NEVER DONE - LISTEN TO ALADDIN'S PODCAST

[MEERA JESSA]

Brian, Robbie, I'm super excited to have this chat with you both today. It's not often I get to sit in a room with two, I'm going to call you, digital asset geniuses. Robbie, I know you obviously a little bit better than I know you, Brian, but you strike me as someone that has an entrepreneurial spirit. I'm really curious, what made you decide that “I'm going to get into digital assets”?

[ROBERT MITCHNICK]

Well, there's a lot of luck, frankly, and some good timing. So, I started my career in traditional investing, I was at CPP Investment Board. And then I went to business school. And while I was there, I was really just looking for something interesting in a technology operational role as a change of pace to an investing-type role.

And it just so happened that I ended up at this company called Ripple, which when I interviewed with them in April of 2017, the XRP token was at $0.02. When I started eight weeks later in June of 2017 it was at $0.28, and within three months after me leaving, going back to finish my MBA, it was a $3. So, the explosion of that company and digital assets in general onto the scene, we call that now the third crypto market cycle, we’re somewhere along the fifth right now, was a kind of watershed moment. And for me, it was a no-brainer that the excitement and the promise of this technology area, I had to try to do it full time, and there was an opportunity to come to BlackRock and build out the business, and that's what we've done.

[MEERA JESSA]

That’s awesome. I would love to hear your story as well, because obviously Coinbase is a huge player in this market, and just curious how you got into this as well.

[BRIAN FOSTER]

Sure. My crypto baptism was a little bit of...

[MEERA JESSA]

I love that. Crypto baptism!

[BRIAN FOSTER]

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. A little bit of serendipity as well. So, coming out of undergrad, I had been working on a startup that I'd bootstrapped and so had to learn the world of online payment processing and wrangling with various payment methods. But then I went to work for another venture-backed startup that ended up completely failing. But it was in the foreign exchange trading software space, and the founder and CEO became a close friend and mentor of mine and he was a very early Bitcoin believer and investor.

And so, he would pay me to do sort of side hustles for him on nights and weekends related to angel investing and other sort of interesting geeky tech things. And so, by virtue of that work, I ended up with some Bitcoin in my hands and over time got really interested in it. And it was around 2013 then, so there wasn't really a market you could work in professionally...

[ROBERT MITCHNICK]

It was a good time to buy Bitcoin, Meera. 
[MEERA JESSA]

Yes. I didn't, Robbie.

[BRIAN FOSTER]

At the time, it's funny, we were all thinking about it as a payments tool. So that was my initial orientation and kind of held on to it and learned some things and had one eye on it, but didn't really fully pay attention to crypto again seriously until I was later in the venture capital world—investing in cyber and fintech and enterprise software. A few years later, went to business school, get another crypto security company off the ground, we were acquired by PayPal, and Coinbase reached out somewhere in that time frame, and been there now for six plus years, helping build the business.

[MEERA JESSA]

That's super cool. So, you guys are both telling me you're really lucky, and I didn't clearly get the Irish leprechaun luck on my side. But that's really awesome, because the fact that you're able to get in at the right point, you guys have actually defined a lot of what's happening in the industry as well. So, it's really impressive. And thank you for sharing your stories.

So, let's get into it. When we talk about digital assets, it's kind of gone through these cycles of hype, volatility, skepticism, and then today it seems like we're entering this very different phase. I was reading an article yesterday that told me that the AUM has surpassed about $235 billion as of mid, I think, 2025, which is pretty incredible. And everything I was reading was telling me that 2026 is a turning point. We see interesting innovation has now become standard as part of the global financial system. But that means a lot of things. It means a lot of coordination across the ecosystem. So, when you think about where we are today and where you started in your career, how would you describe the digital asset landscape and how it's evolved over the years?

[BRIAN FOSTER]

I think there's been even in the last four or five years in our industry, an unbelievable amount of change. And when we talk to large financial institutions and asset managers, like BlackRock, I would say the biggest thing that's changed is that it's really transitioned from being a conversation that's taking place in a corner of the firm opportunistically, to a conversation that's happening at the top of the firm and is existential.

