The RWA Tokenisation Lie (And How to Actually Fix It)

Anton: You join a hedge fund, it's like your dream come true. You're like, "Finally, I'm here." And then you're listening to a boss, and you're like, "Oh, wow. Apparently, this is not the future."

Anton: There's a large cohort of crypto-native users that simply do not invest in real estate. The crypto industry is very cyclical. Capital, optimism, profit, then when it corrects, the correction is usually very steep. But it really burns a lot of people. This is really not for 99% of the people in the world. This volatility is too much.

Sebastian: With volatility comes opportunity, right?

Sebastian: You need to diversify. You can put capital across different asset classes.

Sebastian: You're tokenising real world assets, right?

Sebastian: Trying to bring the best of both worlds and offering it as a less volatile investment product.

Anton: I checked your platform. It targets the right people. But for many years, the RWA crowd was just talking to the wrong end users.

Sebastian: But it's not only about price accessibility. It's also about, is this even appealing? Is this something I consider? How do we make this the optimal investment product in the future? Lots of work to do there for sure.

Sebastian: But then you pitch it to the crypto crowd, but the crypto crowd are like, "We are chasing meme coins. How is it not a fit?"

Anton: You mean a 13x in three days.

Sebastian: Exactly. Exactly. When you're building something, it's just problems. It's just challenges.

Anton: No, definitely don't do that. We tried that. This doesn't work. We will never buy your garbage tokens. And this is not an innovation. There is something bigger coming.

Sebastian: Welcome to Block by Block. Today we have Anton Golub with us, founding member of RWA Labs, Chief Business Officer of Freedx, and probably a lot of other secret special projects and companies in the background that maybe we'll learn about today, a few of them hopefully. Thanks for being with us.

Anton: Sebastian, thank you very much for welcoming me. Great to be on Block by Block.

Sebastian: Our pleasure. Our pleasure. We have the pleasure of meeting a lot of incredible people on Block by Block and generally, I would say, in the ecosystem that we both find ourselves in, web three, blockchain, and so on. And for us at Tribe, at the intersection of that into real estate, you are absolutely on the top of that list. Your face, your name, your voice is already everywhere in our ecosystem because you've been in this space way longer than most people, including myself. So it's a pleasure and an honour to be able to sit with you today and just have a conversation.

Sebastian: Most of the people that we have had on here so far are largely engaged in one company, and they have a singular mission, a journey that they're on. You are involved in multiple, as far as I'm aware, probably more than I already know about. Before we speak about any of those, I want to start somewhere else. I want to start with life. Because business is part of life, but it's not all of life. What does balancing running multiple projects and multiple businesses at the same time look like for you, in life? How do you do it?

Anton: Yeah. So, first, thank you very much for the praise. As you were saying it, I felt flattered. But also, as you were saying I'm involved in multiple things, I was thinking, wow, it comes with its own challenges as well. So maybe to first say why you would do it, or let's say why I do it. To be very honest, in the end it's all about the people who are involved in these initiatives. It's because you have a great collaboration, great interaction, hopefully a great outcome out of that, and great, happy, satisfied clients or partners, however you want to call it. So that's actually why you do it.

I think everybody listening to this could relate to it. They would say, yeah, if I don't really like what I'm doing, I will not do it twice or three times. So for me it's about the people. Why am I engaged? Then obviously there is always an interest, my personal affinity to be involved in something where I see a long-term future or long-term potential.

As you were giving the introduction, I have to say it's actually not that easy, because it's just a lot of work in the end. There's nothing mind-blowing to it. I don't have a big secret here.

Sebastian: Sorry, people. We're waiting for the big reveal here.

Anton: Yeah. But it's just a lot of work. To make it manageable, I deal with it by organising my work time. Sometimes it means I have to work a bit more than usual, more than you would think should be normal. But that's basically what it is. You really have to organise yourself, because in the end you're responsible to your partners, to your co-founders, to your team, to your clients. You're responsible to them. It's all about this organisation.

I learned that over time. I like to think I'm a bit more on the artistic side, but that's just my thinking. Over time, like you and I have been working for a long time, you learn how to work and you learn how to organise yourself. I was hoping, as you were saying this, to say something amazing for the beginning of the podcast, and I was like, nah, it's just work. It's just work.

Sebastian: I think that is amazing, the unfiltered truth, if you will. There's not, in my view, enough open conversations about the difficult, ugly side of entrepreneurship, of operating businesses, of the sacrifices that come with it. And there are plenty of them. There's a lot of media exposure specifically, I would say, to the great successes. The unicorns, this and that. And it should remain, it should be praised and it should be celebrated. But when you're thinking about it, certainly as a first-time founder, or in an early-stage role, even if you're an employee coming in to co-build, it's very different to walking into a large-scale established business where there are systems, processes, layers of people.

So the answer is amazing, because it's your experience. That's what we want and that's what this is all about. You touched on something that is extremely close to heart and core to Tribe, because the clue is in the name. Tribe. It's about people. It's about community. And for us, every decision we try to make is with the people in mind, as well as the business in mind.

You set out to start RWA Labs, I think about 10 months ago. Is that correct? With Irina and Juliet.

Anton: Yes.

Sebastian: Why those two wonderful humans?

Anton: So, first, just to describe those two very wonderful humans. Irina Heaver is, well, a lot of people know her as one of the leading lawyers in this digital space.

Sebastian: She might be the only one who beat your brand. It's a never-ending competition over who is at least more active on these public matters.

Anton: So Irina Heaver, first of all, a great friend. We have known each other for a long, long time. One of the leading lawyers, an amazing person, great at execution, great at driving things, a pioneer. She did so much work here in the country, in the region, but also globally on the legal side. And Juliet runs one of the leading VCs here in the region, in the country, NewTribe Capital. I know her a little bit less than Irina, but I also know her for a really long time, and again, an amazing person.

So if I recall correctly, it was actually Irina's idea. I'm just reflecting now. It was Irina's idea, kind of saying, "Hey, we all three of us like this RWA space, tokenising real world assets. We're very passionate about it. We also identified there's a demand from people who want to enter this space and need support." A lot of companies want to learn what tokenisation is. Maybe they want to start slow, they need a lot of education, they need a lot of handholding, and we identified that there's a demand there. So why don't we actually try to fill that demand, fill that gap?

It was very simple, the reason why we did it. We wanted to focus RWA Labs here on the country and the region, so we are a UAE-based team, UAE focused, but obviously operating wider than that, global where possible. And that was the reason. Great people coming together, feeling there's a demand for it. And objectively there is, we know it now. We got together and we did some amazing things together, supporting some really leading companies on tokenisation.

That's also where we had a contact point. We organised the RWA Summit, which was in this vacuum where Token2049 was not happening because of the circumstances in the region.

Sebastian: Thanks for stepping up, by the way.

Anton: Yeah. Again, Irina was saying, "We're doing it." And Juliet, "Well, it seems like we're doing it." So we organised the RWA Summit. The goal was to bring leading players in the RWA space together to talk, meet, discuss, collaborate, and so on. So this is a little bit how it came together. RWA Labs has been a great experience, to be honest. I really like it. All three of us, and there are more people behind us in the team who do a lot of the work as well, but at the forefront publicly it's myself, Irina and Juliet. I think we're a great team together. It's a pleasure to work with them, and it's also amazing to be surrounded by tough ladies who keep on pushing. So I don't know how your team is.

