The Future of Finance Digital Asset Exchanges Event 2025

Will Tokenisation be the nemesis of exchanges or the re-making of them?

Date: March 13, 2025

Venue: Reed Smith Offices at 1 Blossom Street, London E1 6RS

1-Day Event: 8.30 am to 8.00 pm

Audience: Traditional Exchanges; Digital Exchanges; CCPs; CSDs; Issuers (non-financial and financial); Asset Managers; Wealth Managers; Banks and Broker/Dealers; Technology Companies; Regulators and Public Policy Makers

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Topics

1. Are tokenisers making a mistake in choosing to ignore the conventional public equity markets?

2. Are tokenisers currently focused on alternative assets for want of something better?

3. Are retail investors the key to digital assets trading taking off?

4. Are exchanges relevant if tokens are traded peer-to-peer?

5. Is the idea of an “exchange” still coherent?

6. What is the future of exchanges?

This Future of Finance Digital Asset Exchanges one-day event will explore some of these issues on March 13, 2025

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Speakers

Max Heinzle Founder and CEO at 21x	Severin Kranz Head of Business Development at 21X	Reyer Kooy Global Head of Operations ‑ Digital at Apex Group
Prasanth Kalangi Founder & CEO at Zoniqx	Rita Martins Head of Product Ecosystem, Digital Assets at London Stock Exchange	Massimo Butti Independent
Benjamin Dean Director of Digital Assets Strategy at WisdomTree	Martin Watkins CEO of Montis Group Limted	Vic Arulchandran Director, Deutsche Boerse | Clearstream, Head of Digital Product and Market Design
Michele Curtoni Head of Strategy at SIX Digital Exchange	Bob Ejodame VP of Capital Markets at the INX Digital Company	Yalini Isweran Executive Director Product Management of DTCC Digital Assets
Ben Brophy Head of Blockchain at Fidelity International	Dr Robert Barnes Co-CEO & Board Member at BPX	Fatmire Bekiri  Head of Tokenization at Sygnum Bank
Lucas Bruggeman CEO of BX Swiss	Katie Richards New Markets | Product development | Strategic initiatives at Incore Bank	Hirander Misra  CEO at GMEX
Thomas Labenbacher CEO and Founder of Assetera	Daniel Mitchell Markets Innovation and Strategy at Citi	Pat LaVecchia Founder and CEO at Oasis Pro
Murat Ogat Co-founder and CEO at Aktionariat	Richard Shade Chief Operating Officer at Archax	Marcus van Abbé Head of Digital Market Infrastructures at R3

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Agenda

08:30 – Registration Opens with coffee and biscuits

09.15 to 09.30 – Opening Address: Future of Finance and Gold Sponsor

09:30 to 09.40 – Keynote Address

09.45 to 10.45: Are tokenisers making a mistake in choosing to ignore the conventional public equity markets?

Panel 1

(45 minutes panel discussion and time for questions and turn around)

Topics and Questions:

1. How important are the public equity markets to traditional exchanges in developed markets?

2. Are the public equity markets too efficient to need tokenisation?

3. Will cash on-chain (as tokenised deposits or central bank digital currency (CBDC)) catalyse native token issuance and atomic settlement?

4. Are digitally “native” equity tokens bound to disrupt equity issuance and trading?

5. Are the public equity markets the fastest (or even the only) route to achieving scale in token markets?

6. Could tokenisation revive the Initial Public Offering (IPO) market?

7. Is regulation a genuine constraint on tokenised equity or an excuse for inaction?

8. Can blockchain technology match the speed and scale traditional equity markets have achieved?

9. Must blockchain technology transform public equity markets completely or can it add efficiency to some parts of the process without changing everything?

10. Will sell-side intermediaries support exchanges that embrace tokenisation by investing in the necessary technology and connectivity?

11. How important to success is interoperability between blockchain protocols and between blockchain protocols and traditional exchanges?