And the reason for that is actually pretty straightforward from a business perspective. And I've had the privilege of getting to watch Robbie lead this at BlackRock from the front row, but really going back four, five, six years, this market was primarily about access to these crypto assets as a new financial asset class and a really interesting new contribution to a portfolio.

Now fast forward the tape. We have a few other megatrends happening that have just like upped the urgency. And those megatrends to me are number one, the world of stablecoin-enabled payments. It's a raging bull market. Number two, the world of tokenization—which I think of really in simple terms as the upgrading of the rest of the portfolio to these blockchain-native rails. And that's a trend that Coinbase deeply believes in and is invested in. And so has totally changed the urgency of the conversation.

[MEERA JESSA]

Maybe I turn it over to you, Robbie, here, because especially something that Brian was saying, the conversations happen in the corner, but I don't think that's how we've approached it at BlackRock. And we've had a very thoughtful approach. I would love to hear your take on what lessons have we learned from that? And where do you think we go in the future?

[ROBERT MITCHNICK]

Yeah, I think that the approach that we've taken has been quite effective. We did not stand up a giant blockchain or digital assets new org and put it off to the side and tell them to go figure it out and let us know how it goes. So, we continue to run this with a pretty lean, centralized team, but then infusing the expertise and the ownership across the various business units.

And so, everything that we've done has been owned and collaborated between my team as that central digital assets team and whatever the business is. And we've also been very selective and deliberate about our partnership strategy. Coinbase was the first of those. They've been a foundational piece of our ability to deliver solutions in this space, to develop our capabilities alongside them.

We've also taken that approach in some of the other verticals. So, it's really been focused on finding, at least at the outset, one best in class provider to engage with in each of those core verticals.

[MEERA JESSA]

And when you think about this concept of partnerships and how far it can extend, when we look at what's happening in the industry and the shift is coming towards tokenization of traditional assets, what is that going to look like in the future? We talk here at BlackRock a lot about the lifecycle of a trade. It doesn't matter what asset class it is. And when I think about that in terms of digital assets, what does that really mean, one and then two, digitizing public markets, what does that really mean?

[BRIAN FOSTER]

It's something both of our firms are super focused on. And I can tell you Coinbase has a moniker we've been very public about called the Everything Exchange, which is shorthand for broadening out our focus to include the whole portfolio, to use BlackRock language. And that spans now not just native crypto assets, but also equities, commodities, even prediction markets, and really broadening that thing out. In terms of tokenization, where we are is, I think, on a marathon somewhere in mile four or five, and what's happening right now is obviously there's a huge policy effort underway in Washington related to market structure and helping shape some of the regulation that's going to really unlock this market.

But we've had the first sort of push here to start to tokenize and start to distribute some of the simplest and most liquid assets, mainly money market funds. But I think what's likely to happen over time here is that the asset managers, in partnership with the firms like Coinbase, will kind of go down the list and tokenize most likely initially, the areas for which there's very obvious demand. And thinking about equities and ETFs, and thinking about how do I think of this as a distribution play to get these products in the hands of more crypto native clients and more different types of product formats, more different types of wallets. That's kind of the obvious first few miles of the marathon. 

Over time, what I'm really excited about is to see this get unlocked such that we can create novel products that actually take advantage of smart contracts and blockchains that were not possible before. Coinbase is a company that has Silicon Valley roots, and we're sort of students of history when we think about the arc of the internet.

And I kind of analogize this to like early days of the internet, there's a lot of sort of copying and pasting of analog media to say, all right, let's put a newspaper on the internet. We're almost like in that phase right now for tokenization. Let's do the obvious stuff. But long term, I think we're going to have all kinds of new, very creative product creation that's going to be good for investors and give them lots of new options, and it's going to be exciting for market participants like Coinbase and BlackRock.

[ROBERT MITCHNICK]

Yeah, I think it's an incredible opportunity because if you look at firms like Coinbase, they've got tens of millions of users, some meaningful subset of those, it may actually be the only financial account that they hold. So, they love crypto, they love Coinbase. They're very loyal and passionate, but they're accessing today an asset class that's $2.5 trillion in market cap, which is amazing that it went from $0 to $2.5 trillion in 17 years.

