Julian Kwan from InvestaX: RWA Tokenization Explained, Licensed RWAs & Onchain Capital Markets

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Episode description

In this episode of the Applied Blockchain Podcast, Adi Ben-Ari speaks with Julian Kwan, Co-Founder & CEO of IXS and InvestaX, about why real-world asset tokenization is moving from “security token experiments” into a global race to rebuild capital markets on-chain.

Drawing on Julian’s experience building licensed RWA platforms across Singapore and the Bahamas, the conversation explores how tokenization is evolving beyond crowdfunding into programmable, interoperable financial infrastructure — and why stablecoins, regulation, and distribution are the real catalysts for growth.

Together, Adi and Julian explore, including but not limited to:

• Why “security tokens” became “digital securities” and now “RWAs”
• Why capital markets moving on-chain is ultimately an efficiency play
• How Singapore’s early regulatory approach enabled real experimentation
• Why stablecoins are the key utility pillar behind on-chain finance
• The biggest bottlenecks in RWAs
• Why liquidity doesn’t magically appear
• How tokenized treasuries became the first true product-market fit in RWAs
• The next wave: private credit, private debt, and “Bitcoin real yield”
• Where privacy matters in on-chain markets

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Resources Mentioned & Themes Discussed

• Singapore’s regulatory and government grant approach to tokenization
• Tokenized treasuries and yield-bearing on-chain assets
• DEX models (e.g., Uniswap-style liquidity pools) applied to tokenized securities
• AI agents as a new interface for discovering information and automating workflows

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Transcript

00:00:37:00 - 00:00:41:00

‍Adi Ben-Ari

Julian Kwan, welcome to the Applied Blockchain Podcast.

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00:00:41:00 - 00:00:45:00

‍Julian Kwan

Adi, thanks for having us.

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00:00:45:00 - 00:00:51:00

Adi Ben-Ari

Julian, please tell us a bit about yourself. Give us an introduction for our listeners.

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00:00:51:00 - 00:01:52:00

‍Julian Kwan

Sure. Hi everyone — Julian Kwan here. I’m the co-founder of two licensed real-world asset tokenization platforms. InvestaX is licensed out of Singapore, and IXS is licensed out of the Bahamas.

I’m originally from Australia, but I’ve been on the entrepreneurial road since I was about 21. I spent around 13 years in Shanghai and Beijing, building a range of startups — including some early SME advertising businesses — and later moved into real estate development.

I came to Singapore about 10 years ago because I wanted to explore the intersection of investing and the internet, and what that would do to private markets. That was the start of the journey.

Then we went all-in on RWAs right as the space began forming — around 2018–2019. We’ve been in the trenches for many years, and I’m happy to be here and share more about the industry and what we’ve been working on.

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00:01:52:00 - 00:02:04:00

Adi Ben-Ari

Okay — super interesting. Julian, take us through the early years, because I think “RWA”, even as a term, is only from the last few years. What were you doing at the beginning? What were you trying to do?

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00:02:04:00 - 00:03:06:00

Julian Kwan

At the beginning it was called security tokens. So we’ve been through security tokens, digital securities, STOs, DSOs — and now we’re RWAs. We’ve had four or five different names for the same industry, which shows how early it is, and how quickly things change.

The first iteration of InvestaX was a real-estate crowdfunding platform. We did a bunch of deals and realised it was good — more like a “0.2” moment than a “0.1” moment.

People were coming online and putting $100,000 into real estate developments in London, Sydney, or Singapore — which they’d never have done before. But if you think about that process — and it’s the same for P2P equity crowdfunding and other online investments — it didn’t really change the nature of the investment.

You’d sign a deal, then sit there for five years waiting for something to happen.

00:03:06:00 - 00:03:46:00

Julian Kwan

Then we noticed something else. We were based in Singapore, and Singapore was home to about 35% of initial coin offerings — give or take. Singapore companies were the underlying corporate structure for hundreds, if not thousands, of ICOs.

We immediately saw that and thought: why don’t we use this technology instead of Web2 infrastructure? If people are going to send Bitcoin, stablecoins, and utility tokens in a world of digital currencies, then we’re going to need a world of digital securities too. That’s the path.