10.45 to 11.30 – Coffee Break and Networking

11.30 to 12.30: Are tokenisers currently focused on alternative assets for want of something better?

Panel 2

(45 minutes panel discussion and time for questions and turn around)

Topics and Questions:

1. Do conventional exchange projects to help private companies raise capital (e.g., Nasdaq Private Market, London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) PISCES and Johannesburg Stock exchange (JSE) Private Placements) make tokenisation unnecessary?

2. Can token exchanges compete (on cost) with the private equity industry to fund private companies?

3. What can tokenisation do for alternative or “real-world” asset classes (private equity, private credit, privately managed funds, infrastructure, real estate, carbon credits, collectibles, commodities etc.) that conventional securitisation cannot?

4. Does the real opportunity in private equity tokenisation lie in investor relations?

5. What is the difference between token platforms for private equity issues and crowd-funding platforms?

6. What is the real inefficiency in alternative assets (e.g. on-boarding of investors, valuations of assets, lifecycle event management) that exchanges can address?

7. Can intrinsically illiquid asset classes be made more liquid through tokenisation (e.g., via market makers and/or Automated Market Makers (AMMs))?

8. Are secondary markets in alternative asset classes an unachievable goal?

9. Is the real opportunity in alternative asset classes to integrate them with the conventional equity, bond and funds markets at the operational level?

10. Several infrastructural service providers to the alternatives market have found it hard to build a business and even one relatively successful exchange has pivoted to selling to technology instead. Are privately managed asset markets too hard to scale?

11. Which side of the capital markets has failed most to rise to the opportunity in alternative asset classes: issuers or investors?

12.30 to 13.30 Lunch and Networking

13.30 to 14.30: Are retail investors the key to digital assets trading taking off?

Panel 3

(45 minutes panel discussion and time for questions and turn around)

Topics and Questions:

1. Are institutional investors too focused on income and passive funds to support companies that need capital?

2. Are institutional investors waiting for a degree of regulatory certainty that will never arrive?

3. What does the experience of cryptocurrency exchanges in selling wrapped versions of blue-chip stocks prove about the retail investor appetite for tokenised securities?

4. Most traditional exchanges have forfeited retail business. Should they – and can they -recapture it?

5. Does history show that retail investors follow institutional pioneers or vice-versa?

6. How can digital asset exchanges avert degeneration into a model in which retail investors provide the money and professional investors make the profits?

7. Does the cryptocurrency precedent prove that exchanges must trade cryptocurrencies to attract retail investors?

8. How effective has the lowering of minimum subscriptions amounts for funds proved in attracting retail investors?

9. Is fractionalisation working?

10. Which retail investors are excluded by the need to be “accredited”?

11. Can issuers as well as investors be grown out of the cryptocurrency markets?

14.30 to 15.30: Are exchanges relevant if tokens are traded peer-to-peer?

Panel 4

(45 minutes panel discussion and time for questions and turn around)

Topics and Questions:

1. How important are wealth management intermediaries in steering retail investors towards digital assets?

2. Is it true that Millennial and Gen Z investors find any form of intermediation too costly and frustrating to use?

3. Is the current engagement of digital asset exchanges with brokers and bankers a temporary feature only of a long-term transition to peer-to-peer trading?

4. Are current intermediaries preventing exchanges adopting tokenisation and building tokenisation infrastructures because they fear disintermediation?

5. Are decentralised exchanges (DEXes) peer-to-peer disintermediation machines that will render centralised exchanges obsolete?

6. Are Automated Market Makers (AMMs) a viable alternative to conventional market makers?

7. Would token markets benefit from more engagement by one type of intermediary – namely, a central counterparty clearing house (CCP) capable of cross-token netting?

8. What incentives (e.g., a continuously updated shareholder register, automated dividend payments) do corporations have to issue shares directly to investors in tokenised form?

9. What incentives (e.g., lower investment amounts and transaction fees, 24/7 trading) do investors have to buy shares in tokenised form?

