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David Lawan

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2026-03-05
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2026-03-05
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  1. “That's right. Just to add one more maybe note of realism to your story, Mark. A mistake people make with these new technologies is they expect them to be better at everything on day one. The reality of DeFi is it's better on a few things and then way worse on a lot of other things. And we in the industry should accept it's way worse on a lot of other things. You just raised that there are eight clicks. That's one example of something that's way worse than you would encounter in Trat5. There's also a huge number of DeFi protocols, some of which have security bugs, some of which have been around for a while and work really well. That's worse than the protections you get in the traditional market. But when you try to find a disruptive technology that's better on every metric, you'll just never encounter it, right? It's always better on one or two metrics and that allows it, the question is, can it get better on the things it's worse at? And I think what we're starting to...”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “That should be met Capital allocators as With open arms. But from regulators, it's met with a little skepticism, a little fear. And so we have to really, we've had to do a really Had a climb a mountain over the last couple of years in working with regulators and educating policy members in D.C. to really get them comfortable with the efficiencies that blockchain technology provides. And it just was so refreshing to hear, you know, Chair Atkins say that exactly what we have been preaching for so long with Project Crypto and how all securities will be traded on chain. So I'm just, I think it's incredibly bullish.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “I mean, It's such a good story because it is so patently obvious how much more efficient decentralized markets are than traditional financial markets. And it's not necessarily traditional financial markets fault. They were built during a time when if you were in California and you wanted to buy a stock on the New York Stock Exchange, you had to make a phone call. You had to send a letter. A stock certificate was mailed, right? These systems were the product of the technology of their era. And then when new technology comes out, new technology often has to be is met with. Great skepticism because it could create instability, but oftentimes what it does is it displaces”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “I paid it legal fees off ramping wasn't too difficult back then. And then by Monday, I had to repaid back the loan and it cost me 36 cents. And I was like, this is amazing technology. And the only problem with this is that it took me like eight different clicks to do. And so I figured once we solve that, which is just now, we can get this technology being adopted a lot faster. I mean, I think I was a little bit too optimistic on reducing the clicks in this space. But I think we're closer than ever.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Yeah, 100% agree. I think it's. Think, like you said, the price is being down kind of people in some kind of mood, but then also, you know, there's so much good news coming out. There's so much regulatory clarity, so much projects moving from pilots to actually launching within the institutional space. Like, I don't know how, if you're following these things, you are not the most optimistic you've ever been in this space. And then outside, even people not in the institutions, I think they don't know what's going on. I remember, I mean, to kind of pull it back to the first time I really thought that this was going to be big was I remember when I was purchasing a house and I had to pay some legal fees, I sold some stocks and the legal fees were due a little bit earlier than I thought and my stocks didn't sell. It takes T plus three settlement days, so I was waiting and I was like, okay, so what can I do? So I just went on to Ave like Matt mentioned. I took out a loan.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Who maybe have a foot on TradFi, but also follow crypto very closely. Maybe that's because there's a lot going on in crypto beyond crypto, in macro and all of that. But I feel like it's a very exciting moment when we see these trends developing, but it does feel like we have a glimpse of the future here that the overall market is not paying as much attention as they should.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Thing that makes this all very exciting is that I don't think there is a broad recognition in the market that this is going on. I have a bunch of friends where Eve Denver last week feels like because just maybe prices are not reacting and maybe we can talk a little bit about market conditions, but maybe because prices are not moving much, the vibes are kind of not great in certain crypto circles. I'm right now at a very global outside connections. This is a big kind of cap intra-TreadFi conference. And crypto has a presence for sure. But I think that the amount of people in the broader market, especially like in the institutional, maybe more, let's say, allocator, institutional vertical off the market, I think the realization that all these things are going on, they're still relatively circumscribed among people like”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “So, in law school, I took a class called Big Bank Regulation. And the takeaway from that class, which we just studied, Dodd-Frank, and we studied the financial crisis, was that interconnectedness of financial institutions was the cataclysm, was the event that caused the entire systemic collapse. And I really started studying decentralization. Like how can we structure a decentralized system? And this was before Ethereum. Bitcoin was out at this time, but I think that the three core pillars of DeFi, self-custody, transparency, and decentralized networks, those three things combined, when applied to the financial economy at large today, will make it safer, will harden it. Will actually make it scale faster. And so I'm so excited about it.