So we went all-in. We added an exchange licence to our broker-dealer licence. It took around five years to get approved — but we believed in it.

00:03:46:00 - 00:03:52:00

Adi Ben-Ari

Really? I didn’t know this.

00:03:52:00 - 00:05:52:00

Julian Kwan

We also realised early on that what people like Larry Fink say today is what we were saying seven or eight years ago: it’s just a better system. Capital markets will move on-chain.

You get better transparency, more benefits for both investors and issuers, and it’s better for governments too — because they can see what’s going on more clearly. There are also far more use cases, because you can do more with these assets once they’re digital.

And ultimately, you’re going to interact in a world of digital fiat money — and you can only really do that with digital shares.

Now with the hyper-growth of AI, we can see that in a world of agents and robots making payments, trading assets, and doing things for humans, the only way it works is digital currencies connecting with digital assets — whether that’s art, securities, or real estate.

So that’s how we got here. We started with a high-level view of how the internet would disrupt investing — and now it’s becoming very clear the movement is real. Governments that were hesitant or negative over the last few years have come around: Hong Kong, Korea — and Singapore has been pro since 2013.

The US is probably the most visible example now. Instead of trying to crush the industry, they’re trying to own it — and as a result, we’re seeing a wave of positive policy and regulation. That means an enormous amount of capital, brainpower, and opportunity coming into the space.

I genuinely think the opportunity is unmatched. It’s a once-in-a-generation time to be working in finance. The market is basically infinite — public assets, private assets, everything.

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00:05:52:00 - 00:06:41:00

Adi Ben-Ari

Yeah. Okay, so Julian, take me through a bit — the nuts and bolts of it. So from a distance, we’ve always heard about Singapore being a leading place in terms of regulation, right? I think from the early days. And I’ve seen this more closely with things that have happened in the UK and Europe and so on. What’s it been like in Singapore, and what does it mean in practical terms for your company? What were you able to do at the beginning, and what are you able to do now?

00:06:41:00 - 00:10:28:00

Julian Kwan

Yeah, that’s a good question. One of the ironies of us being in Singapore is that we wanted to be here. We wanted to be in a central market in Asia that was English-speaking. They went out early as the fintech hub — they were the financial hub of Southeast Asia and beyond. Then they wanted to be the fintech hub. This was pre-blockchain, so they were already planting those flags.

As blockchain came along, they became super pro that as well — trialling stuff. We’ve been given financial grants by the government to tokenize assets here. There’s probably no other country in the world that has that kind of government initiative support — thinking, “If we want our country to be the tokenized capital of the world, let these early-stage startups have a crack out here. None of the big guys are doing anything — let’s give them a bit of money and see what they do.”

The flip side is that very few, if any, other regulators in the world thought the same thing. So we went all-in in 2018–2019. And I was of the position that you won’t get anywhere if you half-ass it. If we’re pretending to do it, the team will just do it the old way, and we’ll never actually get anything out the door. So we went all-in.

That was very challenging because we were ahead of the curve. Singapore was ahead of the curve, we were ahead of the curve. Then when we went out to the world to seek business, we realised how far behind everyone else was — or how far behind it wasn’t even possible. Some jurisdictions weren’t even talking about RWAs.

So regulation is very important. There were jurisdictions that threw up positive regulations, but they weren’t jurisdictions per se — Gibraltar, Malta, somewhere in the Philippines — just saying you’re pro something by regulation does not mean there’s any money there, any issuers, any investors.

But now you’re at a point where Hong Kong is pro, America is pro, and the UAE is obviously a really big market — they’re building out the capital markets. What they’re doing is super interesting and valuable.

Ultimately, this technology, these assets, these startups — they can go in many different places. Regulators need to be positive and support it, otherwise it’ll stop and build somewhere else. That’s the landscape.

From a use case perspective, stablecoins are the key pillar of utility in the whole space. Bitcoin is digital wealth. Ethereum is a smart contract platform. And now with tokenization of real assets, we’ve seen small things going on for years that no one really knew about — private assets, your startup, my real estate fund — things that very few people knew about.