10. Is peer-to-peer trading compatible with the persistence of private blockchain networks?

11. Are the decentralised liquidity pools of Decentralised Finance (DeFi) and the centralised liquidity pools of Traditional Finance (TradFi) converging on a common issuance and trading model and, if so, what should traditional exchanges do about it?

Confirmed Speakers

Massimo Butti https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxbutti/

15.30 to 16.15 – Coffee Break and Networking

16.15 to 17.15: Is the idea of an “exchange” still coherent?

Panel 5

(45 minutes panel discussion and time for questions and turn around)

Topics and Questions:

1. Have multi-lateral trading facilities (MTFs), organised trading facilities (OTFs), electronic communications networks (ECNs), alternative trading systems (ATSs), cryptocurrency exchanges and the wide variety of other capital raising and trading “platforms” that have emerged in traditional and digital assets put an end to the idea of a centralised stock exchange forever?

2. Reg NMS and MiFID 1 exposed traditional stock exchanges as low margin utility businesses whose transaction revenues are susceptible to disruption by new entrants. Are traditional stock exchanges better placed to survive the challenge of tokenisation?

3. When traditional exchanges point to legal and regulatory uncertainty are they finding a convenient excuse for inaction or identifying a genuine constraint on investment in new technologies and techniques?

4. In the primary markets, IPOs are in a secular slump, with private equity consuming most of the value created by unlisted companies. Are IPOs a business traditional stock exchanges should be content to lose?

5. Secondary markets are fragmented, and some jurisdictions lack consolidated tapes. Will blockchain technology make these problems better or worse?

6. Traditional stock exchanges in developed markets have diversified into data and data analytics and post-trade (clearing, settlement and collateral management) services. Are these businesses viable without a presence in the primary and/or secondary capital markets?

7. Some new entrants provide banking services such as cash management and the provision of credit. Is this a sensible policy for an exchange?

8. Will specialist token exchanges (e.g., in cryptocurrencies, alternative funds, mutual funds, privately managed assets, real estate, carbon credits etc.) persist or be consolidated?

9. Must an exchange be a neutral infrastructure, or can it also be an active market participant?

10. What should an exchange that wants to encourage the development of token markets do to help to make it happen?

11. Does it make sense for traditional exchanges to hedge their bets by investing in token issuance and trading infrastructure?

Moderated by Massimo Butti https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxbutti/

17.15 to 18.15: What is the future of exchanges?

Panel 6

(45 minutes panel discussion and time for questions and turn around)

Topics and Questions:

1. Why have most traditional stock exchanges chosen to do nothing about tokenisation?

2. Is the tokenisation threat a problem for developed market exchanges only, implying that emerging and developing economy market exchanges can carry on as normal with listing and trading?

3. Have the exchanges that have invested in tokenisation made a mistake in focusing on market education, hosting flagship issues and making the technology user-friendly rather than building an eco-system?

4. Have Singapore and Switzerland obtained a competitive advantage by becoming the most successful jurisdictions at hosting digital asset exchanges?

5. Are the corporate bond markets a major opportunity for exchanges or are they a primary market issuance process opportunity only?

6. Is the debate between private and public blockchains now resolved in favour of public blockchains or are traditional exchanges still reluctant to operate public blockchains?

7. Will the exchange of the future be a “hybrid” of the traditional and the digital?

8. Will the exchange of the future charge subscription fees rather than transaction fees?

9. Has the relationship between economic growth and stock market growth broken down in developed economies?

10. Can exchanges provide neutral market infrastructures akin to the “common” blockchain platforms that host third party apps advocated by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)?

11. For exchanges, is the ability to raise capital and generate liquidity by concentrating transactional activity becoming less important than the manufacture and distribution of investment and investment-related products?

18.30 to 20.00 – Networking Drinks and Canapés

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Contact Information

Wendy Gallagher

Co-Founder Future of Finance

wendy.gallagher@futureoffinance.biz

Mobile 07725 160903