Sebastian: Let's not talk about that. That's a weak point at Tribe, so we will take your expertise. How did you manage to figure that out? That's a takeaway for us. We're all male, unfortunately, today. Not by design, it just is what it is. But the next guest I will have on this podcast will be a wonderful human, a lady. She's part of the Tribe, but not as operationally involved, per se. I'll leave that one. It will be an unveiling.

Anton: I think everybody watching this is already hyped up for the next episode. Very well played. Strong, strong.

Sebastian: So earlier you mentioned something else which I want to push a little bit on. That is, some days there's a lot more work, some days there's a little bit less. I personally find that's often a choice you have to make. You have to make that decision when you don't have a boss that tells you to go home, or that they need you until 9pm today, or can you work Saturday, whatever. What I'm saying is, where do you draw the line between work and life? And how do you do it? When do you decide, okay, enough, I need to go home and be with family, friends, go to the gym, do something different?

Anton: Yeah. So maybe I'll emphasise when I usually have more work, and then I'll try to explain how I manage it.

Sebastian: When Irina calls.

Anton: Actually, you make a great point. Usually in the team, and you know this as a leader, other people depend on you. When there is certain work that needs to be done, it's because the rest of the team is depending on you, and they're giving you a deadline, the day or time when they need your support. So more work means that more of the team members are dependent on me, and I don't want to let them down. I want to support them and I want to be a good team member. Then I have to do more work to satisfy those needs. So that's why I have more work.

But also, I'm very honest, because you say, okay, where do you draw the line? For me personally, I'm just very realistic. Can I satisfy the demands of the team in the time that we agreed? And if the answer is yes, okay, then I do it. Maybe it's a bit more work. But if the answer is no, because I also need to rest, I need to spend time with my family and friends, then I communicate transparently to my team and say, "Hey, I know we agreed on a deadline for Thursday, it's Friday, but it's not happening, so I need to move that. Is it fine for you that we do it on Monday or Tuesday?" And then they need to adapt.

I think you make a great point, because otherwise, as a leader, an entrepreneur, you have an entrepreneurial spirit. If you talk about work, then you can work the whole day, because you want to satisfy all of the demands from your team and not let them down. Then you will work every day, and you will never see your family, never see your friends, and maybe it will impact you badly, health-wise, mentally. That's why I think when you ask me when I draw the line, it's where I realise I'm not able to do it in line with expectations. I have to adapt, I have to move it, and I tell the team honestly. And likewise, vice versa, the team tells me, "Hey Anton, I know you expected something until this day, it's just not happening because of whatever reason. Let's adapt." That's basically how I draw the line. I'm just very honest, first with my team but also with myself, and I say, yeah, I need to go home and rest.

Sebastian: Fair enough. Fair enough.

Anton: I don't know how you see it, how you're driving it.

Sebastian: I agree. I think it comes with experience and time, and perhaps to some degree age, because typically with age comes a higher degree of self-confidence and the ability to say no. I found it hard, when I was in my mid-20s, to say no to myself, to figure out when enough is enough. Listening to your body, physically, mentally, all of these things play a part. Signals, internal and external signals, and actually listening to them and then taking action on the back of them. I was significantly hotter, I would say, in my 20s than I am in my mid-30s today.

Anton: When you said mid-20s, I was like, what do you mean? I thought you were now mid-20s.

Sebastian: No, no. That's good, thank you, I appreciate that. So yeah, I would say similar. And I do agree with this whole accountability concept that you spoke about. When it's about Sebastian reorganising his own work to satisfy his own work streams, that's a different story. But when someone else's work stream is dependent on me, it changes the game for sure. That's definitely where the more unreasonable work hours tend to kick in.

Anton: I'm very similar like that.

Sebastian: I want to switch gears a little bit. Thank you very much for the openness and the honesty and the transparency. One thing that's quite unique about you is the duration that you have spent in our ecosystem, in this industry. Because web three, blockchain as an industry is very young. It's a really young industry. But today, certainly if you combine blockchain and AI, it's omnipresent. It is everywhere around us in life, professionally and privately. Some of it we are highly conscious and aware about. We see it, we interact with it. But a lot of it we're not aware about as consumers. It just sits in the background and does what it's meant to do, which is a great thing. That's maybe a whole other podcast, speaking about how to build products and making sure that we strip out the complexities of crypto products.

With all this experience that you bring in, and that includes professional but also educational, specific experience, which is quite unique, how do you think that changes the way you look at what you do day-to-day compared to someone who doesn't have as much experience? You've seen the ups and the downs and maybe you can see patterns. So I'm curious to hear, do you think differently to a newborn operator in web three?

Anton: Yeah. So I think you flagged something very important at the end. Unlike many other industries, the crypto industry is very cyclical, and these cycles are actually really strong. You have this run-up, everybody's very excited, there's a lot of capital, optimism, profits, revenues, excitement. And then when it peaks, for whatever reason, when it corrects, the correction is usually very steep. Now, you can say, well, this is an industry, but you can just look at the prices and relate to that. If you just look at Bitcoin, you say it goes up a lot and then it goes down 50%. I actually don't know of any other industry or asset class that has these four or five year cycles where it's so volatile.

One thing that I can tell you is that I got adapted to it. I had a very interesting conversation a few days ago with a friend of mine. I told him, "Yeah, this bear market is not so bad." And he was telling me, "No, it's very bad, you just don't get it, or you're not at the forefront of it to understand how bad it is." Maybe my anchor is different. I said, "Ah, it's not that bad." He was like, "No, actually it's really, really bad. If you look at the industry and look at how much the transaction volume has gone down, activity has gone down, venture investments have gone down, prices have gone down." And then he tells me, "No, it's actually really, really rough out there."

So that's also a reminder for me, because it was a close friend who told me, "Hey, wake up, it's actually not that simple." And it also made me think that maybe I have adapted. It's useful for me, because this is my fourth cycle.

Sebastian: Yeah. Not your normal.

Anton: Yeah. Of course we crashed 50%, because what else to expect? So maybe even more in the last cycle. So I think that's the first thing that I would say, that I have adapted. But maybe that's not a good thing, actually, in the end. On the other side, I also understand that this volatility is not attractive for many people. So if you reflect, a lot of other industries, the tech industry, deep AI, they're not so volatile. Maybe they're even more exciting now, or there's more upside to it. But this volatility, what I have seen over the years, it burns people really a lot. And it burns people who come close to web three and then experience this volatility, and then they say, "Ah, this is really not for me."

I would say maybe this is really not for 99% of the people in the world. This volatility is too much. But then, as someone with an entrepreneurial background, you can say, well, with volatility comes opportunity. So if you can navigate that, and especially if you enter at the right time, there's really a lot of upside and a lot of reward to it. That's how I would balance it in my mind. But it really burns a lot of people, and this is something I want to say to our industry, that we burn a lot of people, and ourselves as well. Because you cannot be in this industry, I cannot imagine that I will be in this industry for 30 years and just riding this up and down and saying, "Yeah, it's fine, another 30% drawdown, it's fine."

