June 5, 2025 • 31 mins
Is Blockchain steadily reshaping the world of capital markets? In this episode of Trading Tomorrow - Navigating Trends in Capital Markets, Jim Jockle and Emily Drooby sit down with Laurent Benayoun, CEO at Acheron Trading, to unpack how blockchain is driving real-world change in institutional finance. From settlement efficiency and regulatory compliance to the future interplay of AI and blockchain, Laurent offers deep insights into the evolution of market infrastructure and what lies ahead. Tune in as we explore the practical use cases, challenges, and opportunities at the intersection of technology and finance.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Welcome to Trading Tomorrow Navigating Trends in
Capital Markets the podcastwhere we deep dive into
technologies reshaping the worldof capital markets.
I'm your host, jim Jockle, aveteran of the finance industry
with a passion for thecomplexities of financial
technologies and market trends.
In each episode, we'll explorethe cutting-edge trends, tools
and strategies driving today'sfinancial landscapes and paving
(00:29):
the way for the future.
With the finance industry at apivotal point, influenced by
groundbreaking innovations, it'smore crucial than ever to
understand how thesetechnological advancements
interact with market dynamics.
Hi, I'm Jim Jockle, and todayI'm joined by my producer, emily
(00:53):
Drewby.
Blockchain technology has beengaining traction across capital
markets, with some firmsexploring its potential to
improve infrastructure, enhancetransparency and unlock new
forms of asset ownership.
Whether it's through thetokenization of real-world
assets or efforts to streamlinepost-trade systems, many are
asking whether blockchain couldoffer practical solutions to
long-standing inefficiencies.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
To help us better understand these developments.
We're joined by LaurentBenayoun, ceo of Asheron Trading
.
Laurent brings extensiveexperience in market structure
and digital asset liquidity,having worked with hundreds of
issuers and built infrastructureat the intersection of trading,
tokenization and technology.
Laurent is also aPrinceton-educated quant and
(01:36):
peer reviewer for the Journal ofQuantitative Finance.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
In this conversation, we'll explore the current role
blockchain may be playing ininstitutional finance and what
use cases are emerging and whatcould lie ahead.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Laurent, thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Yeah, absolutely.
Thanks for the opportunity.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Well, let's start at a high level.
What do you think is drivinginstitutional interest in
tokenizing traditional assets?
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Yeah, I think there are a number of reasons.
The first one that I can thinkof is settlement efficiency, you
know, improving costs and speedas well.
The second aspect that makes alot of sense is transparency and
regulatory compliance.
You know, and we can get intothe details, but if you have a
pseudo, anonymous public ledger,that improves both aspects
(02:21):
right.
Also, liquidity is definitelyan appeal, you know, if we're
talking about, like you know,art, for example, fractional
ownership, essentially, you knowthat's definitely something
that is of interest.
You know you could use that toput up, you know collateral
things of that nature, and same,you know, applies to real
(02:45):
estate, for example.
So, definitely, you know, likeefficiency, cost and speed,
regulatory compliance andliquidity and fractional
ownership.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
We've heard the art example before on the show.
For sure, We've also heardracehorses.
People split racehorses Seemsto be a popular one too.
Now, from a marketinfrastructure perspective, how
is blockchain improving orreplacing the legacy systems?
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Yeah, so like one obvious example would be you
know cross-border remittances tosee and frankly, partnering,
you know, with blockchaincompanies to experiment and to
(03:30):
improve the speed and theexecution of those cross-border
you know payments.
So you know that's.
You know definitely somethingthat has been growing over the
past number of years and I thinkthe trend is getting there.
I even myself noticed that youknow settlements are faster and
you know, I expect obviously notas fast as you know crypto
(03:52):
native settlements, butnonetheless, and I expect that
sometime in the future we mightwe might get very close to that.
You know modulo, of course.
You know everything that isrelated to KYC and whatnot, but
yeah, what will that mean forthe larger industry?
Well, it's definitely like animprovement, like from a trading
firm perspective, right, one ofthe limitations that you have,
(04:15):
for example, is rebalancing.
So rebalancing is essentiallylike you have, you know,
balances scattered across eitherexchanges or prime brokerages
or custodians or whatnot, and byimproving the speed and the
efficiency of you know thoserebalances, you're able to trade
(04:35):
more frequently.
You have less potentialdowntime and, as a result, if,
for example, from theperspective of a market maker,
if you're geared at improvingmarket efficiency, you thus
ensure that you're running, youknow, most of the time and so
you're improving that marketefficiency most of the time, so
you're online more frequently.
Essentially, that's just oneexample.
(04:57):
You know, I think banks willhave more visibility into their
operations as well.
There is a lot of work that ishappening, you know back office,
middle office and back office,you know, for trade
reconciliations, for example,and things of that nature.
This could be vastly improvedusing blockchain, so you no
longer, you know, have to calllike a trader to figure out you
(05:19):
know what certain you knowtrades pertain to, or like what
actions were taken on a certainday or whatnot.
You can simply, you know, lookat a ledger, essentially, that
has recorded all thetransactions.
So you know, like, from everylike institutional perspective,
I think that it can only bringefficiency if done properly.
Obviously you don't want to useit left and right and I'm sure
(05:41):
we'll get to talk about AI, butbut you know, same thing, like
it's not because it's like abuzzword or if it's like a trend
, that it needs to be used inevery single aspect of the
business, but in the criticalones, I think that it can make
significant improvements,absolutely.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
How do you think institutions are approaching
blockchain adoption todaycompared to, say, just a few
years ago?
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Yeah, yeah, I think I think, compared to a few years
ago, we still see the samegradual process.
You know, like, institutionsare still cautious about it.
I think that crypto, back inthe day, is used to suffer and
blockchain, you know as a whole,used to suffer from like a
somewhat poor reputation.
I think that this is improvingover time with regulation and
(06:22):
whatnot, but we still see thesame, you know, cautious,
step-by-step process.
We also see growing use cases.
Right, we talked aboutcross-border remittances, but
there are improvements to bemade in terms of supply chain.
You know healthcare data.
You know internal process foryou know, for larger companies.
