From BitGo to BNB Chain: Thomas Chen on What Institutions Really Want

0:00Kinsa Durst Welcome to Panoramic Content Suite, Singapore edition alongside Token2049. I think F1's about to kick off very soon, but thank you for stopping by for making time from your busy, busy day. I wanted to welcome Thomas Chen. He's the Chief Business Officer at BNB Chain. Thank you for joining us.

0:19Thomas Chen Yeah, thank you for having me.

0:20Kinsa Durst Really excited to have you, but we'll let you kind of kick off with, you know, maybe if you don't mind telling a little bit About yourself, how you ended up at BNB Chain today. Sure, sure.

0:29Thomas Chen So my name is Thomas Chen, Chief Business Officer at BNB Chain. I've been here for about two months now, but my journey in crypto started back in 2018. So back then, when all my friends were going to get their MBAs, I thought, why don't I make crypto my MBA, right? Because if the, if you rewind the tape to 2018, if the blockchain technology is supposed to be a binary outcome to disrupt the financial Stack, I want it to be on the right side of the bet to go to crypto. My focus since then was always on infrastructure. I started, started off my career at BitGo, was there for six and a half years, eventually ran all of global revenue for them and Put them on a path towards IPO before I left. Last year, I spent the year building DeFi for a different exchange ecosystem.

1:15Thomas Chen And then this year switched over to BNB Chain. Nice.

1:19Kinsa Durst Well, super excited. I know BNB has been one of the OG chains out there, obviously a big association with Binance as well, which is the, one of The largest centralized exchanges. But congrats on the new role. By joining as a Chief Business Officer, what type of focuses are you trying to push during your time here? And, or what are you most excited about?

1:43Thomas Chen Yeah, I'll tell you why I made the decision to join BNB Chain versus some of the other opportunities that were out there. When you look around, when at least as an American, when I looked around the ecosystem, BNB Chain is always there, right? It's like number four coin market cap, it's massive. But sitting there in New York, I'm like, what are they doing? I actually don't really know. But if they're that large and the trading volumes there and the users are there, why do I hear much about them? So I approached it from a, my thesis was there is a, probably a market access problem, right? There's a lot of retail users and users in general in the BNB Chain ecosystem, tens of millions of MAUs, that want access, the non -US investors that want access to, call it blue chip Western products. And there's a lot of Western institutions that want distribution.

2:32Thomas Chen From my perspective, BNB Chain is the perfect place out of any other ecosystem, right, to bridge that connection. So that's my bet for the next, call it five years to figure this out. Yeah.

2:42Kinsa Durst If I had to kind of divide demographic across the global blockchain ecosystem, I think BNB tend to be more Asian, Asia oriented, had probably The most Chinese on chain users on chain. But as you mentioned, the purpose of crypto and the benefits of crypto is the global financial infrastructure and blue chip Western stocks. Tokenization is a big trend right now. And accessing, gaining access to that is a huge thing. It sounds like given your more institutional experience, this is the perfect kind of amalgamation of what's going to come next. Right.

3:18Thomas Chen I would say it's non-US. So we do have a lot of users in Argentina, for example, as well. Yeah.

3:27Kinsa Durst I think instead of given the context of Token2049 suits and ties of your outfit as well, not too serious, not too institutional, but Can talk with the big guns. What type of institutional plays are you guys, Are you a lot to share anything about what you guys are rolling out soon? Yeah.

3:48Thomas Chen So if we look at what's happening on chain today, let's start there. Using the topic of RWAs, we've got about 5.8 billion RWAs tokenized on chain. The vast majority of it is tokenized US treasuries, primarily used by institutions as an alternative stablecoin for collateral or for reserve or cash management. And then after that, you have a north of a billion in tokenized equities, whether it's Ondo stocks, bStocks, or xStocks. They all exist in a synthetic way, synthetic versions on BNB Chain. Most of trading volume is actually concentrated on the tokenized equities. So when I look at this R tokenized RWAs heading, what is the actual demand driving the stuff and what is the actual utility?

4:35Thomas Chen I think from a demand equation, it's pretty straightforward. There are a lot of non-US users. I mean, I'm American, so I'm spoiled, so I don't tend to think about this. But there's a lot of non-US investors in Pakistan, Vietnam, Philippines that don't have access to brokerages that give them Nvidia or Tesla or QQQ for that example. So these synthetic equities, They're an easy way for these users to access. That's step one. Step two is what you can do with it. Candidly today, a lot of the trading volume, not just our chain, is driven by memes paired with RWAs. I'm okay with that because that's just the first step in this organic growth of liquidity, evolution of liquidity on any chain. People speculate liquidity will show up and then eventually, once we have the plumbing figured out, the connectors, then you get to more interesting use Cases like if I were a user, I can create my own basket of tokenized equities and then I can take out a loan against That desired basket.

5:36Thomas Chen Whereas today, in TradFi that movement, it's not easily accessible. Yeah.

5:41Kinsa Durst So it's very much like a B2B2C Situation where you're onboarding a lot of providers of new asset class, a lot of my tokenization where global users can get access to these New tokenized products. That said, to bring these institutions on board, I'm curious from your experience at BitGo as well, Much of a veteran working with these institutions, what do they really care about when working with three projects or even coming on chain? What are they looking to get out of Tokenizing or bringing their assets on chain? Distribution. Distribution.