So I don't know how you see it. I think you're in the RWA space, but more on the real estate side, and real estate is always perceived as very stable.

Sebastian: Yeah.

Anton: So it's the opposite. That's why I wanted to hear how you see it, from your Tribe, from your clients, from your team. But I think the crypto industry is rough, the digital asset industry is rough.

Sebastian: Yeah. For sure. On that point, it's almost the exact opposite, and not only in the way it's perceived but actually in the way it behaves. It's conceptually quite an interesting thing, because we're looking to effectively merge the two. We're trying to bring the best of both worlds and create something in the middle, which is also partially why it's so difficult. The ecosystems behave completely differently. They think differently.

The way I think about this is this. There is a subsegment of crypto which is more stable, and the clue's in the name, stable coins, yielding stables.

Anton: Even those.

Sebastian: Yeah, which are still volatile, but I think they play a role from an investor's perspective in the ecosystem, where I want a lower amount of volatility exposure on chain. The alternatives today are not that many. And yielding stables is one of those alternatives where I can park X amount of capital for a Y period of time and basically drive that yield. I think that's the role that real estate can play in the world of digital assets. Ultimately, sound financial logic, if you will, is that you need to diversify. Yeah, you can put capital across different asset classes, but if you're gambling everything on crypto, without giving a specific weighting, we don't do free brand placements.

That's why for me it's very exciting, but it also comes with a big challenge, which is, without pulling out the data, and we have obviously looked at some of this data, there's a large cohort of crypto-native users, certainly I would say in the younger brackets, that simply do not invest in real estate. It's not an asset class that they have ever considered looking at, which in itself is a challenge we want to try and work towards overcoming. That accessibility. But it's not only about price accessibility. I think the dialogue gets stuck in that price accessibility conversation. It's also about, is this even appealing? Is this something I consider?

A lot of investments are functionally invisible to various investor types. If you're your average person at 72, you might understand traditional stock market equities very well, because you did that throughout a large duration of your life. But the idea of buying any crypto on a crypto exchange might be so far removed in thought that you never even get to take the action. Even though you may be able to do it functionally, you figure it out, you just don't think about that as an investment opportunity.

So what I'm saying is that bringing real estate on chain and offering it as a less volatile investment product will also have to come with quite a lot of educational efforts within the wider ecosystem. And this is not only real estate. I think this is true for a lot of the RWAs, because they all behave differently than your traditional assets. But it's also true the other way around. As we start converging the world of TradFi and DeFi, if you will, and we're bringing TradFi investors into these ecosystems where you can now have exposure to traditional instruments, crypto, RWAs, we have to make sure that they are comfortable and that they understand all of those different investment opportunities or financial instruments for it to actually come to its greatest fruition. How do we make this the optimal investment product in the future? Lots of work to do there for sure, but that's why we're here.

So your background, there's a lot of experience specifically in exchanges. Again, similar to the early comment, you bring a wealth of experience that many could only dream of, quite frankly. With this in mind, when you think about building and running an exchange today, I'm talking about crypto, not equities and whatnot, as someone who looks in from the outside that doesn't have that experience, what are things that people generally get wrong, misunderstand, that might be obvious to you? When you have those conversations, it's like, you have gotten this completely wrong.

Anton: Yeah. So maybe I'll say first why I think it's attractive to run an exchange. Running a digital asset exchange is perhaps one of the proven ways to run a business that has a high chance of being actually profitable and sustainable. What I'm trying to say is, businesses that make money in crypto are actually exchanges. It's around trading. So if you make money in crypto, you're really running an exchange, running a trading firm, or maybe running a fund, a hedge fund, however you call it. This is where the money is being made. Everything else is very difficult. Wallets are difficult, platforms are difficult, custody is difficult, compliance is difficult, because it's not a transaction-driven business where in a very highly active market you can actually generate a lot of revenue. So there's a big upside to running an exchange. That's what I would tell people first, this is where the money is being made.

Now the second thing is, people underestimate two things around exchanges. The first one is just how important liquidity is. You have hundreds and thousands of exchanges. You go there and they're usually dead, for two reasons. The first reason is there is no liquidity. So it's a prerequisite. What I mean is, if people come to an exchange, it has to be alive, it has to be active, and you need to be able to execute transactions in size with no problem, immediately. So if I come in and say I want to do, maybe at the beginning, a small trade, $1,000, I click a button, filled. And that's for all of these hundreds or thousands of markets they list. Likewise, if I come and say, okay, I want to put in $100,000 and I will do 20x leverage even, so I'm doing a $2 million transaction, I click a button, it executes immediately and it's done.

So this is what it means, having liquidity. But liquidity is part of the infrastructure. It's part of the product. It means you need to have market-making firms on the other side who will provide that liquidity and take on those trades when your end clients come to trade. Why do I say this? Because the end clients are not market makers. People don't wake up one day and say, "Let me go in the order book and put 10 orders on each side for these 100 markets." This is not what they do. They're the end user. They click a button, they expect a trade immediately with no problems.

So that's the first thing, it's a prerequisite. The second thing is just that exchanges are all about distribution. We can have the most amazing product, we can have interesting mechanics, but if you cannot hit the target, and first of all, if you don't understand really who is your target client segment, whose needs are you filling, and even more important, how do you even find these people, how do you reach them and tell them, "Hey, by the way, come here to do it." If you don't crack distribution, you will have a beautiful exchange with a lot of liquidity and no clients. And that exists as well.

The most successful exchanges today in the world, if you look at your Binances, OKXs, our friends who are here in the neighbourhood, or even if you look at decentralised exchanges, people talk about Hyperliquid. If you look at it, you really see it's great infrastructure. But many people have amazing tech, and then, really important, they have liquidity and they are able to communicate that message to the client. So I would really say people underestimate liquidity by a lot, how much it costs to make it happen. And the second thing is they just don't focus on distribution, because I think it's a web three thing. In web two, in normal business, people know how to do marketing, how to reach clients, and how to get them on the platform. In crypto, they always think they will come by themselves. I'm like, no, they will not come by themselves.

Maybe I don't know, because you run a platform as well. I was checking your platform. You are even at the forefront of this whole space, because you're tokenising real world assets. So it's not your crypto token launched with a few market makers and some KOLs. It's a serious business. So I don't know how you see it, but when I was reflecting on the question, I would say liquidity and distribution.

Sebastian: Would you say liquidity and/or distribution would be one of the two main reasons why exchanges then fail?

Anton: 100%, 100%. I would say liquidity is even a prerequisite, because otherwise you don't even have clients. A client can come and say, "This is amazing, this is the perfect fit for me," and they come there and they realise, "Wow, but I can buy only for a thousand bucks, and I want to sell, and I can't sell, there's nobody to get out." So I think it's even a prerequisite.

I don't know why that happens. Maybe because a lot of people who build crypto exchanges are tech people, so they don't get the trading part. Maybe that's the reason. Or, let's say, the opposite is also true, most of the successful exchanges, when you take a look at the founders, they came from the trading space. CZ was at a hedge fund before, and Bloomberg, and an HFT firm. Hyperliquid, the guys ran their own market-making firm. So the people who understand that liquidity is important, and who made it a success, they already came from that scene, they understood it. And distribution, that's just marketing and then getting the clients on board.

