Bitcoin's Biggest Advantage Is The One Wall Street Can't Buy | Saeed Badreg

Saeed Badreg’s central case is that tokenization can bring global investors access to assets and companies that have been difficult to reach through conventional markets. Tokenized U.S. equities can be offered internationally, and tokenized pre-IPO exposure may reach people who cannot directly buy private shares. Sunrise helps issuers put equities, commodities, and other assets on-chain, including offerings that give U.S. users access to Asian markets. Badreg sees this access—not simply putting existing products on a blockchain—as a major draw.

Badreg said Sunrise has made more than 100 listings on Solana and processed more than $300 billion in cumulative volume. He cited the company’s SpaceX offering, launched within minutes of the IPO, as an example of how quickly tokenized exposure can be brought to market. He put the global real-world-asset and equities market at more than $160 trillion. These figures describe Sunrise’s reported activity and Badreg’s estimate of the addressable market, rather than a claim that all those assets are already tokenized.

He expects real-world assets to generate more on-chain activity than a proliferation of new crypto tokens, and does not expect crypto-native tokens to account for most on-chain trading volume in the next five to ten years. In his view, traders increasingly want exposure to operating businesses, real estate, and commodities; the model of publishing a white paper and issuing a token is largely dead. Meme coins remain substantial and sustained on Solana even as the host said they were doing poorly on Robinhood. Badreg sees meme-coin trading as a possible route for users to discover tokenized equities and hold them alongside meme coins and major cryptocurrencies.

For tokenized assets, access alone is not enough: liquidity depends on market makers and clear ways to mint and redeem tokens for the underlying asset. Badreg said Sunrise works with issuers on one-to-one backing, and that its tokenized-equity issuers generally use entitlements rather than debt securities. He described the SpaceX offering with Backpack as validation of that structure. Coinbase, Robinhood, and Binance have announced moves toward 24/7 trading and entitlements, though the discussion did not establish that these announcements resolve every question about liquidity or investor rights.

Badreg said regulatory uncertainty pushed crypto companies toward venture-capital funding and helped create a divide between token holders and equity holders. Rules are clearer than they were three years ago, he said, but remain uncertain enough to constrain token fundraising and the ability to pass benefits to token holders. He also called U.S. crypto policy under Trump a net positive for builders, citing officials abroad who said it gave them room to advance crypto and reports that some central banks reversed guidance against stablecoins. He hopes the policy shift lasts beyond the administration. Stablecoins, he added, are significant buyers of U.S. Treasuries and help the U.S. borrow and fund deficits.

Institutional activity illustrates how crypto adoption can advance even when prominent executives remain critical of Bitcoin. JPMorgan expanded access to tokenized money-market funds on Solana and moved its institutional payments coin onto Ethereum, despite Jamie Dimon’s anti-Bitcoin comments. The host also cited JPMorgan’s forecast of 10% annual Bitcoin returns and expected outperformance against stocks, bonds, and real estate, while noting the bank was not allocating to Bitcoin. Elsewhere, Strategy repurchased $193 million of STRC, bought 267 Bitcoin, and raised its digital-credit-securities repurchase program to $3 billion; the host said restoring STRC to par was taking priority, with spending on STRC eight to nine times that on Bitcoin. BlackRock filed for an actively managed Bitcoin ETF using options to limit both gains and losses, potentially appealing to investors wary of volatility. The host noted more than $600 million in ETF inflows on Monday, but net flows of $526.7 million after outflows elsewhere, and said the pattern—including possible carry trades or a large entity converting spot ETFs—warranted attention amid what the host described as a crisis in self-custody.