Tokenised assets have moved from white papers to exchange listings. My next guest invests at the protocol layer where that happens. Amar Odedra, Chief Commercial Officer at Algorand. Welcome to the show.
Great to be here.
You have invested across Web2 startups, Tezos, and now Algorand. What is different about investing at the protocol level?
Working at a corporate VC level is the closest comparison. The first and foremost focus is to deliver financial returns. But what is different is that we also assess the strategic benefit of an investment for the wider ecosystem — where it could fit as part of the overall jigsaw. And once we make that investment, we work hand in hand with each project to connect them to the broader ecosystem and ensure the right infrastructure is in place — bridges, oracles, and wallet infrastructure — to ensure they are best positioned to succeed.
What is actually getting tokenised today beyond the pilots?
We have passed the phase of pilots. In previous years we had all sorts of assets being tokenised — Andy Warhol paintings, Ferraris — but that was really just to prove the concept of fractional ownership on-chain. More recently we have seen a huge growth in tokenised financial assets, fuelled initially by stablecoins. But also other cash equivalents such as Treasuries and money market funds. Then private credit products with programmable yield — which is quite different. Then commodities. And of course public equities. The IMF recently reported that over 50% of US traded stocks that trade on-chain happen outside of Wall Street trading hours — rising above 80% for high-volume stocks such as Apple and Tesla. That really proves the core thesis around why on-chain, in addition to mobilising collateral that would otherwise be dormant in traditional markets.
You brought a traditional market maker into the Algorand ecosystem. Why does institutional liquidity matter for a blockchain?
Institutional capital will not go where there is thin liquidity. If an institution wants to place a $5 million order and the market moves against it because of that, they will not be coming back. So we brought on board Flow Traders — a regulated and listed traditional market maker and one of the largest liquidity providers for ETFs globally — to deepen the order book and tighten the spreads available. Liquidity attracts liquidity. And the aligned interest between Algorand and Flow Traders is real.
Algorand has made post-quantum security a priority. How should investors think about the quantum threat today?
A 10-year bond issued on-chain today needs to stay secure until 2036. Traditional estimates of the quantum compute required to break classical elliptic curve cryptography have continued to come down. Years ago the figure was millions of qubits. Google’s estimates earlier this year put it at 500,000. And last month, a design was released requiring only about 20,000 qubits to do the same. Public keys are on-chain — and I have no doubt that bad actors are harvesting data today with a view to decrypt in the future once quantum hardware becomes available. The good news is most governments are taking this seriously — US federal agencies have all been mandated to present their quantum roadmaps this week. From our perspective, we have been working on this since 2022. Our ledger is post-quantum. This year we launched native post-quantum accounts. And our teams are working to ensure that by next year we have an end-to-end quantum-resistant protocol.
Amar, thank you again for joining us today.
Thank you.