Sebastian: For our listeners that may not be as well-versed with the world of trading or crypto exchanges, that may come from a different walk of life, maybe spent a lifelong career in real estate or what have you, when you talk about distribution versus liquidity, they're obviously not the same thing, but they're quite interlinked. In short, can you describe the two? What's the difference between them?

Anton: Yeah. So liquidity is actually a very technical thing, but people feel it when they do a transaction. In plain words, liquidity is the ability to execute a transaction, it doesn't matter if it's a buy or sell, that's your choice, at the size that you want. So if I want to sell some tokens that represent equity or bonds or real estate, I can do that in the full amount that I want, and the transaction happens immediately, I'm not waiting for a year or six months or six days or whatever. So this is what liquidity means.

Now, you can say, well, how can I even recognise liquidity if I'm not a technical person? Usually, when you go to these platforms, to these exchanges, they show you this thing called an order book. The order book just tells you how much liquidity you have on the buy side and how much liquidity you have on the sell side. And usually they show you these price levels, and they tell you, well, at this price level you have this much buy interest, or you have this much sell interest.

The reason why I say this is key is that people usually look at these platforms and they see this order book moving and changing, and something is happening all the time. Usually I ask them, "What do you think, who is doing that?" And they say, "I don't know, maybe people around the world, they're doing that." And I tell them, "No, 99.9% of the activity you see in the order books comes from market makers." Why? Because market makers provide the liquidity for a living. That's their job. That's how they make their money. That's their role in this whole ecosystem.

So, liquidity is the ability to execute a transaction in full at any time and get it completed immediately. How do I see liquidity? It's usually in these order books, running around, and market makers are those inside providing liquidity. Now, liquidity cannot survive if you don't have distribution, if you don't have the end client coming in doing the trades. Market makers provide that liquidity so the clients can trade, and then market makers make their money by providing liquidity, namely on the spread or maybe on the transaction fees. So an exchange with a lot of liquidity cannot survive on its own, because you need somebody in the end to go and say, "I want to buy real estate, I want to sell it."

So you said it very nicely, you can almost get liquidity on the platform by paying for it, but if you don't get the end clients to come in through distribution to trade, it's not sustainable. The liquidity only becomes sustainable if the end client comes in and then the market makers provide that liquidity and get paid for that. So you said it perfectly. It's so interlinked. They're actually very opposite modules, but so interlinked, because one needs the other, and the end users make it sustainable.

Sebastian: Yeah. I think every person out there, if you've ever been on any investment product where you're trying to either buy or sell, regardless of what you're trying to buy and sell, and the user experience is effectively that you can't do either, well, you're going to get frustrated, of course. Especially in 2026 when we live in this on-demand kind of reality, where I can get, especially in a city like Dubai and in a country like the UAE where everything just works.

Anton: Shout out to the leaders.

Sebastian: Yes. It doesn't matter what you want, when you want it, there's infrastructure, because this is really infrastructure, that enables that kind of on-demand type experience.

This is quite interesting, because as we think about the idea of bringing, in this case real estate but also other real world assets, on chain, that have very different characteristics in terms of an investment or an asset class compared to spot trading. You don't spot trade real estate. I'd love to hear your opinion on this. When you think about market making and liquidity when the underlying asset is real estate, which typically is a type of investment that you buy and hold for a longer duration, it doesn't have to be five years or a decade or whatever, but you certainly don't buy today and sell tomorrow. Whereas traditional market makers, or market makers in crypto, are earning spreads or trading fees with a very high velocity. I don't think anyone has solved this yet, by the way. And to be clear, we don't know exactly what the answer is. We have a thesis of what this could look like. But I'd love to hear your raw, unfiltered thoughts. How does one market make when the underlying asset requires you to really hold for some duration of time for you to be able to make any money? Otherwise, one party here is making a serious loss.

Anton: Yeah. So you make a great point. Market makers in the traditional space, it's fully automated, computerised, people trade a lot, as I said the order book is moving around like crazy, a lot of activity. And then you have assets, especially many times unique assets. Let's say you're selling a unique watch. How can you imagine that there will be some market maker moving prices? Because moving what prices, it's a unique watch. If I have it, there can only be buy interest, there cannot be sell interest, I'm holding it.

To be honest, these players exist, and the reason why I can describe it to people is that, a long time ago, when I used to watch TV, there were these shows when they talked about pawn shops. At a pawn shop, you come in and you say, "I have this product, I have a watch, I have gold, I have a painting, I would like to sell it." And then the person at the pawn shop comes and says, "Hey, okay, let me give you a price." They may bring an expert, very important. An expert needs to say, "I think this is valued, if you go to an auction or if you try to sell it in the market, I think this item is worth $100,000." So you need an expert to tell you the pricing, because you cannot be an expert on all asset classes. But then the person running the pawn shop, he will tell you, "Look, the expert told me this is worth $100,000. If I bring it into an auction, it will cost me $5,000 just to put it on the auction, because they need to pay fees. And I'm not even sure that I'll be able to flip it in a day, maybe I'll have to hold it for six months. Therefore, Sebastian, I can offer you maximum 70,000."

So you see how he was behaving like a market maker here. But it's a very different experience than a market maker on a crypto exchange that does billions of dollars of volume every day and a lot of trades. My gut feeling is that for a lot of these new asset classes, you will have an equivalent of what this person that I just described does. So you'll have an expert, you'll have an oracle, we call it an oracle in the digital asset space, a price feed coming from an expert who will say, "This real estate, it's worth four million dirhams." And then somebody will say, "Okay, look, I cannot sell it immediately, I'll have fees, I need to pay the DLD, whatever. I can offer you now 3.6 if you want to sell it now."

So now you can say, well, we can fractionalise that, so a person can then sell a fraction of a real estate. I don't know how we want to do it, but I think that's how it will happen. We'll not have these platforms like we have with a crypto exchange, but we'll have expert pricing coming in, people understanding what the costs are to complete the transaction, to sell it later, and also taking into account the risk that you cannot maybe sell it immediately, maybe you'll hold it for six months or one year, and then they will offer you a price, and that is for you to take it.

Sebastian: Very interesting. Very interesting. I think something similar. Especially, you made one point that's very interesting, which is the concept of inventory risk.

Anton: Exactly.

Sebastian: You say it so professionally. I was a marketing dude.

Anton: No, no, not at all. Not at all. And it's a conversation that sort of is a double-edged sword, in the sense that taking on inventory risk means potentially greater financial upside, when you're able to offload, or you start having a degree of offtake of that inventory. Certainly if, like in your comparison, you can buy it below the current expert valuation, or fair market value, or whatever term you want to put on it. I believe, as an industry, this is one of the sensitivity points, if you will, that we have to figure out how to rightly solve.

Obviously, there's going to be some capital available globally that is willing to take that inventory risk, but really what they're pricing is future upside, as well as your distribution capabilities. Because if you're responsible for bringing that distribution in to effectively, at some point, offload what they're holding. So super interesting.