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Financial history. It's just most people haven't witnessed one of those big changes because there really hasn't been one outside of crypto since 2008. Crypto was sort of the next new thing after ETFs. They don't come along very often. But if you scale back through history, you do see these apocalypse changes in how finance works. It does happen, right? That is actually what Atkins was calling out with Project Crypto is we've seen four of these in their history. This is the fifth. And I think what Mike is talking about is it's a necessary fifth, but you can see the entire financial ecosystem and how it works change. It has happened in the past. It's happening again now.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “I love that. I mean, it's a great thesis. I want to build one more piece of history on that, Mark, if that's okay. So I'll take 2008 and raise Mike 1993. The other piece of interesting fabric that I can join here is I've been around long enough to see finance make significant changes, right? So like I remember going from floor-based trading to digital trading. I remember going from mutual funds to ETFs. And the reason I raised that is a mistake I see a lot of people making visa VFI is assuming that like finance is sort of at the end of history, that the way we do this now is the way we'll always do it forever. It will only ever be ETFs. There will never be another asset management primitive. It will only ever be traditional brokerage intermediated floor-based or digital trading. There will never be another version. And that's just not true of.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Rules that actually are built into the very fabric of the system. And that's where DeFi comes in. That's why I'm so focused on DeFi and why I think institutions are going to adopt it at scale. Because, you know, the purpose of DeFi is not to build casinos. It's not to build speculative tokens NFTs being coins. The original thesis behind DeFi was a response to the failures of the Great Recession. Building a financial system whose architecture structurally eliminates the conditions that made 2008 possible. So when that happened and when DeFi Summer came in 2020, I knew that the entire institutional fabric was going to move on chain. And I jumped right in.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Explain their own rules to the regulators. The institutions being supervised were the ones that understood what was being supervised. And I realized in this time while I was in law school that rules are not going to solve this problems are just on paper. You need programmatic, systematic.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “And an opacity. The opposite of decentralization and transparency was the nexus, was the prime event that created the absolute collapse of our financial system. So in 2008, I was looking at the financial system and I was just trying to figure out what the hell went wrong. And we had Dodd-Frank that came out. Basil III came out. Siffy designations, stress testing, you know, resolution planning, serious efforts by serious regulators. And they all, all those regulations kind of fell short because the system had gotten so complex that regulators needed the banks. The regulators needed the banks themselves to explain what they were doing. The quants had to walk the examiners through the models. This is actually in Basel III. The quants, the banks have to...”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Because the entire system failed. And the institutions at the center have become so interconnected that when one went down, it threatened to drag the entire system with it. Bear Stearns, AIG, Merrill City, webs of counterparty risks no one fully understood. No one knew who was Solvent. No one knew who was holding the toxic assets so much so that if you recall the Treasury had to capitalize even solvent banks to prevent further contagion. They called this systemic risk institutions that were so large and so interconnected and so opaque that failure would take down the whole system They were called also too big to fail. That's what we call them. And the lesson we all learned then was that interconnectedness.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Matt and David gave a little contemporary history. I might want to give a little actual ancient history here, what seems like ancient history, and that is. Understand from my perspective. What DeFi truly is and the potential for institutions and why institutions should care about it. You have to go back to the moment that made it necessary, which was in September of 2008. So Lehman collapses. Within days, the entire financial system is in free fall. Not because one bank failed.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Clear that it's all going in this direction, it's going much faster than we anticipate. But because we've heard this institutions are coming story so many times and for so long, I think many of us sort of dismissed or didn't take seriously these items. I mean, they're sort of ridiculous. The most important financial regulator in the world says all assets will move on chain in the next five years. And there are people who are like, ah, whatever, DeFi's dead. or L1s are dead. It's sort of ridiculous. So for me, it was the Apollo and BlackRock union morpho moment. Actually, more than anything else that said it's right here, right now, it's accelerating sort of like AI at that kind of pace. And the world is going to look completely different in two years.