And we also see a growingknowledge.
(06:43):
Right, Like back in the days,you needed to kind of like hire
like an external consultant.
I'm not saying that it's notthe case anymore, but now you
can directly hire, likeinternally, for your very
specific use cases.
And also, another point thathas changed since over the past
couple of years is regulation.
So we have a little morevisibility in terms of, and
(07:05):
clarity in terms of, what theregulation looks like in some
jurisdictions not all, but yeah,that's basically the changes
that we see.
You know more knowledgeslightly more visibility in
terms of regulation and more usecases.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Is there anywhere where you see regulation moving
really quickly or in a way thatyou think is incredibly
productive?
Any countries.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
Yeah.
So I know Singapore very wellbecause this is where the
company is headquartered, Ithink that.
And also I know Europe becausesome of our clients are based in
Europe and so we had to obtain,or we have to apply for, a
license, rather in Europe aswell.
You know, what I see is that,overall, regulation seems to be
(07:52):
going in the same direction, sothe big picture is somewhat the
same.
The details, however, aresomewhat vastly different, and
this can make or break abusiness, essentially.
So what I'm trying to say isthat for regulation to be, you
know, good, in my opinion itneeds to be balanced and clear.
(08:12):
Uh, clear for obvious reasonsright, when you're a business,
the last thing you want isuncertainty, um.
And balanced because you wantto foster innovation, right, um,
in a regular, in a jurisdictionthat is going to over-regulate,
obviously this is going to bean absolute nightmare for
businesses, because then youknow there's like not, there's
no wiggle room and there's notmuch you can do.
(08:34):
I'll just give one example.
So, again from a market makerperspective, we had
conversations and productiveconversations actually with a
few regulators.
Their requirements, kind oflike industry-wide, was that in
our case, we needed to hold 90%of our client assets on-chain.
(08:55):
In other words, we couldn'tdeposit more than 10% of the
client assets onto exchanges andhot wallets and whatnot, the
the problem with this from amarket maker perspective is that
when you're getting workingcapital from a client, you're
deploying this working capitalfor the purpose of liquidity
provision, so it's unreasonableto expect that a market maker is
(09:17):
going to just hold 90 percent,you know, on chain cold storage,
all that um.
And so we had conversationswith the regulator and we
explained our business case andwe told them look, it really
doesn't make sense unless we askfor 10x what we would normally
ask for, which we don't want todo, because then there's also a
(09:38):
risk that we're shifting to theclient and capital constraints
and whatnot, no-transcript whenthe regulator is actually
(10:09):
listening and understands thecase that you're making and
they're able, you know to, to,you know kind of like amend
their thought process when itpertains to the business in
question.
I think that this is thehallmark of a very you know,
good regulator and thus ajurisdiction that most likely
(10:32):
will do well.
Now there's another issue.
So we talked about regulation alot.
There's also the problem ofregulatory arbitrage, right?
So not all jurisdictions areprogressing at the same pace.
So Singapore was pretty early.
You know Europe also with Mikaand whatnot that was signed into
law last year and we expect,you know, the US potentially to
(10:54):
have something somewhatcomprehensive, you know, in the
near future.
But you know there are otherjurisdictions out there that
exist where some companiesdecide to, you know, get
domiciled, essentially so thatthey can obtain either no
(11:21):
license or, you know, a prettylight license jurisdictions and
continue to operate in a mannerthat is not necessarily super
ethical, let's say, becausecompliant you might be in your
own jurisdiction but ethical isa different story.
So, yeah, discrepancies acrossjurisdictions, some that are
ahead, and definitely weappreciate when the regulator is
(11:41):
understanding of innovation andbusiness cases.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Essentially, Laurent, we've been doing the show for a
while and you might be one ofthe first people to talk about
ethics when it comes tocompliance.
So normally people stick rightto compliance, but they forget
about ethics.
So I appreciate you bringingthat up.
It's very, very important.
They go hand in hand and, youknow, I also appreciate you
talking about a use case andgiving us a real world example.
It helps so much for ouraudience.
(12:07):
What are some of the morepromising or interesting use
cases for blockchain that you'reseeing emerge?
Speaker 3 (12:16):
Well, one that I can think of, or one that I would
like to see emerge at least, is,you know, verification for AI
generated content.
You know we are seeing a lot ofyou know, like.
You know, AI capabilities areessentially growing by the day
and you're able to, you know,generate videos.
You know audio files, picturesand whatnot, documents and so on
(12:40):
and so forth, and it would begreat to have blockchain work in
tandem with AI, because AI hasamazing applications.
I'm not saying that everythingis bad, obviously, but you know,
have blockchain work in tandemto be able to verify either the
ownership or, you know, theintellectual property, copyright
, copyrights, or you know, like,just like the authenticity of,
(13:03):
like, a certain video, becausenowadays and I think this, by
the way, it could be used, youknow, by banks and whatnot you
know, banks sometimes use voicerecognition, right, they ask you
a whole bunch of questions, butthen they also take, you know,
a snippet of your voice tocompare that to, like a
previously recorded one, to makesure that they're talking to
the right person.
Again, this can be, you know,impersonation can happen via AI,
(13:24):
and I think that having youknow, blockchain, you know,
eliminate these issues coulddefinitely be an amazing thing.
You know, One trend.
Just to go back to yourquestion, though, one trend that
we were seeing emerge istokenization of real world
assets, and, frankly, I see thisas the future of our industry.
(13:46):
So, yeah, this is definitelysomething that has been growing
and that I see as, like you know, continue to grow in the future
.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Right and Laurent, I just want to go back really
quickly to your AI andtokenization conversation.
We've heard that before.
I think it's fascinating tothink about the two together,
because so often we think ofthem as separate conversations
and separate technologies.
But really more so I'm startingto hear experts talk about what
(14:18):
they can do for each other moreand more, so it's really
interesting that you bring thatup.
And now your company.
I'm going to turn us completely, but your company supported 400
plus issuers.
What are the most commonchallenges these issuers face
when bringing tokenized assetsto market?