I also think there's a second lane here that may be unique to real estate, I don't know, but which is, certainly in real estate you can effectively identify buy and sell side, let's call it offline, and then execute on chain. Especially if you're talking about larger positions, if it's a single apartment in Dubai Marina worth three million dirhams, that's not that kind of audience. But if you're talking about a commercial building worth $300 million and someone's holding 20% of that, there aren't that many buyers, relative to smaller fractions.

Another point that, as an industry, we've hammered a lot here in the UAE, which is price accessibility and so on. But this concept scales. The amount of investors that have access to a $300 million commercial building, even if it's leveraged, is quite small. But the amount of buyers that may have the ability to come in with one, two, three, four, five million dollars is much greater, but still smaller than the 5,000 dirham bracket, obviously. Even in those hundreds of thousands or multi-million dollar situations, I think there's a manual process of some sort where you matchmake buyer and seller at that scale and simply just execute on chain. Because taking a $5 million or $10 million inventory risk for a number of months, or six months, is a big ask, compared to maybe doing it for 29 seconds on an exchange or whatever that might be.

We spoke a little bit earlier about a duration, your personal duration in the industry. There's something else that's quite, I would say, quite unique about your background, which I want to probe a little bit, which is your educational background.

Anton: Okay.

Sebastian: You effectively made the decision quite a long time ago to start an academic route into trading. That was your entry point. Why did you do that? Backdrop of a financial crisis just a few years earlier, I would imagine, prior to you going into doing this. Where did this come from? Why did you do this with your life?

Anton: Yeah, excellent question. There was a very specific moment in my life at the university. So you actually identified correctly, I studied mathematics, I was always in mathematics, but I was more the guy who did theory, pure mathematics. I remember, now the memories are coming, I was always the person saying, "Ah, these guys who do practical stuff, this is really for the ones who can't do the real thing, which is theory." I was taught like that.

And I remember the day a person came to visit us at the university and talk about his work. Now, people who are in trading and finance will know who I'm talking about, or what entity I'm talking about. He was the principal, or one of the early partners, at Renaissance Technologies. Renaissance Technologies, for those who know or don't know, is the most successful quantitative trading hedge fund ever in history. So this is the best of the best of the best. And this person, who is a creation like I am, he came to our university and was talking about what they do in this superstar trading firm, hedge fund, however you want to call it.

I was listening to him, and he finished his presentation, and I was like, "Wow, I don't understand what he just said, but this sounds amazing. I didn't even know that you can actually use mathematics." He was talking in depth about how you can use financial engineering, mathematics, in finance for a very specific reason, and there are people who do it very successfully. He did this presentation in 2008, just before the whole crisis came in. He came to my university and gave this talk, and I remember I walked up to him and said, "This is amazing, I want to work at Renaissance Technologies." He looked at me, and I kind of told him, "Do you have a job for me?" He says, "Anton, you will never get hired here. We get thousands of applications, we're the biggest on the planet, you really have to be the best if you want to work, creation style, Boltzmann style." And he told me that and I was like, wow, okay, because I didn't know.

Later I researched and I realised it's actually a really competitive field, to work in this high-frequency trading space, quantitative trading space, at these biggest hedge funds in the world. I actually learned, after he told me, that you really have to be very, very good. And the reason I say this is that I was actually one of the best students at the university in maths, so I felt I was very good. But later on, when I learned about it, it was like, yeah, you really have to be the best. They hired people with a lot of experience, the best of the best, but they never hire finance people. If you worked at a bank or another hedge fund, they would never hire you. They would only hire you if you came from physics, maths, computer science, and so on. So you didn't have to know anything about finance.

Sebastian: Interesting.

Anton: But they would hire you if they saw the potential. But enough about them. That was the exact moment where I said, wow, I didn't even know this space exists. And then what I did, I decided to also study financial engineering at university. So I did both of those. And that was my motivation. When I finished university, I said, okay, now I need to get a job at a hedge fund. And then again I learned how not easy it is. I was very lucky, after university I managed to join one of the first projects globally on high-frequency trading. Because high-frequency trading back in 2009, 2010, was still secretive. People knew that more and more trading on financial markets is done computerised, it's not people trading, it's algorithms.

I joined one of the first projects ever in the world, in the UK, where the goal was to look at how high-frequency trading and market making, all of this stuff, how they impact financial markets, how do they make it better or worse. I joined this project and my journey in this whole space took off there. Long story short, I worked briefly at the UK Treasury as a consultant on high-frequency trading, but more on the research and policy side.

Sebastian: Got it.

Anton: And then I...

Sebastian: To understand the impact it has on the macroeconomy.

Anton: Exactly.

Sebastian: Okay.

Anton: So it was a huge project. You have to remember, it was a massive project. I did great work when I was in the UK on this HFT space, but more on research. And I remember, back in the day, my boss, a very tough Singaporean lady, I think it was one of my KPIs, she said, "You need to write down what you learn and you need to publish it." So I published one of the first documents about high-frequency trading that explains what's actually happening there. You have to understand, back in the day, a long time ago, people knew that this is happening but didn't know what was happening.

Sebastian: Got it.

Anton: And I wrote a paper called "Overview of High Frequency Trading". For many years, if you typed HFT in Google, the first result was Wikipedia, the second one was this paper. And that's how the UK Treasury found me, to join and work on it. I remember I joined the UK Treasury, I was 24, and I would go there and they would meet me and talk, and they realised they hired me to help them as an expert on regulation and policy. I remember the guys were looking at me, who's this kid? And yeah, they would say, "Wow, you're really young."

Sebastian: Impressive.

Anton: Yeah. I really wanted to enter the industry as a trader, and I met an amazing, super-smart guy. He ran one of the biggest hedge funds in Switzerland in this space. And somehow, over a period of like a year, I kind of told him, "Yeah, if you need anyone to join." And after a while, they found an opportunity, he said, "Hey, come over and you can be a trader at a hedge fund." I was like 24, a dream come true for every young man in finance. And that's how I went into this journey. And it's very different, because then you're actually trading money from clients in the fund, and you're deploying it for the purpose of high-frequency trading. That's my journey into that. But initially it was this guy talking, and me not understanding what he was doing, and I was like, "Wow, this is awesome, I want to do this."

Sebastian: That's incredible. So you basically then went to Switzerland for this hedge fund.

Anton: Yes, exactly.

Sebastian: Why did you give up the trading, educational background, dream job, hopefully making bank, and then say, whoa, this digital assets thing, which wasn't really even a term fully back then, it was crypto basically. That was a big leap of faith, it looks like.

Anton: Yeah. So I can tell you now, it's a very good point. I joined the hedge fund, and the owner of the hedge fund, a super-smart, brilliant guy, a famous guy, I join and almost immediately he starts telling me, "Anton, this hedge fund stuff, this is the past, this is not the future. There's this new thing coming called the blockchain, and it's like a global settlement infrastructure, and you have the first native asset on top of it called Bitcoin, and it all works, and this is the future." It was 2012. Imagine you join a hedge fund, it's like your dream come true, you're like, finally, I'm here, I finally somehow managed to make it in here. And then you're listening to a boss, and you're like, "Oh, wow, apparently this is not the future." And he was the one who kept on saying, he was not saying no to this HFT space, he was kind of saying, "Hey, there is something bigger coming."

Sebastian: Interesting.

