For years, traditional finance and crypto operated in separate worlds. That is changing fast. Coinbase has set up a tokenisation hub in Abu Dhabi. Mubadala Capital has tokenised a private market fund. Saudi Arabia has completed its first sovereign native tokenised title deed transfer. Joining me in studio is Pearce Clune, COO at ZIG Finance, who is building the infrastructure to bring institutional capital on-chain. Pearce, welcome to Capital Markets.
Thank you very much. My pleasure.
Finance is increasingly moving on-chain. What has changed that made that transition actually possible now?
The biggest thing that has changed is that we have moved past the question of whether financial assets can exist on-chain. We know now that they can. They do. That has been proved. So more importantly now it is about how do we build the rest of the financial system around the assets that are on-chain — things such as origination, structuring, distribution, and access. That is also where we see traditional finance and decentralised finance starting to converge. Traditional finance has the assets, the credibility, and the capital. DeFi has the global access through distribution and decentralisation and the infrastructure. It is not about one or the other. It is about taking the best of both worlds and putting them together. That is where we get the win.
If tokenisation already exists, what is actually stopping institutional finance from moving on-chain at scale?
The tech is the easy part. We know already that we can have assets on-chain — that has already been proven. The difficult part is building everything around that. Increasingly we get questions around where is the origination of the asset, how is it distributed, what is the regulation, and more importantly who is going to buy it. That is why we think of on-chain finance as an end-to-end problem that needs to be solved. From our perspective, that is why we have ZIG Markets — our orchestration layer looking after origination, structuring, and distribution — then ZIGChain as our infrastructure layer, and then ZIG Labs as our ecosystem builder. We need that ecosystem to sew all of the pieces together and make it all work.
What does the bridge between traditional finance and DeFi actually look like today?
The boundaries are really disappearing between the two. But it is not as simple as taking a traditional asset, issuing a token, and having it on-chain. It is about getting institutional grade origination and structuring and then marrying it with programmability on the blockchain side, as well as looking at distribution — which marries both worlds together. The opportunity is taking the best of what traditional finance does very well and the very best of what DeFi does, and marrying them together to give global access to institutional grade assets — ubiquitously — to people who today do not have access to those investment opportunities.
Why is the UAE emerging as such an important market for this convergence?
The UAE has all the key ingredients together. Sophisticated financial institutions. Large amounts of capital operating locally. Regulators who are very active in building a world-class regulatory framework. Technology companies already here focused on on-chain finance. And the ambition of the government, which is the bedrock it is all built on. You have VARA in Dubai, a sandbox within DIFC for the tokenisation of securities, ADGM in Abu Dhabi with very active frameworks around tokenisation and digital assets, and then more recently Coinbase choosing Abu Dhabi as its international hub for tokenisation. The opportunity here is not just to participate but to lead — not just as a place for digital assets, but as a place to drive the structure of a whole new financial infrastructure.
What are institutions asking for today that they were not asking two or three years ago?
A number of years ago, institutions were asking why blockchain. That question has now moved from why blockchain to how can I move my assets on-chain, how do I originate, how do I structure, what are the regulatory frameworks? That shows the institutions have changed. They have moved their mindset. They are not just exploring technology anymore — they are trying to understand how they can use it. The opportunity is not about creating blockchain products because the tech is interesting. It is about using on-chain infrastructure to create financial products that are genuinely better to issue, better to distribute, and give better accessibility to everyone around the world.
Thank you so much, Pearce Clune, for being here with us.
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