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Yeah, so I guess more of a disclaimer on my end, but
we don't service security tokens, right, but, however, you know,
I've heard and this issomething that we're exploring
again, provided the rightlicenses, of course, that's
something that we're exploringagain, provided the right
licenses, of course, that'ssomething that we're exploring
in the future and that we'vebeen considering for some time
now and, of course, as a result,we're getting interested in the
(14:57):
challenges that issuers mayface in the process of bringing
security tokens to market.
Definitely, challenges that wesee are related to the
technology and you know thebridge between what we call
tradified, so traditionalfinance, and decentralized
finance, right, and I can comeback to that point in a second.
The second challenge isliquidity.
(15:17):
You know, security tokens arenot super kind of like common
yet and they're not, maybe notwell understood for some reason,
and, as a result, liquiditymight be lacking compared to,
you know, to traditional assets.
And then the last point, ofcourse, is the regulatory aspect
.
But yeah, going back to thefirst point that I was making
(15:39):
about this technological bridgebetween TradFi and DeFi, I'll
give you an example.
So someone, let's say someone,comes to us as a market maker
and we are able, potentially, todeal with security tokens in
the future and they say look,you know, I want to tokenize.
You know, like this piece ofland underneath which you know
(16:01):
there are like X amount ofminerals in.
You know these proportions andwhatnot.
As a market maker, when you'rebringing the asset to market, of
course you need to have somekind of valuation and an initial
, like an opening price andwhatnot.
You need to kind of likeunderstand market dynamics for
the asset in question and so onand so forth.
But assuming you have all ofthis covered, really the bridge
between the two is coming in theform of okay, well, so what are
(16:24):
the mint and burn mechanisms?
Who's going to put that inplace?
Is it you know, like thetrading arm, or is it you know,
the issuer?
And then what happens like, say,like you know how is, like, the
mint controlled, for example,how is their physical delivery?
So you know you have a wholelot of like logistics and
technological challenges thathappen underneath.
(16:46):
That may not be visible andthat's probably a critical one,
I would say.
Liquidity can be addressed by,you know, hiring professionals.
So that's not, in my opinion,not too much of an issue.
Regulatory aspect is one thatwe have to go through.
So I would say like the biggestchallenge would be that kind of
like bridge between, like youknow those real world assets and
(17:08):
you know the tokenized versionof it, like how do you go from
the logistics to the technologyand whatnot?
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Yeah, that's really interesting as someone who's
involved in algorithmic tradinginfrastructure.
How is AI influencing marketmaking strategies and are there
guardrails in place to preventmisuse?
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Yeah, so I was listening to an interview given
by Ken Griffin from Citadel andhe was saying and I was
surprised by his answer to asimilar question he was saying
that AI use in trading so far isessentially like speeding up
email responses and used tosummarize documents.
(17:47):
So, and and you know, I alsoheard a similar story from
someone at a top hedge fund whotold me that machine learning
was used essentially on lessthan like 5% of the assets under
management and it was put onthe brochure for investors just
to essentially please them.
But so, yeah, I think tradinguses are somewhat limited for
(18:14):
now, and you know like there aremany reasons for that and we
can go into the details ifthat's of interest.
But one of the reasons would be, you know, the lack of
sufficient amount of data onsome markets.
You know, like problems withoverfitting, although this was
recently addressed in somepapers.
But yeah, anyways, from a puretrading perspective, it seems
(18:37):
like AI has still limited uses.
Ai is very much used for middleand back office tasks and also
for some development tasks, likein, obviously, in an algo
trading company or a systematicexecution a firm using
systematic execution you'regoing to have essentially like
your researchers, developers andtraders.
Typically, that's how it'sstructured.
(18:58):
So research comes up with likethe execution logic, passes it
on, broadly speaking, to thedevelopment team that implements
the strategies, builds theconnectivity and whatnot, and
then traders are using thosestrategies for P&L essentially.
So, yeah, ai would be usedpotentially in the QD, the quant
(19:21):
dev section of what I justdescribed and then related to
trading.
I think that at least what weare trying to do at the company
is we're trying to build agentsthat kind of like sit on top of
the strategies.
So, let's say, you have astrategy for liquidity provision
, unhedged, you have one that ishedged, you have one that is
(19:42):
related to arbitrage, agencyexecution and whatnot.
The idea would be to have anagent sitting on top that would
be able to decide which strategyto turn on, according to what
market condition, configure thestrategy and potentially also
monitor the strategy.
Now, and the goal of that isessentially to make the
quantitative traders life easierRight, not to replace them, and
(20:04):
that's going back to theguardrails that you were, that
you were that you were askingabout, and that's going back to
the guardrails that you wereasking about.
So, not to replace thementirely, of course, but to make
their life easier to spotopportunities that they may not
be able to spot.
So to essentially like furtherautomation.
Now, in terms of the guardrails, of course, they're very much
human, right, you always want tohave an eye on the execution of
(20:27):
the strategies.
Make sure that I mean it's thesame as like when, when trading
went from, you know, like manualtrading to electronic trading.
Right, yes, you can replace anumber of traders with one algo,
(20:50):
monitor the performance and toraise flags as soon as something
goes goes off.
At least that's the use of AIthat I see in trading at the
moment.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Yeah, that's great.
It's also nice to hear thathumans are still needed, right?
Yeah, how would you describethe current relationship between
blockchain technology andcapital markets?
I think that's one of thosequestions where we just
especially with what, what wecover on our show.
Um, yeah, it'd be good to givethe audience just a little bit
of an understanding there yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
So, uh, there's this book I don't remember the author
, but it was called uh.
It is called uh, crossing the,the chasm, uh.
The idea is you have kind oflike this like bell-shaped curve
for adoption and I think we'restill very much like early stage
, like visionary slash, earlyadopters, in terms of what I see
(21:43):
.
There are so many use cases torefine.
You know we've talked about,you know, art a little bit and
real estate, We've talked aboutcross-border payments, you know,
and settlement, you know likecustody transparency there are
so many, you know and other usesbeyond, you know, just the
(22:04):
financial markets, of course.
But yeah, there are a lot of usecases to refine.