Anton: And the reason why it was very interesting for me is because we were in the foreign exchange markets, and it's a very specific market in how it works in the background, how things actually happen. FX is not really a market how people think of it. It's actually dominated by the banks. You either trade against the banks, there is one exchange but it's microscopic compared to the trading between the banks. So it's very unique how you trade, and we always saw blockchain... So let me take a step back. In FX, when you trade, the settlement always happens between the banks. So even if you and I are two hedge funds and we trade, we all have our prime brokers, which are our banks. And when we do the trade, the trade settlement happens between the banks, and it's all silent. It's on their balance sheet, in their currency, just like magic, a fairy tale, settling on their books.

And then we always saw blockchain as this global settlement infrastructure where it's not controlled by the banks, but it's controlled by the miners.

Sebastian: Well, that was the dream, anyway.

Anton: Yeah, that's the dream, at least. And you can put assets on it and then you can trade on them. So this is how we saw it. And then, after a year, year and a half, two years, this person, I was still living in Geneva, he was in Zurich, he called me, Geneva in autumn, grey, rainy day, you will not see sun for the next six months, he calls me and says, "Anton, I'm shutting down the whole hedge fund. I'm getting fired. Sorry, I'm firing everyone." I said, "Wow, this is a horrible start to the day." And then he said, "Yeah, but I'm telling you this idea about blockchain, why don't we do a startup?" He was a lot older than me, a lot more experienced, and he had done companies before. He said, "Why don't you join? You'll be a co-founder of mine and we'll build a startup in this digital space." It was 2013.

I said, I really admire this person. And I said, you know, sometimes you trust someone, you have to trust in them. And I said, okay, I imagine it will be Silicon Valley startups. I didn't know what I was thinking. Basically, I was too young. I said, yeah, why not?

Sebastian: You've seen too many movies.

Anton: Yeah. I thought we would raise 100 million now, somehow magically. That's how I saw it. So we launched the company in 2013. Six months later, Mt. Gox blew up, which was back then the biggest crypto exchange on the planet, doing like 90 to 95% of all volume, blew up completely, as we were ramping up to launch strongly and raise money. So that was postponed for like a year.

Sebastian: Wow.

Anton: But this was actually the story he told me as soon as I joined, that there is this new thing. He decided to pursue an opportunity in the digital asset space. We launched one of the first companies in crypto in Switzerland, and then it took off. It was the typical startup story. You launch a company, you're struggling a lot at the beginning, but somehow the right people, the right capital gets together, and then it took off. That's basically the story.

Sebastian: That's quite the story. It's almost like you serendipitously fell into this by way of this person deciding, you know what, I have this company and it's the path and I'm going down this path. That's quite incredible. And what to me makes it so incredible is that it was so early on. This person obviously had the financial capability to do these things, but they also had the foresight to say, I think we should double down here. 2013, that's really early. Very early. Amazing. Very cool.

So when you do things today, you operate today, you build today, you advise today, all the things you do today, with the educational, TradFi shift into building, which is arguably probably one of the first, I would say, 50 exchanges ever built, maybe even earlier, how does that affect what you do? What do you bring with you today that's from that world of TradFi education that you've now translated into how digital assets and exchanges operate today, or should operate today?

Anton: Yeah. So I would say, I would not even call this experience, but I would say I know the markets very well, how they function, how they actually operate. So many times, especially when we're building something, because this is when key decisions are made, many times I can tell people, "Ah, no, definitely don't do that, we tried that, this doesn't work, we need to find a different solution." So when I say experience, many times I know how the markets work, so I can tell you what not to do. Because you can always change paths, but it can take you on a path where you're really like, "Oh my god, this is now a big turn to correct something," that maybe we didn't know because we don't know intimately how the markets work. So I think that's the first one.

The second one is, I'm very humble about new technology and about new features and about new opportunities, because you only later know that something works. At the beginning it's so easy to be saying, "I don't think this will work," or "I don't think it's a good idea." If you have some thoughts about it, you can challenge an idea. I would rather, even I do that today, I would rather say, "Okay, look, I think this is not the best way to do it, and let me show you where we will have challenges. But this is great, because we can now test these challenges when we launch our product." And we have already identified where the things are, like when you create a table, you put the legs. So we have three legs, but we need to know how to put the fourth. So humbleness towards new ideas, to really say, "Hey, I'm not sure, maybe it will work or it will not work, but let me tell you where I have identified a few things where we need to strengthen it." And then you pivot later on.

And I think the last thing I bring is, I'm super excited about our industry. So even today, you come to me with something and I'm like, "Oh my god, this is amazing, you're doing such a great job, I love your platform, I checked it." And I think that's very important, because I know a lot of my colleagues, they did their style, they did their exits, and today you cannot even talk to them, they're so jaded with all their success, they're like, "I don't like crypto." But I think this is maybe a matter of character or outlook on life. I still bring that enthusiasm when people come to me with a new idea. I say, "Awesome, guys, do it, great stuff." Maybe not all ideas, but many of them.

I think that's so important, especially, you know it, when you're building something it's just problems, it's just challenges. So to have internally this drive, that somebody says, "Yeah, it's awesome," you know this meme with the dog, the whole house is burning and the dog is like, "Yeah, it's awesome." So bringing optimism towards the team, I think that's very important.

Sebastian: 100%. Yeah. No, I fully agree with that. You have no option. If you walk into every day thinking, oh, another problem, well, that's all you do. You're there to solve stuff that others haven't solved. If you don't get excited by that, don't do it. Go do something different with your life. So, fully agree with that for sure.

One thing that you said I find quite interesting, because it's applicable, at least in my view, to RWA meets crypto, and I'll explain what I mean. You have a background in education and then high-frequency and then moved into the early stages, and you can now look at certain business models or product decisions or whatever that might be, and say, my view is that that might not be the best way. I'm not saying definitely you shouldn't do that, but consider this, because my experience tells me this.

One of the friction points, I guess, that I see is, as we talk about all of these new, not new, old asset classes really, that we're trying to bring into an ecosystem, a digital infrastructure ecosystem that was built for a very different use case originally, with an audience that behaves very differently, and really for a very long period of time wasn't taken very seriously either. There was a lot of cowboying around, for lack of words. But a lot of nuclear meltdowns, and we've had them even in recent years. You don't have to go back to 2013 or 2014 to see them. We've had one pretty much every year over the last five, ten years as well.

Is there something today, in your experience, when you think about bringing RWAs into the world of blockchain and starting to trade and invest into these on chain, in terms of infrastructure or product-related decisions, that they're just by default adopting from crypto that they shouldn't? Are there changes we should make to the way that we build blockchain-based trading for RWAs, that have been applied to crypto, that shouldn't apply to RWAs?

Anton: Yeah. So I would say there are two challenges in the RWA space. One is very technical but then reflects a lot on the value proposition, and the second one is on the client base. So I'll answer the first one. In the earlier days of tokenised RWAs, the products that people were creating were actually not bringing any innovations, in my view, but they were creating further costs and uncertainty for the investors. I'm going to explain what that means, but it's a bit technical.

