JD Durkin: Anna Wroblewska joins us here on the show. She returns to the show, CBO at Dinari. Nice to see you again.
Anna Wroblewska: It’s great to see you.
JD Durkin: So now you just opened up more than 700 tokenized stocks and ETFs to eligible U.S. investors. For someone unfamiliar with the process, what could someone do with a tokenized stock that maybe they could not quite as easily do with a regular share?
Anna Wroblewska: So when you think about tokenized stocks, you have to think about the product level and the infrastructure level.
On the product level, what we are unlocking is really more future benefits, I would say. So things like programmability, instant settlement, a bunch of asset management products that I think are going to get really interesting.
On the infrastructure side, our real goal for the U.S. is to unlock the ability of other broker-dealers, so broker-dealer networks, service bureaus, to offer tokenized stock products to their customers and begin to bring about, I think, the real key changes that come.
So things like token-to-token swaps. You can do that in crypto, can’t do it in traditional finance yet, and much more to come.
JD Durkin: And of course, a lot of tokenization happens offshore for people who are familiar with the ecosystem. What does it mean to be onshore, and what are the key differentiators there?
Anna Wroblewska: I think the real thing that this shows is that there is a path to doing this in the U.S. We’ve been saying that for several years now.
And I think a lot of the things that you hear are that this just isn’t possible right now. And again, it’s important to make a distinction between products here. We say “tokenized stocks.” It can mean so many different things.
And what I think a lot of people are referring to is you can’t issue synthetic tokenized stocks in the U.S., and that is true and remains true. But the ability to bring stocks on-chain is absolutely possible, and we’re really excited to be demonstrating that that’s true today.
JD Durkin: And it’s also true you could buy a lot of these tokenized stocks using USDC. In simple terms, for people unfamiliar, what does that mean? What really changes in doing so?
Anna Wroblewska: So you can use stablecoin. USDC is a stablecoin, so it’s one-to-one to the U.S. dollar.
What makes this, I think, really exciting for customers right now is that you can go from a self-custody wallet that you control, and you can start to buy stocks and do things with them in that wallet. So you kind of can do everything in a blockchain-native way, but still have direct access to all the protections and benefits of the U.S. capital markets in that context.
JD Durkin: So help me better understand this as a broader tokenization conversation. I think people are trying to understand this for the first time. If I own a Dinari token of a stock, do I actually own the stock?
And if, let’s say, for the more traditional ways of owning a stock, dividends, voting shares, things like that, are those up for consideration in this newly emerging world?
Anna Wroblewska: Yes, correct. So Dinari pioneered what the SEC now calls the custodial model of tokenization.
And what that means is that all the rights, protections, benefits, ownership that you get in the security itself are also in the tokens. So you’re not actually giving anything up in order to be on-chain.
And we think that’s a really exciting starting point for moving all of finance on-chain.
JD Durkin: Anna Wroblewska, CBO at Dinari. Great to have you back on the show. Come back and see us anytime. I appreciate it.
Anna Wroblewska: Of course.
