JD Durkin: Brendan Ma joins us now, Head of Investment Strategy at the Arbitrum Foundation. My man, nice to see you here today.
Brendan Ma: Nice to see you.
JD Durkin: Thank you for taking some time. Asset managers who are actually moving assets on-chain, what are they actually telling you this week? What are some of the top trends and things going on in the space?
Brendan Ma: Yeah, we’ve seen tremendous interest in tokenization, not just this week but across the industry for a while now. And I think from Treasuries to equities, there’s just tremendous demand for bringing high-quality financial assets on-chain.
A lot of the work that we’re doing is helping make sure that there is strong infrastructure that can help these types of enterprises really come on-chain.
JD Durkin: We’re finally talking a lot more about the general tokenization, moving-assets-on-chain kind of conversation over the course of the last year. Are there still popular misconceptions or parts of this conversation you think we’re still not quite getting right or quite grasping yet?
Brendan Ma: Yeah, I think, you know, tokenization comes in many different forms. Even this week, you’ve seen so much great work across, you know, the United States on trying to bring forward leadership when it comes to digital assets and tokenization.
And I think maybe one thing we’ve been spending a lot of time on this week is that no matter what happens across the regulatory environment, there is tremendous demand that’s happened. It’s already out of the gate. We’ve got some very large institutions building on-chain.
And so regardless of what happens across regions, we’ve just seen a lot of demand already be pushed forward.
JD Durkin: How do you feel about that aforementioned regulatory environment? It could be here in the U.S. or around the world. Are regulators kind of a little slow? Are they still kind of dragging their feet to have these good-faith conversations, or is the pace finally quickening a bit?
Brendan Ma: Well, I mean, the U.S. is very interesting, right? Like this week, obviously, CLARITY not passing cloture was a setback for a lot of the people that worked in the industry on it.
But I think increasingly what you’re seeing is real movement, real anticipation that we have a window where regulators are going to step in, where you have a lot of institutions that are continuing, not pulling back. And there’s really a window right now for this industry to show that there is real demand behind these products, real demand that is indisputable, that’s inevitable.
At Arbitrum, we’re spending all of our time making sure that we can have 24/7 instant-settlement markets for every single asset across the programmable economy.
JD Durkin: Let’s talk a bit more about your work at Arbitrum. Robinhood now routing 10% of its chain’s revenue onto Arbitrum. How does that come together, and why is that so significant for where you’re positioned right now?
Brendan Ma: Yeah, absolutely. So Robinhood is the latest example of an enterprise that’s using the Arbitrum technology. And when they license that technology to build their own blockchain, to bring assets on-chain, 10% of the net transaction revenues flow back to the Arbitrum ecosystem.
And that’s really important for us because we’re in the business of making sure that all assets can really come on-chain. And even in the last 30 days, we’ve seen a lot of revenue come through. The last 30 days on Arbitrum, the revenue that’s across the ecosystem is already five times what we saw the monthly average across Q2.
So Arbitrum was the first blockchain to reach 5,000 tokenized real-world assets, and we expect this trend to continue.
JD Durkin: Okay. So in expectation of said trend to continue, if you and I were to sit here back on the trading floor of the Stock Exchange one year from today, what’s today’s date, September 18, 2027, how do you most hope or most expect this conversation will continue to evolve a year from now?
Brendan Ma: Yeah, well, we think many, many assets, many, many financial assets will be brought on-chain. We think many users will want to be able to access assets around the world with instant settlement, 24/7.
And I think there’s going to be a lot of leadership, both across industry and beyond industry, to make that happen.
JD Durkin: Brendan Ma, Head of Investment Strategy at the Arbitrum Foundation. Really a pleasure to have you on the show. Safe travels. Thanks for seeing us today.
Brendan Ma: Thank you so much. Great seeing you.
JD Durkin: Absolutely. We’ll do it again soon.