A few years ago, what a lot of people were doing, they were taking an asset in the real world, let's say real estate, but the way they brought that asset on chain was through something called special purpose vehicles. Now you know what I'm talking about, because you're an expert, but for people who don't understand, basically they created a fund, which has its costs and problems, but this is a traditional finance product. They wrapped the asset with that fund, and then they tokenised the fund, and then they created a token, and they said, "Let's go now sell this token." Now, you don't have to be an RWA expert to realise you did not do much here. You just wrapped an asset with this traditional, heavy, costly thing, and then tokenised that thing, and then, how will you bring this asset on chain?

Now, why do I say this is a problem? Because by doing this process you actually increased friction, because there is this traditional fund in the middle. You increased costs, because this thing costs money to maintain. And thirdly, you have actually increased uncertainty for the buyer of the token, because he first has exposure to the fund, which has its own challenges and problems, and then only later towards the asset.

I will never forget it. I was looking into the RWA space, working on a couple of projects with my friends back in 2022, and I go to a friend of mine who runs a fairly big family office, one of these big ones in Switzerland. And I told him, "Ah, we'll tokenise US treasuries and then you can buy these tokens." But this is a very smart guy. So he took a look and he told me, I'll never forget it, he's a good friend of mine, so I have to give him a bit of a disclaimer. He said, "Anton, we will never buy your garbage tokens." And then he said, "Let me explain to you why." And then he explained, "Look, I actually already have the world's biggest banks and prime brokers and investment banks at my disposal. If I want to buy US treasuries, I will just call them. I already have accounts open with all of them. I'll just buy the US treasuries. So why should I now buy this token that has uncertainty with this fund, to actually get the access to the treasuries which I can either way buy?"

And for me this was a mind-blowing moment, because I realised he is right. This is not an innovation. And then I said, but okay, what's then the right step to do it? The right step is to bring this asset directly on chain. Then you don't need all this thing, the intermediaries in the middle. You should actually bring an asset directly on chain. And why should you do that? Because then you decrease the cost, there are no SPVs anymore. But the problem was, and the problem still is today in many countries around the world, that this is not possible, what I just described. You cannot just put shares directly on chain. What I mean by that is, you can put something, but does this give you the legal certainty that you're the owner of that asset?

So that was a thing where, for many years, people were creating these intermediaries, but they were actually not giving, in my view, and many of my friends as well, they were not giving that much added value to the end client, which is very important. So this is the first problem.

The second problem is that I think pitching real world assets to a crypto-native crowd is a very difficult sell.

Sebastian: Elaborate on that.

Anton: Yeah, because people in the crypto industry expect high volatility, big drawdowns, but they expect a lot of upside fairly fast. They're looking for that 50%, 100% per year, 200%. The story is 10x per year. And when you have that kind of expectations, it's very difficult to find alignment when you're offering them a product that's stable in pricing and offers a very good yield, 5 to 10%. This is just not the right fit. And I know a lot of projects actually try to do that. They would create these tokens, liquidity pools, all these bells and whistles. But then you pitch it to the crypto crowd, and the crypto crowd are like, "But we are chasing meme coins, how is it actually a fit?"

Sebastian: Give me a 13x in three days.

Anton: Exactly. So I don't know how you feel about it, but I think many times, today many companies, also like yours, because I checked your platform, your website and everything, it targets the right people. But for many years the RWA crowd was just talking to the wrong end users. That's how I felt.

Sebastian: Yeah. Well, there's a lot of interesting stuff to unpack there. I'll take us off track, because it's more interesting. One of the core points to hit on there, which is super important, and we could spend hours just talking about this, is how do you structure the holding and the legal ownership of the underlying asset? Which is not a problem statement that a single private entity operator can solve for. You just simply cannot. You can only rely on the structures that are currently available to you within the jurisdiction or jurisdictions that you operate within. Obviously, here in Dubai they have taken one step towards making that change, at an emirate level, and soon it will likely also be at the federal level.

Do you have any thoughts on, obviously we're in the middle of it, we're full steam ahead clearly, but it sounds like maybe it's too early to launch still, unless you're willing to operate in some sort of in-between, doing a little bit of this structure, a little bit of that structure. The underlying structure isn't there to be fully native on chain for all of these assets. But yet, despite that, we're seeing all these companies launching. So do you have any thoughts on this, like, is it too early?

Anton: Yeah. So it always boils down to the fact, who is your target client segment and what kind of problems are you solving for them? Because when you asked me where I see opportunities or gaps or challenges, however you want to call them, I said, well, the structuring is not done the right way. But maybe for your end client, he cares about access, he cares about deploying capital, and he doesn't have access, like my friend in the family office. Maybe that's a value proposition. Or maybe it's about lowering the ticket size. So maybe the structuring is then less important.

So it's always important, founders and projects need to be mindful, they need to say, okay, what problem am I solving, for which clients? And I can point to some success stories. For instance, Xtos, which is a company, I don't know where they're based, maybe in Switzerland, who basically tokenise US equity, bring them on chain, they work together with Kraken, and people from countries or jurisdictions that don't have easy access to equities can do that through Xtos, namely through this collaboration with Kraken.

Sebastian: Fair point.

Anton: But they still use these special purpose vehicles and these very complicated matters to create a product. So it's always important to understand which problem I'm really nailing, and maybe then the structuring is not so key. But I'm always like the person who told me the big thing is the blockchain. Do we really see where the breakthrough is? What is the big problem, where is the big innovation? In my humble opinion, it's many times easier to go after the bigger problem than after the easier problem.

Sebastian: Especially when you're in those early days, where the world is just trying to discover itself.

Anton: But what I just said comes with the challenge that you need to change laws. I mean, this is the most difficult one.

Sebastian: Yeah. 100%. For sure. Structuring definitely is top of the list of conversations we have. All the time. We're obviously lucky and benefit from the fact that we are here, and there's a reason why Tribe is built in Dubai, from Dubai, for Dubai, but then also for the country and the region and the world, of course, that's the goal. But as a starting point, it's highly beneficial to be able to be where there are these pilot projects happening, with new, innovative structures.

I think on the real estate side, if you talk on the asset owner side, the supply side, if you will, there's a huge amount of excitement and pent-up demand sitting there wanting to figure out how to get involved. There's a huge amount of education and handholding required, rightly so. As an industry, blockchain, web three, we've got to stop using hyped-up terminology. Let's just use normal language when we talk about what we do. We're creating barriers for ourselves that aren't helpful. Even in the way the products are sometimes built, it's overly complicated. It should be dummy-proof basically. And I mean that in the absolute non-disrespectful way.

But structurally it's quite evident, and I don't even have to, I can use real examples. There have been a number of attempts here and in other regions to structure really, really large projects. Really, really large RWA or real estate tokenisation projects, all of which have collapsed. There hasn't been a single global, really large use case that's then copy-pasted multiple times over. And to me, that tells me that, as an ecosystem, we haven't gotten the structure right yet. And we need to keep testing, keep trying.

I would say, in my view, that we are likely going to live with a dual or multi-structure reality for some time, perhaps forever, because, to your point, what are you solving for? Your large-scale asset managers, your large-scale capital allocators, have a very different expectation on structure, and what matters to them is very different to a retail investor, for example.