But it's tiny in the context of global investable assets, which is just somewhere around $400, $500 trillion. And so, now there's an opportunity to bring that other $400 trillion into accessibility for these tens of millions of users in the case of Coinbase and crypto writ large, there's hundreds of millions. This will be a brand new unlock to enable the buildout of portfolios, diversification, return opportunities that obviously, if you're only invested in just one asset class, you're clearly missing.

[MEERA JESSA]

So, I want to go back to something that you said, Brian, around the whole portfolio. And Robbie, we talk about the whole portfolio a lot here at BlackRock. What role does digital assets play in that whole portfolio story?

[ROBERT MITCHNICK]

Well, I think that is one of the most pertinent questions that is on the mind of many of our clients. And we've been pretty consistent with the view that, speaking for now at least about Bitcoin, which is in a little bit different category and is of a different nature than the rest of crypto, but Bitcoin is this fascinating asset, which is really the first global monetary alternative to gain widespread global adoption in thousands of years since gold and silver.

And it has the properties of being digitally native, decentralized, scarce, existing outside of any one country's economic, political, monetary system. And that's a really interesting asset for investors and for consideration in the whole portfolio. Now, of course, it still is emerging technology. It's still volatile. So, it has sort of this duality to it that in some sense is on a standalone basis, obviously risky asset. But in the context of the whole portfolio, it's actually, from a fundamental perspective, long term, potentially a diversifier and even a hedge against some of the left tail risks that investors face elsewhere in their portfolio.

[MEERA JESSA]

How would you describe Bitcoin to a five-year-old?

[BRIAN FOSTER]

I think you have to start with scarcity. So, there's some simple meme here that probably works for a five-year-old related to cookies, but you know, we can get, I think, wrapped around the axle a little bit on some of the things that are technically exciting. And I think that the industry over time has struggled to simplify the complex and tell the story in a clear way, so I love your prompt for that reason.

[MEERA JESSA]

Yeah. And that's why I'm asking it, because in some ways people have oversimplified it. And then when you look under the hood, it's so complex.

[BRIAN FOSTER]

Yes.

[MEERA JESSA]

So, where's the middle ground?

[BRIAN FOSTER]

Scarcity. And the value around things that are scarce is not a new phenomenon. This has been going on for all of human history. What's novel about Bitcoin is that it's in a new digitally native and global format, and that's exciting to everybody. But to me, it really boils down to scarcity. And I think even a five-year-old can understand that if there's just a few cookies and there's a lot of five-year-olds, you really want to make sure you get one of those cookies. I think at its core, that's what Bitcoin is about.

[MEERA JESSA]

I love it. That is great.

[BRIAN FOSTER]

Robbie, how’d I do? You got a better one?

[ROBERT MITCHNICK]

I'm looking forward to dessert later. I would say that it is money that lives on the internet, and that most money in the world is issued by a government, and it is an exception to that. And the only other types of money that aren't issued by a government exist in nature, and Bitcoin exists natively to the internet.

[BRIAN FOSTER]

Robbie’s five-year-old is a little smarter than my five-year-old.

[MEERA JESSA]

So, I want to switch, not gears, but I want to actually go back to the tokenization point. And the reason I want to go back to it, because I'm going to bring it back to the whole portfolio again and private markets. Tokenization in private markets is a bigger and bigger topic these days. Talk to me about what you're hearing in the market and where you think this is going.

[ROBERT MITCHNICK]

Yeah, it's a really interesting one. I think that it's important to be very precise, in general, in tokenization, and especially in a private market context, in terms of what the technology solves and what it doesn't. If we think about the generalized value proposition of tokenization as enabling digitization, global interoperability, 24/7 trading, real-time settlement, transparency, automation of certain functions, people can get very excited about that value prop and say, let's just throw that at everything and how could it possibly not succeed?

And the truth is that when you're talking about any transformation, especially any transformation that affects fundamental infrastructure and migrating from an old paradigm to a new paradigm, you need to have very specific problems that it solves, or new forms of utility that it unlocks. Take, for example, money market funds, which has been the asset class where there's been the most traction today. There is a very specific problem that that solved—which is historically, you have always had this trade-off between capturing full yield on cash and having perfect liquidity, and even a traditional money market fund, which is relatively liquid, at the same day you can get your cash out on a business day, not on a weekend, is far from perfectly liquid.