6:20Thomas Chen That's it. For a lot of the asset managers, issuers, the KPI, their North Star is AUM. So they need to figure out ways to grow AUM. Some of the challenges, depending on how far along they are, I mean, not every institution wants to be first in this, but none of Them want to be last. And there is a lack of taxonomy in on-chain finance or DeFi. So if you look at TradFi, you have these preset, not preset, but these ingrained taxonomies where you know a part of the stack which Service provider does X, Y, Z. It's pretty mapped out. But if you look at on-chain finance, what they had to navigate is if I'm the asset issuer here, my first step is, okay, I can tokenize it with a tokenization platform.

7:05Thomas Chen And then there's this hard line and then it's DeFi, which is like you have to go find your own market makers, find your own Curators, find your own, You got to figure out how to get listed as eligible collateral and lending venues, or see your own liquidity and debts, right? That's all new to them. So the onus is on us to help them navigate from point A to Z in a very streamlined packaged way in a sales process That speaks their language. Because for them, not only do they need to know how to do this, they have to be able to navigate their internal risk committees, Internal due diligence committees. So it's about speaking their language. And we're kind of asking like a Sherpa to take them through the process. Right, right.

7:42Kinsa Durst And I'm sure that's going to make a huge impact in terms of their decision making as well. I mean, my follow up question would be, it's like, why BNB, right? There's a few options. I mean, it seems like the momentum is strong enough to a point where there's too much demand in terms of wanting to move on Chain, and you guys have plenty of imbalance. But how do you actually convince them why BNB over, let's say Ethereum or other blockchains? How do you differentiate yourself?

8:08Thomas Chen Yeah, I would say for them, it's not so much a technical decision. The technical decision might start with, so we're even compatible, right? So the technical decision might be, do I want to maintain two code bases if it's Ethereum and a non-EVM compatible chain? That's something for them to decide. Right. But at the end of the day, it's what is the clearest, cleanest path to distribution? And that's where we win the conversations. Because I give an example, with bStocks on BNB Chain, they launched probably around the same time I joined, two, three months ago, and now They have over a billion in TVL just on BNB Chain, right? Most of trading volume happens on chain as well. So I think that's a strong proof point that the distribution channels are there within a BNB ecosystem. I just got to build up the plumbing.

8:52Kinsa Durst Yeah, yeah, makes sense. It's not like exclusive partnership. It's more like, how do we get the most distribution possible across all the BNB Chain's? That's right.

9:00Thomas Chen We're agnostic, right? As I mentioned, xStocks, Ondo stocks, bStocks, they all coexist. I think the challenge that creates actually is liquidity fragmentation in user experience. If you're a user in your trusted wallet application or retail Neobank application, Do you need to know that this is xStocks version, Ondo stocks version, bStocks version? Or do you just want price exposure? How do you extract that away? And then if you want to build more creative products with the underlying asset, if it's fragmented, you got to manage liquidity as well. So it's, I guess, a double-edged sword with the fact that there's no exclusivity, but liquidity fragmentation is a core issue that's top of Mind.

9:44Kinsa Durst Gotcha, gotcha. But you guys have the liquidity, so they, of course, want to work with you guys and expand into the BNB ecosystem as well.

9:52Thomas Chen Yeah, so one thing I'll give an example. One of our closer partners, Given the success of bStocks and Ondo stocks on our chain, we're starting to lean in vault products as well, because for a normal Retail user, they're not going to be as savvy as you or I with a wallet to figure out the best yield opportunities across different Chains. So what we want to present in packaged user is a one-click earn for RWAs, whether it's around tokenized gold or launching credit or Some sort of other RWA asset. They trust the wallet, They trust the curator, they know that we've underwritten it, and they can just one-click get access.

10:34Kinsa Durst That said, I know there's a lot of builders looking to compete and gain attention on BNB and other chains as well. Is there something that you're looking for from builders or institutions or kind of crypto-native builders? Here's where you see opportunity that can be further explored by these builders. Of course, like stablecoins, RWAs, tokenization, huge thing on the crypto-native side, [unclear] are gaining a lot of traction right now. If there's something that you want to see more, I'd be curious.

11:09Thomas Chen Yeah, my view is crypto moves so fast. I don't know what's going to be the topic due to your hot next three months.

11:17Kinsa Durst You can touch on AI too.

11:18Thomas Chen My thinking is, as long as we build the right culture, the right infrastructure that makes us top of mind for people to build an Experiment on, it could be AI. We have a collaboration with Amazon Web Services built in AI Studio for people to play in the sandbox environment or as privacy. It might be something else that resurfaces in a year's time, but we need to be ready and have all of the connectors internally. If someone wants to deploy an AI agent, they know that they can do so on BNB Chain with the desired outcome. Amazing.

11:54Kinsa Durst Yeah, super excited to see what BNB has coming up next and bullish as well. Is there anything else you want to say to the audience and people here at Token2049? Yeah, feel free to get the message out.

12:07Thomas Chen Yeah, I would say, look, we're here. We have the largest distribution channel and expect to see a lot more from the perspective of RWAs natively on BNB. Amazing.

12:20Kinsa Durst If they want to learn more, they can follow BNB or yourself, get in context somehow. We'll add the links below.

12:27Thomas Chen Yeah, I'm on Twitter. I have to be a full-time Twitter KOL now of part-time maybe, so I'm getting fluent on Twitter. You can find us on LinkedIn if you're an institution, BNB Chain on the other platform. Yeah, incredible.

12:41Kinsa Durst Thank you for joining.

12:43Thomas Chen Thank you.