But in the last year or two, we’ve seen product-market fit in tokenized treasuries and money market funds, where we started to see real on-chain growth and real issuance. That was mainly stablecoin holders earning zero yield seeking any type of yield. So when people started tokenizing treasuries, it was like, “Oh hey — this is liquid. It’s daily redemptions. And I can get 4% versus 0%.” 4% might not sound like a lot, but it’s 400% more than zero.

Now we’re going back full circle: real estate, private equity, private credit — all these other assets coming out. We just tokenized a shipping investment, because at the end of the day, a token is a digital share. Tokenization is for every asset class, every SPV, every ownership vehicle. But you still have to have company licences, good asset owners and managers — all that remains the same.

I think we’re going to see an explosion of activity. The genie’s out of the bottle, and it’s only going to get more interesting now.

00:10:28:00 - 00:10:50:00

Adi Ben-Ari

Yeah. And Julian, just so I understand what the platform looks like and how it’s structured — presumably you have an exchange licence, somebody comes to you to issue, right? And you help them tokenize. And then you enable a secondary market as well. Is that right?

00:10:50:00 - 00:15:37:00

Julian Kwan

Yeah — in short, yes. We thought our position was: if you don’t have a one-stop shop, it’s going to be more complicated than the old world, and no one’s going to do it.

So we have advice — if you want to start a project today and you have an asset, we can advise on: what do you do? What’s the structure look like? What legal structure? What smart contracts? What protocols? What platforms to launch on? Is it a global product? Are you allowing people to trade it? Are you allowing people to lend against it?

And then on the platforms themselves — we have two — you can issue, you can have a co-branded section, you can have your offering cards, you can issue any tokenized asset of your own. We onboard the issuer — we don’t just let anyone list.

Investors can KYC/AML, they can pay for it — or they can pay in stablecoins — and they can buy one of these real-world asset tokens. Then there are ways to do secondary trading.

We’re starting to see that in a world of digital assets, everything will be platformized. You should be able to buy stocks, crypto, do banking services, buy real asset tokens, buy startup tokens — everything online — and it will gravitate to platforms.

We positioned ourselves as a key infrastructure player between Web2 and Web3. All the Web3 guys will need licensed venues to legally issue real-world asset tokens, because most are securities and most don’t have licences. Or they might have crypto licences, but that’s a different asset class. So we help crypto exchanges power the backend of real asset tokenization, because they’re coming for this — it’s a much bigger universe than crypto.

Same from the Web2 side: Robinhood is a great example. They were selling stocks, now full tilt crypto, and now full tilt RWA. The Web2 guys will want to add crypto, digital assets, and real asset tokens eventually. And crypto guys will come back the other way and want to add RWAs.

It’s still very early days. BlackRock is a big player, but there are 40,000 asset managers out there. It’s the same with Robinhood and Coinbase — Coinbase is big, but there are hundreds of crypto exchanges that haven’t started yet. And there are thousands of fintech platforms globally.

What’s most interesting is there will be a whole bunch of new investment products developed. If you do a quick historical review of blockchain: Bitcoin in 2008, Ethereum in 2013 (smart contracts), then NFTs, memes, DAOs, metaverse, then RWA, then stablecoins. New use cases all the time.

In securities and capital markets, there are already so many products: options, debt, equity, structured products, preferred equity, common equity. A digitized version of these assets has huge benefits depending on the asset.

Wall Street historically spent its time creating financial engineering products — now they’ve got a whole new world to do it in. It’s bigger, broader, and ultimately better for investors. Wall Street has woken up to this over the last 18–24 months now that America is sanctioning the whole thing.

Places like Singapore and the UAE that were out in front will now see a new wave of capital coming in. We’re going to see a whole bunch of new investment opportunities that hopefully open up to a much broader set of investors.

00:15:37:00 - 00:15:55:00

Adi Ben-Ari

Yeah. Okay, good. Julian, I’m a techie, right? So I look at this stuff from a techie perspective. We work with centralized exchanges. We’ve done some on-chain AMMs, and now we’re seeing perps, DEXs, and things like this. What’s your view on where things should be off-chain versus on-chain? Where’s all this going? Because it feels quite messy now.