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Buying uni tokens and putting Biddle on Uni and Apollo doing the same on Morpho. And the reason for that is I think I, like many people in crypto, have sort of, boy, who caride wolf syndrome about this institution's moving into the DeFi space. If you step back and look at what's happening, you have the most important financial regulator in the world saying all assets will move on chain and announcing Project Crypto. You have the CEO of the largest asset manager in the world saying every stock bond in ETF will be tokenized. You have his CFO saying they're going to tokenize all of their ETFs in the next three to 12 months. And now you have largest credit manager buying 9% of a DeFi protocol. Any rational person looking at a string of facts would say, boy, are we accelerating up the curve? Are we like it's.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Everything was going to be DeFi. So there's a little bit of backstory there. But I actually agree with what Mike said. For me, almost the tipping point. Because I was slow to recognize it, it was BlackRock.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “It started with the ETFs and then it further deepened after Liberation Day. Matt, I feel like it's going to be something similar for you. It's something similar, although I would point to sort of three moments, one of which was last week. So I can make this maybe even more current. I absolutely agree the middle moment was the ETF's launching and just being by far and away the most successful launch of all time. I mean, they were six times bigger than the most successful ETF launch previously. It's not an outlier. It's not like a two-sigma outlier. It's like an absurd thing. So that definitely told me that this was going to be a big deal. My personal story, since, I mean, as soon as I used Aave, I knew it was fate accompli that the institutions would eventually come into the space. The UX there is such magic that I've yet to find someone who I've walked through lending into Ave who didn't just”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Many times it actually has been kind of dictating what's going on with the Bitcoin price. And then, of course, we had all the regulatory unlock and just so many good news flow that I think stands behind a lot of these reasons. But that was the exact moment when I was like, okay, this is an inflection point. Now TreadFi is really, really driving the buzz here.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “And I never bothered to add the ETF volume to look at the Bitcoin price action because ETFs are obviously very large and bring a lot of capital. But in terms of volume, traded volume, they were like 5 to 10% of Bitcoin spot volume. So they were not very meaningful. And I was like, yeah, let me do that. I did that. And then it turned out that spot ETFs were trading 30, 40, 50% of the Bitcoin spot volume. And then if you add like micro strategy, which is a Bitcoin proxy, you're kind of rivaling that whole volume. Just a few weeks after I was looking to the options market and then I saw that IBID options was on its path to overtake Deribit Bitcoin options, both in terms of open interest and in terms of volume. So for me, it was probably about a year ago that I started to see that Tread5 was not only a player, but it was the leading player.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “I'm sorry, Trat5 started to lead in the Bitcoin price formation process. And for me, that hit in early mid 2025. Like folks like me, when they see the market, they have a few kind of flagposts. They look at a certain pattern in volumes. They look at certain pattern across exchanges. And after Liberation Day, Bitcoin was just trading weirdly and it wasn't doing the things that it was supposed to do. All the indicators were kind of off. And then I was talking to a client, actually a VC, and he's like, David, that's right, but you're only looking at the Bitcoin spot volume. What if you add the ETFs?”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Sort of liquidity provider. So that's the type of lens that I see. I see a lot of trading action. I talk to a lot of these guys. So I'm bringing kind of the sell side lens and hopefully it complements both the buy side vision and the DeFi cross over here. So just to put that into context, because I'm one of those guys who are looking at volumes and order books. I spend a lot of time on derivatives. So I spend a lot of time trying to understand the Bitcoin price formation process and just trying to help our clients and counterparties navigate this world. And for me in that realm, the moment it really hit that Treadfi was not only a player and then a player that was probably bringing most of the new capital into the space, right? After the spot Bitcoin ETFs launched. But also at some point, I think DeFi started to lead.