SmartCon 2024 featured presentations from more than 100 blockchain industry pioneers and financial leaders, who gathered to highlight the convergence of TradFi and DeFi into a more efficient global financial system. To delve deeper into the most groundbreaking topics from this year’s event, Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino interviewed some of the most influential speakers on-site at Hong Kong’s Kerry Hotel.
Marcel Kasumovich is Deputy Chief Investment Officer at Coinbase Asset Management, an SEC-registered investment adviser helping global institutions navigate the digital assets space. Kasumovich sat down with Malandrino to discuss the benefits of stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) and how TradFi can best integrate these technologies.
He distilled the transformative power of digital assets.
“When you really study the architecture of blockchain technologies, you see things can be better, cheaper, faster – and that’s a very exciting proposition for a monetary system that’s functional but can be a lot better than the way it operates today,” he said.
Kasumovich views atomic settlement as “the single most important” advantage of using stablecoins as a payment tool.
“The number of transactions that can be facilitated by a certain amount of assets is much higher than in the fiat world – 25 times higher, maybe 100 times higher in instances, so you need less money to do the same amount of transactions,” he explained. “That means you and I need to hold fewer cash balances. That would be an efficiency gain that would allow companies or individuals to then reallocate their excess cash into more productive uses.”
As the industry-standard decentralized computing platform which has enabled over $16 trillion in onchain transaction value, Chainlink has played a fundamental role in advancing stablecoin and RWA adoption through a comprehensive set of services that provide digital assets with highly reliable data, proof of reserves, and cross-chain interoperability that is compatible with legacy financial systems.
Kasumovich emphasized TradFi’s inevitable shift toward onchain finance. “There certainly is a convergence,” he said. Amid the excitement over blockchain’s significant benefits, he advises institutions to start small.
“Our experience has been that it takes three tries for institutions to get comfortable,” he explained. “If we’re sending dollars to one another back and forth, that’s a very simple transaction where they can see how the system works; then they can migrate to a short-term loan; then they can go further out on the risk spectrum.”
In addition to improving global regulatory clarity, he believes transforming the technical complexity of crypto transactions will be a tipping point for digital asset adoption.
“They’ll start realizing that this is just a better way of doing things. And the more user experience that we can get that’s familiar to people and comfortable for people, the faster we can integrate into the mainstream.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Marcel Kasumovich.