00:15:55:00 - 00:18:06:00

Julian Kwan

It’s a good question. To highlight one simple issue — as an example of what is messy — if you’re trying to analyze any cryptocurrency today, you’re probably going to end up in two places: CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap, these data aggregator platforms.

They plug into digital asset infrastructure and try to give instantaneous pricing for any type of asset, plus other trading data — but they only acknowledge on-chain data.

So if you go to our platform: IXS has its own utility token, even though it’s a regulated RWA platform. The token is called IXS — same name as the platform. A lot of people measure the success of a crypto project by how much total value locked is on that protocol. There are flaws — you can gamify it — but to keep it simple, people look at TVL and if it’s big, it must be successful.

The point is: we tokenize real-world assets. The value of the asset is off-chain because it’s in the real world. So if you’re looking at this industry, the two main places people validate and research projects openly say: “We can’t count this. We can’t tell you what these guys do because we don’t acknowledge anything off-chain.”

So we have like $90 million of so-called TVL that someone else has acknowledged, but the two main guys don’t do it — refuse to do it. It’s not their ball game. It’s not structured. Messy, right? Messy.

But the opportunity in this new world is insane — and there are huge challenges. A lot of people are chipping away at them. That’s the whole point of a startup: see a problem, try to solve it, build a new industry.

00:18:06:00 - 00:18:17:00

Adi Ben-Ari

Yeah, yeah. I’m with you. I’m trying to understand where this is all going myself as well.

00:18:17:00 - 00:20:07:00

Julian Kwan

At the end of the day, there are only so many things you can say that aren’t really true before reality catches up.

A lot of people say we don’t need securities laws and everyone should be able to trade everything all day long without any KYC. Technically, you could do it. You and I could create an ERC-20 for equity in our company and send it to a million people today — they didn’t even have to ask for it.

But it’s not realistic, because you’ve still got a world of real people and real businesses. And crypto has proven time and time again: if you have zero rules, a lot of people get scammed and ruined. It’s inevitable.

Rules exist not necessarily because of mad oversight — they existed because people kept cheating each other.

00:20:07:00 - 00:20:12:00

Adi Ben-Ari

Rules are usually made when something goes wrong…

00:20:12:00 - 00:21:19:00

Julian Kwan

That’s right. And you can argue there are too many rules and we need to peel back, and new technology can change it.

But overall: it’s never been a more exciting time to be building in this space. There’s never been more clarity per se. There’s never been more people interested.

I think the current state of play — January 19 — is a whole bunch of people who lost faith in crypto because altcoins are in the toilet and Bitcoin hasn’t moved for a year, and “Oh my God, it’s all over.” I don’t believe any of that. I think we’re going to have an amazing couple of years, especially for Bitcoin, which leads all coins.

I think the altcoin season is going to be very exciting. But today, a lot of the industry is institutionalized. Wall Street’s coming for everyone’s bags. It is what it is. You can either want everyone to use Bitcoin and accept it, or you can’t sit there and say “we don’t want those guys” — it’s all or nothing.

00:21:19:00 - 00:22:49:00

Adi Ben-Ari

When I think about real world assets and the things that we’ve seen out there, I guess there are a couple of major challenges. One is pricing. For this stuff to be automated on-chain, you need oracle pricing — and that’s hard with less liquid assets where the data is off-chain.

The second is that because of securities laws, access to these assets is restricted — and that’s obviously different to crypto. Crypto is the wild west, and it’s interesting intellectually and technologically because there’s lots evolving — but there’s also risk, and there’s a reason we have regulation.

But when you bring restrictions in, it restricts who can access assets and how. And then the question becomes: how do you bring liquidity? Off-chain, it’s the big asset managers and institutional investors. How do you see this coming together?

00:22:49:00 - 00:30:15:00

Julian Kwan

Yeah — so for those well-versed, price oracles in crypto scour the internet and projects to give updated pricing. When you think about real-world assets, that becomes an issue. There are startups trying to solve it, but I don’t think there’s a magic bullet.

If Bob and Alice have a real estate building or a VC fund, you can’t send a price oracle to knock on their door. They have to plug the information in — they’re asset managing, checking portfolio values, etc.