We're still, I think, at thevery beginning and similar to AI
.
Frankly, like you know AI we'reseeing you know chatbots and
then we're seeing like imagegenerators and all that.
I think that as time goes, moreand more people are going to
kind of like appropriate thetechnology and they're going to
(22:28):
start building those use casesand soon enough it will appear
kind of like obvious for thevast majority of us, and then
that's when you have massadoption.
So, yeah, I think it's stillvery early stage and we kind of
like touched upon those usecases, but I'm sure that there
(22:49):
are many to explore for buildersout there.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
You know, earlier this year Mantra experienced a
$5 billion collapse.
Has that setback slowedmomentum for blockchain adoption
in capital markets?
And you know what lessons, ifany, can be drawn from that
fallout?
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Yeah well, mantra is a whole story, I guess.
But but so the under I don'tthink that it it questions, you
know what happened with with theprice necessarily undermines
the technology.
I think that you know theyactually have a use case
(23:25):
personally, a use casepersonally, and frankly, there
are a number of projects thatare tackling RWAs on-chain, so
they're not the only project.
Now, the thing with Mantua,again not related to the
technology, but if we look froma pure price perspective, from
(23:45):
the looks of it again I'm notexactly sure if people know what
happened, but it looks like,and again this is speculation
there were those OTC deals tobuy back on secondary markets.
Of course, even if you, whenyou do this, even if your
(24:18):
intention is not to manipulateprices, you're going to have
some price impact.
You know it would be foolish tosay that there is absolutely no
price impact.
You know it would be foolish tosay that there is absolutely no
price impact Whether you do it.
You know, with taker orders ormaker orders, even maker orders
would have some impact becausesomeone who was going to sell a
certain quantity and who wouldhave, as a result, move the
(24:40):
price down as a result of thatmarket order, would have moved
the price down less or not atall, potentially, if there was
more buy side liquidity.
So anyways, that was number one.
You know, as a result, positiveprice impact potentially, and
indeed you know, the price movedlike between like 10 plus fold
(25:02):
I think it was like 9 to 15x orsomething like that in a few
months.
Now the claim is that thosedeals were not done during those
few months.
Anyways, and then it seems likewhat precipitated the price
decline was the combination oftwo things a potential
liquidation of one or severalactors and so unwinding of
(25:28):
leverage positions, and alsorelatively thin liquidity for a
project of that caliber.
You know, there there's certainrelationship between metrics
that market makers look attypically.
You would look at fully dilutedvalue.
You would look at marketcapitalization, so the value of
(25:48):
the circulating.
You would look at marketcapitalization, so the value of
the circulating supply.
You would look at exchanges onwhich the project is listed.
You know their ranking and anumber of others.
You know the volume traded perday, assuming that there was no
toxic order flow.
And then you would look at, youknow like, the depth, you know
within certain percentages ofthe price, and it seemed like
(26:11):
Mantra didn't have a whole lotof liquidity, given their FDV,
given their market cap, giventheir ranking, given the
exchanges and whatnot, and given, you know, obviously the price
is obviously tied to FDV andmarket cap, anyways.
So the point being that, youknow, price rose on thin
liquidity and fell back down onprobably equally thin or thinner
(26:32):
liquidity.
So, anyways, but again I want toemphasize that this is purely
price related and it is somewhatremoved from the underlying
technology.
You know, when the FTX storyhappened, everyone thought that
it would potentially be the endof crypto, that reputation would
be broken forever.
(26:53):
And you know that centralizedexchanges, you know, whatever
you know, the judgments willconclude but it's not a story
(27:17):
about the underlying technology,it's not a story about
blockchain, it's not a storyabout centralized exchanges, you
know, because some are doingthe right thing.
So you know.
I think that it's the samething here for Mantra and RWAs.
The technology is still there,it's still promising.
In my opinion, the trend willkeep going, but for sure, it is
(27:41):
a setback for the project,especially because it attracted
a lot of attention to kind oflike this rapid rise in price
and equally, or faster, I guess,decline in price.
But that's more related to, Iguess market microstructure and
certain actors doing potentialnefarious actions.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
So yeah, so we've made it to the final question of
the podcast.
We call it the trend drop.
It's like a desert islandquestion.
If you could only watch onetrend in blockchain in capital
markets, what would it be?
Speaker 3 (28:18):
uh, ai for sure.
Uh, without a doubt.
Uh, again, going back to ourconversation, I think that there
are so many uh unseen at thistime and maybe untapped.
So unseen, you know, use cases,untapped potential that might
appear obvious in the futureonce we have them in front of us
(28:39):
.
But for now, only you know likevisionaries can can wrap their
head around what AI could beused for, and so, yeah, I think
there's like more to come for,you know, software for
applications built on thesoftware, for hardware powering
the software.
So definitely, ai is one thatwould keep watching.
(29:01):
You know, we could very much bein somewhat of a bubble, much
like the dot-com, but it's stillgoing to be assuming that the
bubble was to burst.
If we were in one and we wereto experience some kind of
fallout, it would be good to see, after it kind of settles down,
(29:23):
to see those use cases come tomass adoption, because I think
it's going to tremendouslyimprove, you know, everyone's
life.
So, yeah, very, very impatientto see what AI has to offer.
There's a question thatsometimes I get asked about you
know which period of time?
(29:45):
If I could, you know, choose aperiod of time to live in, which
one would I choose, and youknow, oftentimes it's in like
within, like a group of friendsor something, and everyone would
say like, well, you know, Ilike the 80s for this reason,
that reason, okay, well, I likewhatever other period, maybe you
(30:06):
know, earlier, later, whatever,I always say the future,
because I think that technologyis going to evolve.
It has been evolving prettyrapidly and I think it's the you
know, the speed at which itevolves increases as well, and I
just, I'm so impatient to seeuse cases and see how I can, you
(30:28):
know, make use of new techbeing developed.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
So so yeah, I love it Spoken like a true CEO.
Well, laurent, thank you somuch for joining us on the show
tonight.
This was fantastic.
You know I appreciate youcoming aboard.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Absolutely Well.
Thanks a lot again for forhaving me.