But now, with tokenization combined with stablecoins, you can have a tokenized money fund that at any given moment, whenever you need to get back to digital cash, you can do that effectively in an instant. And so, it breaks that historical trade-off of having to choose between yield and liquidity on cash. And that was very significant. So, I didn't answer the private markets question yet, but I set it up for Brian, which is the harder part of the question.

[MEERA JESSA]

That was a good lay-up.

[BRIAN FOSTER]
He’s passing me the hot potato. So, look, I think in a way the technical discussion around tokenization is actually far and away the easiest part. We've actually, at this point, we've solved the basic fundamental issues around wrapping an asset, putting it on a blockchain, making it fast, global. Those are solved problems. I can't tell you exactly, with a crystal ball, how the private markets part of tokenization is going to play out.

But I can say with confidence that when we look at those types of transactions today relative to the public markets ones, they look very, very different, right? These are transactions that are happening in small rooms. It maps back to our scarcity discussion where a lot of the interesting assets in the private markets, the owners of those assets, are curating investors that they would like in their cap table very carefully.

And so, I think that there is a technical answer to this, which is the easy part. And then there is the sort of human and transactional part of this discussion which needs to work as well. And so, a big piece of that, in my mind, is you need buy-in from the sellers of these assets who are curating that scarcity, if you will, today, in these transactions.

And you need them to be excited about something incremental and valuable here, to bring new types of investors into that transaction vis-a-vis the tokenization and the new distribution that that enables, that's accretive to their process and I think the industry is grappling right now with what exactly does that look like. But I think it has to start with the sellers of these assets, the owners of them being bought in and proactively participating in that.

[MEERA JESSA]

Yeah, I mean, the opaqueness of the private markets, the scarcity that you've talked about a lot, Brian, is actually what has always historically made them so attractive. But that's changing. There's no real processes, definitely not unified processes. So, my thought would have been it would be actually prime to be tokenized, quite frankly, but hearts and minds need to change for that to happen. So, I totally hear your point on that. What are you guys most excited about this year?

[ROBERT MITCHNICK]

Well, we're not even two months in and it feels like an entire year's worth of stuff. It's just been very eventful. I think that's frankly the nature of the moment we're in, which is time is not linear—it accelerates. And I think that people are starting to feel that in a very visceral way. I think it's going to be a year of incredible technology, innovation and transformation on many fronts.

You have a number of really seismic technologies that are kind of co-arriving here, and there's a cross-fertilization element and reinforcing feedback loop between digital assets, AI, robotics and quantum computing—really powerful technology forces that are each sort of in their own inflection point and which have interplay with each other. So, it's not going to be a boring finish to the year. That's my one guarantee is going to happen.

[MEERA JESSA]

How about you, Brian?

[BRIAN FOSTER]

I love that answer and agree with Robbie. I'm going to zoom in a little bit and just reflect back to you, maybe, how I'm allocating my time and within Coinbase—which is a reflection of what I'm excited about. And it's really three trends. The first trend which we've discussed is this access to Bitcoin and crypto assets as a financial asset class that is humming along. It's a secular trend. We are going to have short-term volatility, but our job is to double down on making our marketplaces resilient, global, accessible and growing that trading and investing business. So that's theme number one.

Theme number two is the stablecoin-enabled payments space, which is in a, what I would describe as a raging bull market where the non-bank fintechs and payment services providers are really sitting up straight, recognizing, I think, for the first time, that this is a new tool that can help them globalize their payments business, build new products, reduce costs and acquire new types of customers. The message is very resonating right now and also interestingly orthogonal to the first theme.

And then the last theme which we discussed is of course, tokenization. And Coinbase's focus is, of course, helping drive policy to unlock this market and also building the tools and the distribution to bring it to life. And those tools are, of course, the ability to store tokenized assets, to settle them on blockchains, including Base, an L2 we've developed on top of Ethereum, and ultimately to bring these assets to our marketplaces and help distribute them. So, these are the three themes that I'm really focused on within Coinbase, and where we're really trying to keep pace with demand from our clients.

[MEERA JESSA]

Yeah, I wasn't going to ask you this question, but you can blame Robbie for this, because he said something that I talk about in every episode that we've done and we have not talked about today—AI. AI in digital assets, what does that look like?