The endgame is probably a few registry platforms, but you can’t just rely on people to tell the truth. So you go back to regulated platforms that sold these assets in the first place. To sell a security, you need a licence — unless it’s your own security.

So you go back to how it was done before blockchain: platforms selling assets under pricing structures — NAV, TVL, AUM — updated daily, monthly, weekly, yearly, whatever they said. People can point to: “This trades all day long, but the validated price is only updated once a year.” Market — do what you want.

On liquidity: the liquidity of an asset is not first and foremost what format it sits in. It’s what quality of asset, who’s managing it, what returns, how many people know about it, minimum investment, how often you can trade — it’s investment metrics.

Every asset is responsible for its own liquidity. It doesn’t magically turn up out of thin air. We had a massive crack at solving this with IXS’s first iteration — ahead of its time — building the first real-world asset DEX.

If you believe in tokenizing everything, you can see a world where SpaceX RWA tokens trade on Coinbase. But do you see a seed-round startup trading on Coinbase? I don’t. I do see millions of startups not welcome on Coinbase or InvestorX.

In the tokenized world, all these assets will want the ability to trade — not necessarily on tier-one exchanges, but still trade.

In crypto’s early days, there was no trading on DEXs. Why? There was no liquidity. You could post one BTC for $10 and hope someone turns up. Then centralized exchanges came — Binance, Coinbase — providing liquidity, but centralized. So people screamed decentralization while trading centralized.

In 2017, smart people said: “There are 10 tokens on Coinbase but 100,000 altcoins that aren’t welcome.” So they built the swap model — DEXs like Uniswap — pools of tokens where anyone can start a liquidity pool.

You bring an altcoin and USDT, you have liquidity, LPs share fees, and buyers have liquidity. DEXs created a low-cost venue where anyone could start a pool without being a big player.

So we built that for RWAs. If there will be trillions in RWA tokens and less than 1% go on centralized platforms, what do the other 99% do? Build a Uniswap-style model — but with securities licences, crypto licences, custody licences — so someone with $5,000 of equity tokens can start a pool.

The challenges: we were first, and at the time there weren’t really financial instruments — everything was private assets. So price discovery was hard. And liquidity still needs to be provided, ideally by the people who set it up.

Liquidity isn’t free. Someone has to bring it out of their own pocket.

We’re starting to see so-called RWA vaults — DeFi versions of what IXS has. A lot of it isn’t legal, but people can do what they want. The tech is there. It’s now a capital game.

So you’re starting to see more use cases across DeFi: lending against these assets. And you really want to see more real-world assets.

The crypto industry used to laugh at us at events — “real world assets are stupid.” We had ridiculous conversations. But we always said: this is a great use case. It brings more utility to crypto. If there are more real things to buy — not just funny money — it’s good for crypto, it creates a flywheel.

And now it’s being proven: stablecoins are absolutely mandatory for crypto — the first and still major real use case by size. And more RWAs require more stablecoins, which increases activity, and the flywheel grows. These assets belong together — and they help each other grow: use case, size, scale, infrastructure, solutions.

00:30:15:00 - 00:31:18:00

Adi Ben-Ari

I guess we probably see the same thing here. The way I look at it is: the technology is efficient. If you use blockchain to actually trade, you can end up in a more efficient place in many ways. That’s not true for everything, not every asset, not every use case — but it’s an efficiency play.

You see it play out in crypto: loose in terms of assets, but tight on the tech side because there’s no room for waste. People won’t do something that can get hacked, or uses too much gas. So it gets very tight and efficient.

So crypto becomes a playground where tech evolves. And then RWAs are the huge market that needs this more efficient infrastructure.

00:31:18:00 - 00:34:09:00

Julian Kwan

Yeah. Look, the basic premise — blockchain efficiencies — is there now. Now it’s: how do you use it for whatever you’re doing, whatever your industry is, whatever your model is. There are so many incredible use cases.

