Published on January 24, 2026
Watch the video of this keynote talk on Gamma Prime’s YouTube channel:
Keynote talk by Lamon Rutten (CEO at eXchange1):
Okay, thank you. I think you heard at the end some disagreement about the heart and soul of this industry, and I think the old soul can still be captured in a regulated environment. And I would argue—and I will argue now—that in fact, that’s the only way to really realize the original ideas of the blockchain revolution.
So, ladies and gentlemen, crypto was a rebellion typed in code. It wasn’t about yield, ETFs, or alpha. It was a battle for the soul of money. Today’s crypto bros maybe chase Lambos and moonshots, but let’s think back to the cyberpunk roots of the industry. Not day traders, but dissidents waging war on centralized control. Some people made fortunes, but that was the camouflage, not the cause.
One author, Naval Ravikant, has written: “Bitcoin is a tool for freeing humanity from oligarchs and tyrants, dressed up as a get-rich-quick scheme.” And that’s a flame we must keep alive. It’s not just about fortunes. It’s about freedom.
Traditional finance has failed us in spectacular ways. No spreadsheet can capture it. The chaos of climate catastrophe, stubborn poverty, parched water wars, and microplastics in our veins. We cannot fix a broken system with the same infrastructure that broke it. I trust you to stake my faith in blockchain and real-world asset organization as our sharpest weapons against these storms.
The landscape is shifting. The rebels are no longer alone in the room. To quote Jack Ma, blockchain isn’t a mere revolution—it’s a tsunami. Stealthy, but unstoppable, swallowing the old world whole. It isn’t a wave nibbling at the edges; it’s a tide that even Wall Street can no longer ignore.
And it hasn’t. The field of tokenization is now flooded with giants like BlackRock and global banks. So the question: have the pioneers sold out? Has the revolution been absorbed by the Empire?
Maybe for a moment it looks that way. But every revolution has learned its lesson. You can’t topple the castle from the outside forever. At some point, you have to walk through the gates. And to understand why that march matters—and why it is necessary—we have to confront what happens when idealism meets the balance sheet.
Let’s strip away the hype. The real-world asset tokenization frontier is strewn with the ruins of starry-eyed ventures that crashed on reality’s shores. Many believed that if we just tokenized real assets, capital would flow frictionlessly to the most impactful corners of the world. But aspirational goals are not hard collateral.
The truth has been painful. Tokenization doesn’t erase risk; it merely layers it. Decentralized protocols are superb at pooling global liquidity, but they are terrible at handling the human mess of real-world finance. Smart contracts can move money across the planet in seconds, but they cannot verify crop yields, enforce court claims, or see fraud coming. You can fractionalize a loan, but you can’t decentralize due diligence. It’s a delusion to think you can, and builders have learned the hard way.
If you want to make real impact, you need more than capital and code. You need compliance. You need credit diligence. You need collaboration with those already embedded in the system. That’s not selling out.
So protocols like Centrifuge, Goldfinch, and Maple, among many others, have pivoted toward institutional participation. Finance is not decentralized in the real world. For transformation, the small pools of DeFi dreamers are not enough. And you may think you have big pools in DeFi. You don’t.
In my old exchange in India, we traded $20 billion a day. In my last year, we had $3 trillion in turnover. Bitcoin? Small pools compared to traditional finance. You need the deep oceans of institutional capital.
So how do you carve out room for idealism when big money speaks so loudly? Well, we do what every successful revolution before us has done. We march to the institutions.
In 1968, student revolution leader Rudi Dutschke coined the phrase “the long march to the institutions.” Protesters realized that shouting from the streets wasn’t enough. That shattered the illusion of torching the old guard. Instead: infiltrate, innovate, and reshape from within.
The DeFi pioneers—and maybe my neighbor just now—thought they could build a parallel world. But the truth is, the gates to change sit inside the old world. If we want the techniques of blockchain to impact livelihoods, not just pay bigger bonuses, we cannot keep seeing institutions as enemies or regulators as outdated relics.
Incumbents aren’t obstacles. They are the engines of evolution—not of revolution, but of evolution. Revolution doesn’t triumph when the old guard collapses. It triumphs when the old guard starts building with your tools. And that is happening now.
Global banks, asset managers, and custodians aren’t sleeping. What seemed like stagnation over the past few years was merely a metamorphosis in disguise—the laying of legal and operational bedrock. Incumbents have been designing systems, lobbying for clarity, deploying pilots, and writing the operational blueprints that will govern trillions.
Now the profit profile of finance is shifting. Balance sheet fat is vanishing. On-chain risks will get diced, valued, and dispersed transparently. No more premiums for mere money hoarding. Being just big is no longer enough. Value is migrating—to identity, to data, and to the reals themselves.
Victory in the near future will go to the data overlords: the masters of the exhaust trails fueling razor-sharp risk engines on crystal-clear ledgers. The winners will be those who can authenticate identity instantly, price risk continuously, and provide settlement finality at internet speeds.
Tokenized money—what we’re seeing now—is the crown jewel that fuses these sources of wealth. Every asset becoming programmable moves money at once across the world.
So let’s return to the beginning. How does this long march to the institutions serve the ideals of those who initiated this industry? How does helping BlackRock tokenize securities help save the planet or bank the unbanked?
Because scale matters. Pilots will not tame the climate beasts. Boutique token pools will not drown poverty. We need the sheer, overwhelming force of global institutional capital. And that is where idealism wins—through infiltration, not isolation.
It’s not interesting to have your own little tea circle talking only with people who speak your language. We need institutions to adopt a technology that fundamentally alters their logic, changes how they operate, and erodes their iron grip on trust.
Eric Vorhees, the founder of ShapeShift, once said: “I have no problem with the financial industry inviting the Trojan horse of blockchain technology into their walled garden, because I know how powerful the technology is.” And that’s what I believe too.
The technology itself will help drive forward the ideals that those who started this industry were really propagating. And that’s the essence of real-world asset tokenization’s long march to institutions.
This isn’t a retreat from rebellion. It’s the quiet embedding of a new DNA inside the global economy—a DNA that will route value where it’s needed most, not because regulators or reviewers demand it, but because the network itself rewards it.
This is the first generation with the tools to redesign the financial arteries of the planet. So fear not the institutions. History does not reward spectators. Build with the institutions, embed the code, and let technology finish what idealism began.
Thank you.
