SmartCon 2025 featured presentations from more than 100 web3 pioneers and financial leaders, who gathered to highlight the theme,“From Crypto to Capitol Hill.” To delve deeper into the most groundbreaking topics from this year’s event, Nasdaq TradeTalks’ Jill Malandrino interviewed some of the most influential speakers on-site at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Pavilion.
William Peck is Head of Digital Assets at WisdomTree, a global asset manager with over $130 billion in assets under management. Peck sat down with Malandrino to discuss expanding onchain access to tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) and the benefits of bringing regulated financial products onchain.
“We think about tokenization as being the next wave of innovation in asset management,” Peck told Malandrino. “It’s about bringing these strategies to a whole new universe of investors – and that’s really the onchain community.”
A leading sponsor of exchange-traded funds (ETFs), WisdomTree’s digital asset business offers 14 SEC-registered tokenized funds across seven major blockchains including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Optimism, Plume, and Stellar.
Peck explained why a multi-chain approach is foundational to WisdomTree’s broader digital asset strategy.
“We are trying to meet clients where they are and do it in a way that still has the same controls and compliance restrictions in place with a very good user-friendly experience on those chains.”
WisdomTree recently announced its collaboration with Chainlink to bring net asset value (NAV) data for the WisdomTree Private Credit and Alternative Income Digital Fund (CRDT) on Ethereum mainnet via Chainlink’s institutional-grade data publishing service, DataLink.
CRDT provides exposure to a diversified portfolio of liquid private credit and alternative income instruments, tracking the Gapstow Private Credit and Alternative Income Index. Bringing CRDT’s verified NAV data onchain via Chainlink allows WisdomTree to enable subscriptions and redemptions through its Prime and Connect platforms, while ensuring institutional-grade transparency, auditability, and interoperability.
Peck emphasized CRDT’s compatibility with DeFi protocols.
“We see a lot of demand from people looking to have this as an asset they can post as collateral, get additional loans against it, and that’s really the use case that we’re solving for,” he explained. “That’s really what WisdomTree is good at – trying to marry both the wrapper and the investor experience around it with the underlying exposure.”
Ultimately, he said bringing regulated financial products onchain is about reaching a broader pool of investors.
“We’re not doing all this tokenization stuff just to save a couple of basis points and costs in the back end. It’s really about providing a better experience for a whole new universe of investors and getting our products distributed to them in a whole new way.”
He expects the GENIUS Act, which creates a federal regulatory framework for fully collateralized stablecoins in the U.S., will accelerate the adoption of tokenized financial products.
“I’d like our tokenized money market fund to be WisdomTree’s largest fund,” Peck said. “And I think that’s possible in the next three to five years.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with William Peck.