We're coming near the end. I wanted to hear your thoughts on, we spoke a little bit, structurally, what founders get wrong, what the industry has to focus on, what you've done in the past, and then where you're at now. To the extent you're able and willing, what does 2026, 2027 look like for you? Where are you focusing? What's in the pipeline? Any juicy gossip you can share with us that's not public yet?

Anton: Speaking hypothetically.

Sebastian: Okay, go ahead. Speaking hypothetically.

Anton: I mean, look, the exchange space I think is extremely exciting, and especially in the RWA space. We had this discussion, for the audience, we were together on a panel which you moderated, a discussion between you and me, which you led perfectly.

Sebastian: Thank you.

Anton: And you asked me where the opportunity is for RWAs, what's the exciting thing that I see. And I gave this example, which was very relevant for us here in the region, which was, when this conflict started here, there was a lot of volatility in certain asset classes, especially in oil, and it impacted us here in the country, in the region. And I gave you this example of a colleague of mine who comes from traditional finance, who works in a company that was heavily exposed to oil, and he told me on the weekend, "Anton, we hedged our oil position, we bought oil." And I asked him, "But how, where did you buy it, the markets are closed?" And he told me, "Hey, Anton, there is this thing called Hyperliquid, where they can go and hedge their exposure."

And it was so... I mean, obviously I knew about Hyperliquid, I knew about Aster, but for me it was like, wow, we as a digital asset industry in the RWA space offer the product that nobody else on the planet can offer. There is no other exchange on the planet where you can go and trade oil over the weekend and hedge your exposure. You can go to CME, the world's biggest futures market, and they don't work over the weekend if you want to trade oil. And it was important for us here in the region and in the country because of the challenges that were happening here, and the conflict.

Sebastian: Yeah.

Anton: And for me it was an amazing experience, because I realised, wow, look, there is something that we offer that people need, and where it's a clear value proposition for the RWA space. But obviously in a very specific context, because it's oil, it's not real estate, but it's something traded globally. So I think in that sense we are slowly entering a phase where offering a marketplace, an exchange, where you can trade such RWAs in a safe and secure manner, with liquidity, I think there will be an opportunity for that. So this is where I'm very excited, and where I think it will happen. Amazing things will happen, but it's just in the early days, and there will be a convergence. You will have centralised exchanges launching, decentralised exchanges launching, and it will happen what you mentioned at the beginning. I really liked it, you said very soon you're just going to be an investor, and you'll go to a platform, you will have crypto, you will have RWAs, you will have traditional finance, you're just an investor. These are not separate asset classes. They're all coming under one hood, under one environment. And for us then, as builders and founders and executives in the digital asset space, it's no more digital assets. It's all coming together.

Sebastian: Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. This idea of time accessibility, which is the way I look at it, when can I trade, is also something that hasn't really entered the conversation very much in real estate yet either, quite frankly. All of the active platforms, even the crowdfunding predecessors, all talk about low price entry points, it's price accessibility. But time accessibility and functional visibility, the fact that you can actually invest in that property, we forget, because in Dubai and the UAE specifically we're very spoiled. Even overseas investors have very easy access, certainly when you talk about off-plan. But I'm sure there's a great investment opportunity in like Kenya, if you find the right one, but it's functionally invisible to like 99.9% of all the people in the world. I wouldn't even know where to start. How do you invest in a villa in Kenya? I don't know. I might go to Google or ChatGPT or whatever to figure it out. But here, it would take you two minutes to find a real estate broker in Dubai, and within one day you'll have a whole list of opportunities, and the day after you can start deploying capital. It's so easy.

On a final note, a bit selfishly, you have a lot of expertise. I'd love to hear, when you specifically think about Tribe, the reason we're here is we want to build as much as possible in public. We want to have conversations like this, we want to be on panels and fireside chats, and learn, because that's the only way we're going to make it a success. When you think about Tribe, you think about real estate tokenisation and the path forward from here, with all the knowledge and experience you have, what do you think are the near-term opportunities, but also the near-term to mid-term obstacles? Anything we haven't spoken about? I'd love to hear both, as a closing note today.

Anton: I will praise you now a lot. So, this is the...

Sebastian: Oh, wow. I'm not sure if this is well deserved, but I'll take it.

Anton: Yes. Thank you. Take it. In the preparation, even before the discussion we had a week ago at the conference, I went to check your website to see what you're doing, the platform, the app, and also what you're doing publicly. I think you're doing a great job.

Sebastian: Thank you.

Anton: I think you're really, really doing a great job. I think also your messaging, your developer positioning, at least when I was looking, was very clear to me, what is it that you offer. And I think you're just doing great.

In the long term and mid-term, but this is now just a thought out of the blue, I think that you will make a massive success story together with a massive partner. And why do I say that? Because there's an opportunity for companies like yours to do that. I'll just mention, you partnering up with a major developer, all the doors on the planet are open at that moment, take your pick who you want. I think that can add a lot of value to an organisation like yours, and why do I say it, because there's an opportunity to do that.

If we were in a country where I would say, "Seb, there is nobody here, you have to figure this out yourself somehow, how you will even find the flats, I don't know," but I'm saying this because there's a big opportunity, and this opportunity is just going to become bigger. Because despite all these challenges, the UAE is just going to become stronger, Dubai is just going to become stronger, the leadership is taking an amazing direction for the country, and all of these developers, we can say developers, but it could be many things, a fund, a real estate fund, or someone else, they're just going to become bigger and stronger. And you and your organisation are already in the right position to partner with somebody who is very strong, because you are the leader in the tokenisation, RWA space. Yes, it's early, but they are the leaders, maybe, in real estate development. You have the opportunity to talk to a key player on the same level and work together with them. How that then results, maybe they buy you, you buy them out because you become bigger than the real estate, I don't know.

Sebastian: Sounds dreamy.

Anton: Yeah. I think you have an amazing opportunity, because there are such big players here, and they would benefit from you a lot more than you will benefit from them. Because you're the future, and they're the current and the past, and you're the future. That's how I would say it.

Sebastian: That's a nice framing. Yeah, we would like to be the future. So, if people want to follow your journey, listeners, current and future ones, RWA Labs' journey, where do they find you online?

Anton: I'm very active on LinkedIn, but I somehow have to be careful now telling people to send me a message. I get hundreds of messages every day. I try to reply to everybody, but as you can imagine, it's just work. So, yes, you can reach me on LinkedIn. I actually think it's even easier to contact me if you just write to me in one of the posts, because sometimes I write posts on LinkedIn. If you just write to me on a post, I think I will notice it more quickly than going through this whole list of messages. So, somehow, contact me on LinkedIn.

Sebastian: Got it. All right. Follow him on LinkedIn. Don't send him messages, he has too many.

Anton: Thank you. Thank you.

Sebastian: If you want to benefit from Anton's expertise, there's tons of content out there. You post, I don't know, daily, twice daily, you're very active and there's a lot of substance. So, that's it. Thanks a lot for coming on. Really appreciate your time and all your invaluable input, expertise, guidance, and hopefully even off camera we will be able to keep benefiting from it.

Anton: Awesome. Thank you for having me on Block by Block, and you pitched the next guest so strongly that I look forward to the next episode. I will watch it, whoever the next one is.

Sebastian: Glad to hear it. Thank you. Thanks.

Anton: Thank you.