I appreciate the opportunity.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
All right.
Well, thank you so much.
Have a great day.
Thanks so much for listening totoday's episode, and if you're
enjoying Trading Tomorrow,navigating trends and capital
(31:15):
markets, be sure to like,subscribe and share, and we'll
see you next time you.
Welcome to Trading Tomorrow Navigating Trends in
Capital Markets the podcastwhere we deep dive into
technologies reshaping the worldof capital markets.
I'm your host, jim Jockle, aveteran of the finance industry
with a passion for thecomplexities of financial
technologies and market trends.
In each episode, we'll explorethe cutting-edge trends, tools
and strategies driving today'sfinancial landscapes and paving
(00:29):
the way for the future.
With the finance industry at apivotal point, influenced by
groundbreaking innovations, it'smore crucial than ever to
understand how thesetechnological advancements
interact with market dynamics.
Hi, I'm Jim Jockle, and todayI'm joined by my producer, emily
(00:53):
Drewby.
Blockchain technology has beengaining traction across capital
markets, with some firmsexploring its potential to
improve infrastructure, enhancetransparency and unlock new
forms of asset ownership.
Whether it's through thetokenization of real-world
assets or efforts to streamlinepost-trade systems, many are
asking whether blockchain couldoffer practical solutions to
long-standing inefficiencies.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
To help us better understand these developments.
We're joined by LaurentBenayoun, ceo of Asheron Trading
.
Laurent brings extensiveexperience in market structure
and digital asset liquidity,having worked with hundreds of
issuers and built infrastructureat the intersection of trading,
tokenization and technology.
Laurent is also aPrinceton-educated quant and
(01:36):
peer reviewer for the Journal ofQuantitative Finance.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
In this conversation, we'll explore the current role
blockchain may be playing ininstitutional finance and what
use cases are emerging and whatcould lie ahead.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Laurent, thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Yeah, absolutely.
Thanks for the opportunity.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Well, let's start at a high level.
What do you think is drivinginstitutional interest in
tokenizing traditional assets?
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Yeah, I think there are a number of reasons.
The first one that I can thinkof is settlement efficiency, you
know, improving costs and speedas well.
The second aspect that makes alot of sense is transparency and
regulatory compliance.
You know, and we can get intothe details, but if you have a
pseudo, anonymous public ledger,that improves both aspects
(02:21):
right.
Also, liquidity is definitelyan appeal, you know, if we're
talking about, like you know,art, for example, fractional
ownership, essentially, you knowthat's definitely something
that is of interest.
You know you could use that toput up, you know collateral
things of that nature, and same,you know, applies to real
(02:45):
estate, for example.
So, definitely, you know, likeefficiency, cost and speed,
regulatory compliance andliquidity and fractional
ownership.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
We've heard the art example before on the show.
For sure, We've also heardracehorses.
People split racehorses Seemsto be a popular one too.
Now, from a marketinfrastructure perspective, how
is blockchain improving orreplacing the legacy systems?
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Yeah, so like one obvious example would be you
know cross-border remittances tosee and frankly, partnering,
you know, with blockchaincompanies to experiment and to
(03:30):
improve the speed and theexecution of those cross-border
you know payments.
So you know that's.
You know definitely somethingthat has been growing over the
past number of years and I thinkthe trend is getting there.
I even myself noticed that youknow settlements are faster and
you know, I expect obviously notas fast as you know crypto
(03:52):
native settlements, butnonetheless, and I expect that
sometime in the future we mightwe might get very close to that.
You know modulo, of course.
You know everything that isrelated to KYC and whatnot, but
yeah, what will that mean forthe larger industry?
Well, it's definitely like animprovement, like from a trading
firm perspective, right, one ofthe limitations that you have,
(04:15):
for example, is rebalancing.
So rebalancing is essentiallylike you have, you know,
balances scattered across eitherexchanges or prime brokerages
or custodians or whatnot, and byimproving the speed and the
efficiency of you know thoserebalances, you're able to trade
(04:35):
more frequently.
You have less potentialdowntime and, as a result, if,
for example, from theperspective of a market maker,
if you're geared at improvingmarket efficiency, you thus
ensure that you're running, youknow, most of the time and so
you're improving that marketefficiency most of the time, so
you're online more frequently.
Essentially, that's just oneexample.
(04:57):
You know, I think banks willhave more visibility into their
operations as well.
There is a lot of work that ishappening, you know back office,
middle office and back office,you know, for trade
reconciliations, for example,and things of that nature.
This could be vastly improvedusing blockchain, so you no
longer, you know, have to calllike a trader to figure out you
(05:19):
know what certain you knowtrades pertain to, or like what
actions were taken on a certainday or whatnot.
You can simply, you know, lookat a ledger, essentially, that
has recorded all thetransactions.
So you know, like, from everylike institutional perspective,
I think that it can only bringefficiency if done properly.
Obviously you don't want to useit left and right and I'm sure
(05:41):
we'll get to talk about AI, butbut you know, same thing, like
it's not because it's like abuzzword or if it's like a trend
, that it needs to be used inevery single aspect of the
business, but in the criticalones, I think that it can make
significant improvements,absolutely.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
How do you think institutions are approaching
blockchain adoption todaycompared to, say, just a few
years ago?
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Yeah, yeah, I think I think, compared to a few years
ago, we still see the samegradual process.
You know, like, institutionsare still cautious about it.
I think that crypto, back inthe day, is used to suffer and
blockchain, you know as a whole,used to suffer from like a
somewhat poor reputation.
I think that this is improvingover time with regulation and
(06:22):
whatnot, but we still see thesame, you know, cautious,
step-by-step process.
We also see growing use cases.
Right, we talked aboutcross-border remittances, but
there are improvements to bemade in terms of supply chain.
You know healthcare data.
You know internal process foryou know, for larger companies.
And we also see a growingknowledge.
(06:43):
Right, Like back in the days,you needed to kind of like hire
like an external consultant.
I'm not saying that it's notthe case anymore, but now you
can directly hire, likeinternally, for your very
specific use cases.
And also, another point thathas changed since over the past
couple of years is regulation.