It was hard for the first few years because everyone thought: “I’m doing it to raise money.” It’s like — you still have to raise the money. You still have to run the investment. “But stupid crypto projects raise money for nothing, why can’t I raise money for something real?” You should be able to — but it’s the wrong audience. And by the way, your asset’s not very good anyway. If you were a really good asset owner, you weren’t looking at crypto six years ago — you wouldn’t even have heard of it.

Institutions are using this to cut costs. If you reduce administration by 10–15%, that increases profit. I don’t know how many of these businesses have 15% profit — this could be 3x the profit. It’s massive. Reducing headcount and AI aside, that’s what big financial institutions are doing — because you have a digital ledger, so you don’t need all the people in the middle validating everything.

On the product side, you get brand new products — new debt, new equity, new ways to use assets. You can lend, borrow, collateralize — which you couldn’t do in paper form. But on trusted platforms with the right metrics, people will loan against these assets. That’s game-changing.

Distribution channels, more venues coming up — and most people don’t know or care that emerging market individuals can get a stablecoin infinitely easier than a US dollar. Billions can’t get a bank account, but they can get a stablecoin.

That’s why the US is now so pro stablecoin support after years of not knowing what was going on. They see that if stablecoins grow, US dollar stablecoins increase US dollar dominance. And now we’ll come out with the Genius Act, forcing stablecoin issuers to pay 0% interest but buy US debt.

That’s why the Treasury Secretary is like, “How many trillions? I’m working on it.” That’s why China is panicking and the EU is panicking. It’s one-way traffic. There will be infinitely more stablecoins and infinitely more real asset tokenization — for DeFi buyers and TradFi buyers. Volumes will explode.

00:34:09:00 - 00:34:16:00

Adi Ben-Ari

No brainer.

00:34:16:00 - 00:35:46:00

Adi Ben-Ari

Julian, one of the ways I look at this is from a company perspective. We’ve got a modest treasury. We get paid in stablecoins from some clients. There’s no reason we can’t swap that in and out of a yield-earning money market fund, or diversify.

And then I think about AI. Why couldn’t I put an agent on top of that? Give it my risk profile and preferences, and it dynamically manages holdings. It can be plugged into our ERP system and say, “You’ve got a payment coming up — I’m going to exit and bring you liquidity.” Surely that’s where it’s going.

00:35:46:00 - 00:39:49:00

Julian Kwan

100%. That’s why tokenized treasuries became the first real product-market fit for RWAs — daily redemption and 4% interest to stablecoin holders getting zero. Now we’ll move up the risk curve: private credit, private debt, etc.

We’re launching a product called Bitcoin Real Yields. Some of the biggest Bitcoin miners called us asking how RWAs work and what we can do together. They’ve got billions of dollars of Bitcoin — what do they do with it? Nothing. Pretty much nothing.

Then we look at BTC DeFi — stake Bitcoin, earn Bitcoin L2 rewards, altcoin rewards — exciting. But there’s only $7–8 billion involved. That means $2.2 trillion of Bitcoin is not involved. They don’t want the risk. They don’t see DeFi yield as equivalent to Bitcoin.

So we developed Bitcoin Real Yields: we loan stablecoins to Bitcoin holders, reinvested into tokenized fixed income. The real yield is US dollar yield, with major custodians and market makers. It’s a world-first product — a real use case.

Bitcoin is a $2 trillion asset doing nothing — sitting idle, not income-producing. So the question should always be: shouldn’t we be able to do something with this? Usually the answer is yes — then it’s how.

Agent trading is exciting. Friends who are traders are all into it. But we need time before it’s commercially safe for average people. You don’t want the agent to trade and send all your money to North Korea.

But the concept of trading has always been a question mark. Buy-and-hold typically outperforms 99.9% of traders. Now add agent traders — humans won’t outperform agents. And agents can only trade if everything is digital currencies. They’re not calling Citibank for a cash transfer. All exciting stuff coming down the pipeline.

00:39:49:00 - 00:40:45:00

Adi Ben-Ari

Yeah, very good. Julian, last question. One of the areas we’ve got involved in — and I think it’s quite early — is on-chain privacy. Do you encounter this in what you’re doing? In the real world asset side, do you see any real demand or need?