[ROBERT MITCHNICK]

I think there's a couple different elements to this. The first is sometimes you hear the term tokenization talked about in the context of AI, and people will say those are completely different things, don't confuse those two. Technically that's true. But conceptually there's actually a very clear overlap, which is when we're talking about tokenizing in the context of AI, it's basically taking language and rendering it in machine-friendly format.

And when we talk about tokenization in digital assets, we're talking about taking assets and rendering them in machine-friendly format. So, there's a very clear overlap there. And as AI continues to grow in its footprint and impact, and in particular AI agents, a crypto asset which is effectively computer-native money, unlike our legacy financial system, is a much more natural instrument for an AI agent economy to actually use.

And then the second piece is that AI, clearly, is a very disruptive force. And so, we're going to have significant changes in the economy, in social/political dynamics, in the way governments need to support their populations, and just in general, a higher degree of change in volatility. And Bitcoin, as this scarce decentralized asset that exists outside of any one country and is digitally native generally in the long run is a beneficiary of change, disruption, fear, etc. and so we'll see how that plays out.

[MEERA JESSA]

Very interesting.

[BRIAN FOSTER]

I like that answer. I would say that this is an area Coinbase is very focused on. My observation is that in the AI space, we've undergone a change in the last probably year, year and a half, from consumers of AI thinking about it as maybe search 2.0 to now understanding it and using it in its agentic format. And of course, what I mean by that is agents who are pursuing jobs to be done and work that was previously done by humans. Your digital helper.

[MEERA JESSA]

Yes.

[BRIAN FOSTER]

And Coinbase’s insight on this is that, well, just as a human helper or human employee needs to account for value and have money to go accomplish certain goals, so do the digital agents. And so, it follows that those digital agents are going to need wallets, perhaps digital wallets and digital assets to go accomplish certain goals of theirs.

So, we are hard at work building tools for AI agents that allow them to use money and value in the form of crypto to get jobs done. And this is where I think these two themes really converge. It's early, but we're starting to see some really promising signs of uptake in this category and have a product effort focused on exactly this theme.

[MEERA JESSA]

I never thought about it that way. That's really interesting. All right. I always love asking this question. We're going to do it. Robbie, what's never done for you?

[ROBERT MITCHNICK]

Well, for me, personal growth and self-improvement is kind of a never-ending quest, and almost hobby, if you will. I think it’s kind of a nice thing to feel like it's a hobby. Take for example, I have a mindfulness and meditation practice. It's been very important in my life, and when I started, I was probably about a two out of 100 in terms of effectiveness at being present. And after 13 years of practice, I'm probably at like a 12 out of 100. So, there’s a pretty good chance I'm never going to make it through 100 out of 100, but that's okay.

[MEERA JESSA]

Was it like your Bitcoin growth, where it’s like volatile up and down?

[ROBERT MITCHNICK]

It's not too volatile. There's just a lot of hard yards over many years.

[MEERA JESSA]

That's amazing. What's never done for you, Brian?

[BRIAN FOSTER]

I'm laughing because when Robbie first told me about his meditation retreats, I think it was during one of like our stressful moments in working on integrations. And my thought was like, God, how much have we stressed this guy out, he's going...

[ROBERT MITCHNICK]

He’s hiding in the forest.

[BRIAN FOSTER]

He told me he's not going to speak to anyone for four days. That sounds like...

[MEERA JESSA]

That sounds like heaven, a silent retreat.

[BRIAN FOSTER]

Yeah, exactly. Well, I have to say, what feels like is never done right now, for me and for New Yorkers, is winter. It's been freezing for, I don't know, what feels like forever. But when I'm not being a geek about crypto at my desk, I'm a big outdoor adventurer. And so, what's never done for me is exploration and the great outdoors. So, my fiancée and I love to travel. I'd love to get to as many countries as I can in my lifetime—have some good ones on the list for this year, but that is a long-term pursuit for sure.

[MEERA JESSA]

I enjoyed talking to you both. This was fantastic. Thank you and I hope we can have you back on again to see how the predictions for 2026 played out.

[BRIAN FOSTER]

Thank you. Great conversation.

[MEERA JESSA]

Yeah, it was amazing.

[ROBERT MITCHNICK]

Thank you, Meera.