So we have a little morevisibility in terms of, and
(07:05):
clarity in terms of, what theregulation looks like in some
jurisdictions not all, but yeah,that's basically the changes
that we see.
You know more knowledgeslightly more visibility in
terms of regulation and more usecases.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Is there anywhere where you see regulation moving
really quickly or in a way thatyou think is incredibly
productive?
Any countries.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
Yeah.
So I know Singapore very wellbecause this is where the
company is headquartered, Ithink that.
And also I know Europe becausesome of our clients are based in
Europe and so we had to obtain,or we have to apply for, a
license, rather in Europe aswell.
You know, what I see is that,overall, regulation seems to be
(07:52):
going in the same direction, sothe big picture is somewhat the
same.
The details, however, aresomewhat vastly different, and
this can make or break abusiness, essentially.
So what I'm trying to say isthat for regulation to be, you
know, good, in my opinion itneeds to be balanced and clear.
(08:12):
Uh, clear for obvious reasonsright, when you're a business,
the last thing you want isuncertainty, um.
And balanced because you wantto foster innovation, right, um,
in a regular, in a jurisdictionthat is going to over-regulate,
obviously this is going to bean absolute nightmare for
businesses, because then youknow there's like not, there's
no wiggle room and there's notmuch you can do.
(08:34):
I'll just give one example.
So, again from a market makerperspective, we had
conversations and productiveconversations actually with a
few regulators.
Their requirements, kind oflike industry-wide, was that in
our case, we needed to hold 90%of our client assets on-chain.
(08:55):
In other words, we couldn'tdeposit more than 10% of the
client assets onto exchanges andhot wallets and whatnot, the
the problem with this from amarket maker perspective is that
when you're getting workingcapital from a client, you're
deploying this working capitalfor the purpose of liquidity
provision, so it's unreasonableto expect that a market maker is
(09:17):
going to just hold 90 percent,you know, on chain cold storage,
all that um.
And so we had conversationswith the regulator and we
explained our business case andwe told them look, it really
doesn't make sense unless we askfor 10x what we would normally
ask for, which we don't want todo, because then there's also a
(09:38):
risk that we're shifting to theclient and capital constraints
and whatnot, no-transcript whenthe regulator is actually
(10:09):
listening and understands thecase that you're making and
they're able, you know to, to,you know kind of like amend
their thought process when itpertains to the business in
question.
I think that this is thehallmark of a very you know,
good regulator and thus ajurisdiction that most likely
(10:32):
will do well.
Now there's another issue.
So we talked about regulation alot.
There's also the problem ofregulatory arbitrage, right?
So not all jurisdictions areprogressing at the same pace.
So Singapore was pretty early.
You know Europe also with Mikaand whatnot that was signed into
law last year and we expect,you know, the US potentially to
(10:54):
have something somewhatcomprehensive, you know, in the
near future.
But you know there are otherjurisdictions out there that
exist where some companiesdecide to, you know, get
domiciled, essentially so thatthey can obtain either no
(11:21):
license or, you know, a prettylight license jurisdictions and
continue to operate in a mannerthat is not necessarily super
ethical, let's say, becausecompliant you might be in your
own jurisdiction but ethical isa different story.
So, yeah, discrepancies acrossjurisdictions, some that are
ahead, and definitely weappreciate when the regulator is
(11:41):
understanding of innovation andbusiness cases.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Essentially, Laurent, we've been doing the show for a
while and you might be one ofthe first people to talk about
ethics when it comes tocompliance.
So normally people stick rightto compliance, but they forget
about ethics.
So I appreciate you bringingthat up.
It's very, very important.
They go hand in hand and, youknow, I also appreciate you
talking about a use case andgiving us a real world example.
It helps so much for ouraudience.
(12:07):
What are some of the morepromising or interesting use
cases for blockchain that you'reseeing emerge?
Speaker 3 (12:16):
Well, one that I can think of, or one that I would
like to see emerge at least, is,you know, verification for AI
generated content.
You know we are seeing a lot ofyou know, like.
You know, AI capabilities areessentially growing by the day
and you're able to, you know,generate videos.
You know audio files, picturesand whatnot, documents and so on
(12:40):
and so forth, and it would begreat to have blockchain work in
tandem with AI, because AI hasamazing applications.
I'm not saying that everythingis bad, obviously, but you know,
have blockchain work in tandemto be able to verify either the
ownership or, you know, theintellectual property, copyright
, copyrights, or you know, like,just like the authenticity of,
(13:03):
like, a certain video, becausenowadays and I think this, by
the way, it could be used, youknow, by banks and whatnot you
know, banks sometimes use voicerecognition, right, they ask you
a whole bunch of questions, butthen they also take, you know,
a snippet of your voice tocompare that to, like a
previously recorded one, to makesure that they're talking to
the right person.
Again, this can be, you know,impersonation can happen via AI,
(13:24):
and I think that having youknow, blockchain, you know,
eliminate these issues coulddefinitely be an amazing thing.
You know, One trend.
Just to go back to yourquestion, though, one trend that
we were seeing emerge istokenization of real world
assets, and, frankly, I see thisas the future of our industry.
(13:46):
So, yeah, this is definitelysomething that has been growing
and that I see as, like you know, continue to grow in the future
.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Right and Laurent, I just want to go back really
quickly to your AI andtokenization conversation.
We've heard that before.
I think it's fascinating tothink about the two together,
because so often we think ofthem as separate conversations
and separate technologies.
But really more so I'm startingto hear experts talk about what
(14:18):
they can do for each other moreand more, so it's really
interesting that you bring thatup.
And now your company.
I'm going to turn us completely, but your company supported 400
plus issuers.
What are the most commonchallenges these issuers face
when bringing tokenized assetsto market?
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Yeah, so I guess more of a disclaimer on my end, but
we don't service security tokens, right, but, however, you know,
I've heard and this issomething that we're exploring
again, provided the rightlicenses, of course, that's
something that we're exploringagain, provided the right
licenses, of course, that'ssomething that we're exploring
in the future and that we'vebeen considering for some time
now and, of course, as a result,we're getting interested in the
(14:57):
challenges that issuers mayface in the process of bringing
security tokens to market.