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Both the preparation to that and then the moments after that in the few years that we have been to that, that has definitely been a watershed moment. But for me specifically, and maybe I can speak a little bit to the lens that I bring to this conversation, which is the cell side lens, right? So I've been working for the past many years at Prime Brokers and Trading Desks. And maybe one day we can do an episode on what is a crypto prime broker, how prime brokers are different from OTC desks or market makers. Why are these guys so heavily used? How are they different? But basically that's the seat that I'm on. So basically when a company like Bitwise or an institutional manager wants to engage in the market, they are not going to do the same thing that we do, just like open an accountant and exchange. They will usually have onboarded as a counterparty to a prime broker or”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “David, kick us off, man. Oh, yeah. I'm happy to start. I think. This stratify convergence and this idea of the institutions are coming, I think it's honestly been happening for a long time. Sometimes we think about the institutional market as this monolithic group of investors, but that's not true, right? We all here know how heterogeneous this kind of group is. We had some folks who have been engaged with this industry until very early, like VC investors, even some endowments have been engaging with crypto in the past at pretty early stages. But a few like a few things have changed. Probably the first moment when this thing started to become very real, and I'm sure Matt can talk a lot about this, is when the spot.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “And yet, and this is the part that I think matters the most, and for our viewers, most the institutional world still hasn't fully caught up with what is actually happening on the ground. They see Bitcoin solely as a portfolio allocation decision. They see Ethereum as a speculative asset only. They're debating whether to put 2% or 5% in digital assets while completely missing that the technology underneath those assets is a generational upgrade to the infrastructure underneath everything they already do, execution, settlement, custody, compliance, fund administration. This is what we're going to talk about. We're going to bring this to you every week. I'm very excited. And let's get started, Mark.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “I believe we are at the most consequential moment. Dare I say, the inflection point for institutional crypto, since the asset class was born. For years, the conversation about institution and crypto was always theoretical, right? Will they or won't they? How much should they invest? How much should they allocate? Is it real? Or is it a fad? That conversation is over, right? BlackRock has tokenized treasuries. JP Morgan is setting intraday repos on blockchains. Apollo announces a giant partnership with Morfo. Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, Kraken, Coinbase, every major name in finance is building on these rails right now. They're not studying them anymore. They're not piloting them. They're building in production with real money”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “My name is Michael Mark Antonio. Thanks, Matt, for that. Thanks, David. Thanks, Mark. I'm the head of DeFi at Galaxy Digital. Galaxy is a crypto AI publicly traded financial services company. If that's a mouthful, we are very focused on the intersection between crypto and AI. And our entire business for most of its history has been predicated on how do we bridge crypto to institutional investors and institutions all throughout the United States and globally. And my focus at Galaxy is on building out our decentralized finance division. And what we focus on primarily is the bleeding edge of technology and the bleeding edge of on-chain, these on-chain primitives that are going to power the entire financial system.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Awesome. Wow. Happy to start. Excited for this first episode. Mark, Matt, Michael, really looking forward to the conversations. So while I'm David Lawan, I'm head of research at Anchorage Digital. Anchorage is one of the leading players in crypto institutional infrastructure, providing services that go all the way from custody to spot trading, derivatives trading, lending. Also, we have, we're home to the first crypto bank federally charter, and we have a lot of presence there on the stablecoin side of things. Before Encourage, I used to be head of research at Falcon X, which is one of the larger crypto prime brokers slash trading desks. Before Falcon X, I had the pleasure of working with and being mentored by Matt Hogan at Bitwise. I was head of research there for quite a few years. And before that, I used to work in traditional finance. I used to be a cell site equities analyst.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “BlackRock has tokenized treasuries. JP Morgan is setting intraday repos on blockchains. Apollo announces a giant partnership with Morpho. Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, Kraken, Coinbase, every major name in finance is building on these rails right now. I believe we are at the most consequential moment. Dare I say the inflection point for institutional crypto since the asset class was born.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “The most important financial regulator in the world says all assets will move on chain in the next five years, and there are people who are like, ah, whatever, DeFi's debt. Any rational person looking at that string of facts would say, boy, are we accelerating up the curve? As soon as I used Ave, I knew it was fait accompli that the institutions would eventually come into this space. We have all these frictions. There's definitely a lot of problems to solve, but we are pretty much on our way to at least have a roadmap for most of them. Trad five people, they work very hard, but they don't know what's coming at them when their assets all start to trade 24-7.”

    2026-03-05 · Forward Guidance · Introducing: Inflection Point | The Crypto-TradFi Convergence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT