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.
Emma Pecenicic is Head of Digital Propositions and Partnerships, Asia Pacific ex-Japan at Fidelity International. She sat down with Malandrino to discuss the path toward scaling fund tokenization and Asia’s role in accelerating blockchain development.
She described two key facets to bridging TradFi and DeFi onchain: bringing crypto investment opportunities to traditional players and creating a long-term roadmap for fund tokenization.
Over the summer at Point Zero Forum, Fidelity International announced a collaboration with industry-standard decentralized computing platform, Chainlink, and global digital asset banking group, Sygnum, to bring net asset value (NAV) data for Fidelity International’s $6.9 billion Institutional Liquidity Fund onchain.
Following the launch of BlackRock’s first tokenized fund earlier this year, Chainlink has been central to TradFi’s growing interest in fund tokenization as the most widely used provider of NAV data onchain. Having enabled over $17 trillion in transaction value, Chainlink provides a comprehensive set of services that are critical for creating and securing tokenized real-world assets like tokenized funds throughout their entire life cycle across multiple chains.
While Pecenicic believes scaling fund tokenization will be a long journey, she said Fidelity International’s client-led approach is moving onchain.
“The ultimate goal is to have a pure digital native fund. This means that I don’t have a token and a share, but I really have a token that is the share.”
Fidelity Digital Assets’ 2023 Institutional Investor Digital Assets Study revealed the majority of investors believe digital assets are here to stay and 65% of investors plan to buy or invest in digital assets in the future.
“We see more than 50% of them already having an allocation and most of them want to increase their allocation in the next 12 months,” Pecenicic said. “We enable access for large institutions to invest into Bitcoin, which has really unique features as an asset. Ultimately, this is a nice area for us to focus on, on top of fund tokenization.”
With its digital asset-forward policies including regulatory regimes for virtual asset trading platforms and stablecoins, Hong Kong has become a hotbed for web3 innovation. Pecenicic believes opportunities in Hong Kong could become a precedent for blockchain innovation worldwide.
“It’s business-friendly, but on top of that you have the demand from the investors’ large population that’s young and digitally native,” she said. “You need to see the client at the beginning of all this effort, and then the technology and regulatory will come.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Emma Pecenicic.