Definitely, challenges that wesee are related to the
technology and you know thebridge between what we call
tradified, so traditionalfinance, and decentralized
finance, right, and I can comeback to that point in a second.
The second challenge isliquidity.
(15:17):
You know, security tokens arenot super kind of like common
yet and they're not, maybe notwell understood for some reason,
and, as a result, liquiditymight be lacking compared to,
you know, to traditional assets.
And then the last point, ofcourse, is the regulatory aspect
.
But yeah, going back to thefirst point that I was making
(15:39):
about this technological bridgebetween TradFi and DeFi, I'll
give you an example.
So someone, let's say someone,comes to us as a market maker
and we are able, potentially, todeal with security tokens in
the future and they say look,you know, I want to tokenize.
You know, like this piece ofland underneath which you know
(16:01):
there are like X amount ofminerals in.
You know these proportions andwhatnot.
As a market maker, when you'rebringing the asset to market, of
course you need to have somekind of valuation and an initial
, like an opening price andwhatnot.
You need to kind of likeunderstand market dynamics for
the asset in question and so onand so forth.
But assuming you have all ofthis covered, really the bridge
between the two is coming in theform of okay, well, so what are
(16:24):
the mint and burn mechanisms?
Who's going to put that inplace?
Is it you know, like thetrading arm, or is it you know,
the issuer?
And then what happens like, say,like you know how is, like, the
mint controlled, for example,how is their physical delivery?
So you know you have a wholelot of like logistics and
technological challenges thathappen underneath.
(16:46):
That may not be visible andthat's probably a critical one,
I would say.
Liquidity can be addressed by,you know, hiring professionals.
So that's not, in my opinion,not too much of an issue.
Regulatory aspect is one thatwe have to go through.
So I would say like the biggestchallenge would be that kind of
like bridge between, like youknow those real world assets and
(17:08):
you know the tokenized versionof it, like how do you go from
the logistics to the technologyand whatnot?
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Yeah, that's really interesting as someone who's
involved in algorithmic tradinginfrastructure.
How is AI influencing marketmaking strategies and are there
guardrails in place to preventmisuse?
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Yeah, so I was listening to an interview given
by Ken Griffin from Citadel andhe was saying and I was
surprised by his answer to asimilar question he was saying
that AI use in trading so far isessentially like speeding up
email responses and used tosummarize documents.
(17:47):
So, and and you know, I alsoheard a similar story from
someone at a top hedge fund whotold me that machine learning
was used essentially on lessthan like 5% of the assets under
management and it was put onthe brochure for investors just
to essentially please them.
But so, yeah, I think tradinguses are somewhat limited for
(18:14):
now, and you know like there aremany reasons for that and we
can go into the details ifthat's of interest.
But one of the reasons would be, you know, the lack of
sufficient amount of data onsome markets.
You know, like problems withoverfitting, although this was
recently addressed in somepapers.
But yeah, anyways, from a puretrading perspective, it seems
(18:37):
like AI has still limited uses.
Ai is very much used for middleand back office tasks and also
for some development tasks, likein, obviously, in an algo
trading company or a systematicexecution a firm using
systematic execution you'regoing to have essentially like
your researchers, developers andtraders.
Typically, that's how it'sstructured.
(18:58):
So research comes up with likethe execution logic, passes it
on, broadly speaking, to thedevelopment team that implements
the strategies, builds theconnectivity and whatnot, and
then traders are using thosestrategies for P&L essentially.
So, yeah, ai would be usedpotentially in the QD, the quant
(19:21):
dev section of what I justdescribed and then related to
trading.
I think that at least what weare trying to do at the company
is we're trying to build agentsthat kind of like sit on top of
the strategies.
So, let's say, you have astrategy for liquidity provision
, unhedged, you have one that ishedged, you have one that is
(19:42):
related to arbitrage, agencyexecution and whatnot.
The idea would be to have anagent sitting on top that would
be able to decide which strategyto turn on, according to what
market condition, configure thestrategy and potentially also
monitor the strategy.
Now, and the goal of that isessentially to make the
quantitative traders life easierRight, not to replace them, and
(20:04):
that's going back to theguardrails that you were, that
you were that you were askingabout, and that's going back to
the guardrails that you wereasking about.
So, not to replace thementirely, of course, but to make
their life easier to spotopportunities that they may not
be able to spot.
So to essentially like furtherautomation.
Now, in terms of the guardrails, of course, they're very much
human, right, you always want tohave an eye on the execution of
(20:27):
the strategies.
Make sure that I mean it's thesame as like when, when trading
went from, you know, like manualtrading to electronic trading.
Right, yes, you can replace anumber of traders with one algo,
(20:50):
monitor the performance and toraise flags as soon as something
goes goes off.
At least that's the use of AIthat I see in trading at the
moment.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Yeah, that's great.
It's also nice to hear thathumans are still needed, right?
Yeah, how would you describethe current relationship between
blockchain technology andcapital markets?
I think that's one of thosequestions where we just
especially with what, what wecover on our show.
Um, yeah, it'd be good to givethe audience just a little bit
of an understanding there yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
So, uh, there's this book I don't remember the author
, but it was called uh.
It is called uh, crossing the,the chasm, uh.
The idea is you have kind oflike this like bell-shaped curve
for adoption and I think we'restill very much like early stage
, like visionary slash, earlyadopters, in terms of what I see
(21:43):
.
There are so many use cases torefine.
You know we've talked about,you know, art a little bit and
real estate, We've talked aboutcross-border payments, you know,
and settlement, you know likecustody transparency there are
so many, you know and other usesbeyond, you know, just the
(22:04):
financial markets, of course.
But yeah, there are a lot of usecases to refine.
We're still, I think, at thevery beginning and similar to AI
.
Frankly, like you know AI we'reseeing you know chatbots and
then we're seeing like imagegenerators and all that.
I think that as time goes, moreand more people are going to
kind of like appropriate thetechnology and they're going to
(22:28):
start building those use casesand soon enough it will appear
kind of like obvious for thevast majority of us, and then
that's when you have massadoption.