00:40:45:00 - 00:43:24:00

Julian Kwan

Yeah. The way I understand it is: there are certain trades, transactions and participants that don’t want people to know who they are. That’s easy to understand.

What’s more nuanced is: if an institution is trading, they can create 50 new wallets a day — but eventually, with the right forensics, you could track down a person or company. In the real-world asset space, there’s KYC somewhere — there’s a real-world identity behind it. So it’s a concern. Especially if you don’t want competitors to know what you’re buying and selling as soon as you bought it.

Small investors might not care. They can set up MetaMask, Fireblocks, custody wallets, ledgers — all day long — and move stuff around without people knowing much. But businesses can’t afford to do that all day — that’s all they’d be doing. So the concern is valid.

There are players positioning themselves as decentralized blockchains with optional privacy layers — zkSync, and others. There’s a whole universe there.

But at the end of the day, many companies publish fund size and asset size anyway. So it depends. It’s probably more sensitive for family offices and high net worth individuals.

And it depends on the asset. Knowing someone bought $10m of tokenized treasuries isn’t a big deal. Knowing they bought $10m of an obscure startup share — that might be more valuable information.

00:43:24:00 - 00:44:10:00

Adi Ben-Ari

Yeah. The area we’re starting to look at now is trading strategies — people doing things on-chain, and others being able to work out what they’re doing, and having strategies undermined through too much visibility. Different use cases there.

00:44:10:00 - 00:44:30:00

Julian Kwan

Yeah. Exactly. There are so many different real-world assets — and different industries operate very differently. There are nuances to all of this.

00:44:30:00 - 00:44:44:00

Adi Ben-Ari

Okay, Julian — fantastic. Very interesting. It’ll be good to catch up in two years, five years, and see where we are.

00:44:44:00 - 00:45:02:00

Julian Kwan

Yeah, I appreciate you having us on. Hopefully that was helpful. If anyone wants to learn more about us, I’m sure our details are in the notes. We’ve got a fantastic community at IXS — lots of smart people focusing on RWAs and trying to build skills and knowledge.

00:45:02:00 - 00:45:45:00

Adi Ben-Ari

Yeah, very good. Appreciate your time. Just before we go, we have a tradition here on the Applied Blockchain Podcast — I ask people at the end to share a source of knowledge and information. It might be something you’ve read, something you listen to. It doesn’t have to be related to tech — it could just be something interesting you’ve come across.

00:45:45:00 - 00:47:08:00

Julian Kwan

Yeah. The one I’d put forward is AI. We develop customized agents. Using AI tools, we prompt them to give us the most interesting information and products in the space. The hack is: it could have been endless web surfing for me — now I’m hammering it down into the top five products, the top five this and that.

We use a few different AI apps. It’s an incredible source when you focus the questions, prompts, and uploads. It’s become incredible for me.

I’m trying to start reading paper-based books about nothing again — just to balance out the extraordinary amount of time I’m spending playing around. That’s my two cents.

00:47:08:00 - 00:47:22:00

Adi Ben-Ari

Yeah — that’s very good. That’s very timely. I share that as well. I’ve found myself spending a lot of time inside these platforms and going deeper and deeper. You go down rabbit holes — but you just get the answers. It’s so compelling.

00:47:22:00 - 00:47:24:00

Julian Kwan

It’s also upgrading at ridiculous speed. Gemini at Google was touted a month or two ago — it was incredible. In April they tried to sell it to me inside my dashboard without even asking. I was like, “What is this?”

Now my tech guys are like, “You should’ve seen what we’ve done with this.” And my marketing guys are like, “Wow.” Mind blown.

00:47:24:00 - 00:47:26:00

Adi Ben-Ari

Yeah. I rediscovered Gemini about a month ago. I haven’t left it, to be honest.

00:47:26:00 - 00:47:29:00

Julian Kwan

Rediscovered — yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Alright, awesome. Thanks for having us on. I appreciate the questions. And if we can add any value any other time, please reach out.

00:47:29:00 - 00:47:31:00

Adi Ben-Ari

Very good. Thank you very much, Julian. Have a great day. Take care.

00:47:31:00 - 00:47:36:00

Julian Kwan

Awesome. Thank you. Bye-bye.