. Alright. Good. Thank you. Yes. Need more of that. Well, you guys should be excited. We have Samara Cohen who is both the global head of market development at BlackRock, and also just one of my favorite people in this world to talk to. So, yeah, real excited about this, welcome, Samara.
Thank you, Jason. I'm excited to be here.
Yeah. I I'd love to get your take on, you have one of the most interesting minds when it comes to just global market structure and how all these things, prediction markets, crypto, equities, everything is coming together. I'd love to get your, like, macro view on just what is happening with market structure today.
So I'm incredibly excited to be here today because I just got back from a week in Europe. I spent time in Paris and in Brussels. And I really think that the next six to twelve months in decisions that are being made around market structure and market design are going to inform the shape of global capital markets for the next decade or more. And I'm not just talking about digital assets and crypto. I'm really talking about the capital markets, what they are, who accesses them, and how, you know, broad the investable universe is. Because as a function of new technologies like blockchain and also
Yeah. Why, okay, so let's say, so you mentioned the regulators yesterday and the policy makers. So it seems like the policy makers and the regulators are on our side. We've got a lot of momentum. We've got tailwinds. We've got this tech that's probably better than ever. Why does it kind of feel like it actually isn't working right now? Like, why are the tokens down? And why yeah. What are the hang ups to what's happening right now?
So I guess I would say the biggest one is I would kind of reframe, like, there is a problem already if we are talking about what side we're on. Right? I think to make this technology deliver into its promise, we need to be on the side of building strong resilient markets and the investor experience. And specifically, like we had a really important learning for investor experience the weekend of October 10, is that, like, there are a lot of market design considerations that really need to be developed and developed pretty quickly on crypto rails given the pace at which tokenization is going. Be
Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I spoke with Robbie yesterday, who's the head of digital assets at BlackRock, you both brought up October 10. What do you maybe taking that a step further, what what do we I mean, everyone in in this room is kinda building these systems. So what do we actually have to get right? So that if, you know, we have another moment like that, but, know, tokenization, tokenized assets have grown a 100 What what is the thing that we need to make sure that we get right here?
So I think that, first of all, just looking at October 10 and taking every moment that happens in markets, and there will be more, and learning from it is critically important. And one of the key learnings, probably from my perspective, the biggest learning from October 10 is what I think of as the Oracle problem, is the mechanism by which we ensure market participants have the right price information at the right time so they can act. And there were multiple points of failures in terms of pricing sources and data that led to kind of the cascading events that happened on October 10. So that me
Yeah. What do you think about tokenized stocks?
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