So, yeah, I think it's stillvery early stage and we kind of
like touched upon those usecases, but I'm sure that there
(22:49):
are many to explore for buildersout there.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
You know, earlier this year Mantra experienced a
$5 billion collapse.
Has that setback slowedmomentum for blockchain adoption
in capital markets?
And you know what lessons, ifany, can be drawn from that
fallout?
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Yeah well, mantra is a whole story, I guess.
But but so the under I don'tthink that it it questions, you
know what happened with with theprice necessarily undermines
the technology.
I think that you know theyactually have a use case
(23:25):
personally, a use casepersonally, and frankly, there
are a number of projects thatare tackling RWAs on-chain, so
they're not the only project.
Now, the thing with Mantua,again not related to the
technology, but if we look froma pure price perspective, from
(23:45):
the looks of it again I'm notexactly sure if people know what
happened, but it looks like,and again this is speculation
there were those OTC deals tobuy back on secondary markets.
Of course, even if you, whenyou do this, even if your
(24:18):
intention is not to manipulateprices, you're going to have
some price impact.
You know it would be foolish tosay that there is absolutely no
price impact.
You know it would be foolish tosay that there is absolutely no
price impact Whether you do it.
You know, with taker orders ormaker orders, even maker orders
would have some impact becausesomeone who was going to sell a
certain quantity and who wouldhave, as a result, move the
(24:40):
price down as a result of thatmarket order, would have moved
the price down less or not atall, potentially, if there was
more buy side liquidity.
So anyways, that was number one.
You know, as a result, positiveprice impact potentially, and
indeed you know, the price movedlike between like 10 plus fold
(25:02):
I think it was like 9 to 15x orsomething like that in a few
months.
Now the claim is that thosedeals were not done during those
few months.
Anyways, and then it seems likewhat precipitated the price
decline was the combination oftwo things a potential
liquidation of one or severalactors and so unwinding of
(25:28):
leverage positions, and alsorelatively thin liquidity for a
project of that caliber.
You know, there there's certainrelationship between metrics
that market makers look attypically.
You would look at fully dilutedvalue.
You would look at marketcapitalization, so the value of
(25:48):
the circulating.
You would look at marketcapitalization, so the value of
the circulating supply.
You would look at exchanges onwhich the project is listed.
You know their ranking and anumber of others.
You know the volume traded perday, assuming that there was no
toxic order flow.
And then you would look at, youknow like, the depth, you know
within certain percentages ofthe price, and it seemed like
(26:11):
Mantra didn't have a whole lotof liquidity, given their FDV,
given their market cap, giventheir ranking, given the
exchanges and whatnot, and given, you know, obviously the price
is obviously tied to FDV andmarket cap, anyways.
So the point being that, youknow, price rose on thin
liquidity and fell back down onprobably equally thin or thinner
(26:32):
liquidity.
So, anyways, but again I want toemphasize that this is purely
price related and it is somewhatremoved from the underlying
technology.
You know, when the FTX storyhappened, everyone thought that
it would potentially be the endof crypto, that reputation would
be broken forever.
(26:53):
And you know that centralizedexchanges, you know, whatever
you know, the judgments willconclude but it's not a story
(27:17):
about the underlying technology,it's not a story about
blockchain, it's not a storyabout centralized exchanges, you
know, because some are doingthe right thing.
So you know.
I think that it's the samething here for Mantra and RWAs.
The technology is still there,it's still promising.
In my opinion, the trend willkeep going, but for sure, it is
(27:41):
a setback for the project,especially because it attracted
a lot of attention to kind oflike this rapid rise in price
and equally, or faster, I guess,decline in price.
But that's more related to, Iguess market microstructure and
certain actors doing potentialnefarious actions.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
So yeah, so we've made it to the final question of
the podcast.
We call it the trend drop.
It's like a desert islandquestion.
If you could only watch onetrend in blockchain in capital
markets, what would it be?
Speaker 3 (28:18):
uh, ai for sure.
Uh, without a doubt.
Uh, again, going back to ourconversation, I think that there
are so many uh unseen at thistime and maybe untapped.
So unseen, you know, use cases,untapped potential that might
appear obvious in the futureonce we have them in front of us
(28:39):
.
But for now, only you know likevisionaries can can wrap their
head around what AI could beused for, and so, yeah, I think
there's like more to come for,you know, software for
applications built on thesoftware, for hardware powering
the software.
So definitely, ai is one thatwould keep watching.
(29:01):
You know, we could very much bein somewhat of a bubble, much
like the dot-com, but it's stillgoing to be assuming that the
bubble was to burst.
If we were in one and we wereto experience some kind of
fallout, it would be good to see, after it kind of settles down,
(29:23):
to see those use cases come tomass adoption, because I think
it's going to tremendouslyimprove, you know, everyone's
life.
So, yeah, very, very impatientto see what AI has to offer.
There's a question thatsometimes I get asked about you
know which period of time?
(29:45):
If I could, you know, choose aperiod of time to live in, which
one would I choose, and youknow, oftentimes it's in like
within, like a group of friendsor something, and everyone would
say like, well, you know, Ilike the 80s for this reason,
that reason, okay, well, I likewhatever other period, maybe you
(30:06):
know, earlier, later, whatever,I always say the future,
because I think that technologyis going to evolve.
It has been evolving prettyrapidly and I think it's the you
know, the speed at which itevolves increases as well, and I
just, I'm so impatient to seeuse cases and see how I can, you
(30:28):
know, make use of new techbeing developed.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
So so yeah, I love it Spoken like a true CEO.
Well, laurent, thank you somuch for joining us on the show
tonight.
This was fantastic.
You know I appreciate youcoming aboard.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Absolutely Well.
Thanks a lot again for forhaving me.
I appreciate the opportunity.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
All right.
Well, thank you so much.
Have a great day.
Thanks so much for listening totoday's episode, and if you're
enjoying Trading Tomorrow,navigating trends and capital
(31:15):
markets, be sure to like,subscribe and share, and we'll
see you next time you.
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Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.