Digital Asset News host Rob covers DTCC tokenization, Canton network, and crypto market developments
Digital Asset News host Rob discusses the DTCC's $114 trillion tokenization trial, the Canton blockchain network, and several other bullish crypto developments.
Summary
An unusually bullish episode opens with focus on the DTCC — the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation — which holds approximately $114 trillion in assets under custody and is launching a tokenized securities trial in October 2026 involving Vanguard, BlackRock, and JP Morgan. The trial will use both a private Hyperledger Besu network and Canton, a public blockchain, as part of a multi-chain strategy. Rob also covers Base founder Jesse Pollak's pivot away from memecoins toward payments and AI agents, Cantor Fitzgerald and Securitize collaborating on blockchain-based IPOs, Morgan Stanley's pending approval for in-house crypto custody and staking, and the status of the Clarity Act. He closes with a Q&A session and extended discussion of his AI-built price prediction tracking website, priceprophets.com ("prophets" as in biblical prophets), which logs and archives price calls from analysts including Raoul Pal, Peter Schiff, Samson Mow, Michael Saylor, Matthew Sigel, Peter Brandt, and Arthur Hayes, allowing listeners to submit new predictions with source links for verification.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
The DTCC and Its $114 Trillion in Assets Under Custody
Host: I don't do too many majorly bullish videos, but today is a little bit different, so I'm going to apologize in advance. This is a pretty bullish video. I try to give a little bit of balance, but I got to tell you, there are a lot of good things going on in this massively bear market.
The first thing we're talking about is the DTCC. What the heck is that? The DTCC is not an asset under management — it's a holding company. It holds over a hundred trillion dollars. At the latest markings, roughly $114 trillion. And it's assets under custody, not assets under management, through its subsidiary the Depository Trust Company. The DTCC is the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation.
To get a little feel of what it actually does: it is the backbone of Wall Street. It's responsible for clearing and settlement. It's also an upgraded version of what we used to do with physical certificates and paperwork, as everything is now electronic — which, of course, we are in 2026, so that's pretty much how it should be. And for risk management between the buyer and the seller, there's an intermediary, and that is the DTCC, to make sure that everything is moving and flowing just fine in a $114 trillion market.
The DTCC's Tokenization Push and the Canton Blockchain
Now, when I was taking a look at what they're building on this specific chain — which I was kind of blown away by, but actually not surprising if you've been following the channel — I had to research the DTCC just to see what it was. It led me to their website, and when I landed on it, I thought to myself, "Is this the right website?" Because it looks like it's going so far forward on tokenization. That's all it's really talking about on their website, which is quite interesting because they've been around for quite a long time for custody. I had to verify this was the correct website — they are really pushing tokenization.
We're going to see a lot of different companies and a lot of head figures doing the same thing. Here's what we have. This is from Eric Balchunas — he was the one who called the Bitcoin ETF correctly, and I actually got it wrong. Shout out to Eric Balchunas. He says, "Vanguard, BlackRock, JP Morgan — just some small players in the game — and more are going to participate in a trial run of tokenized securities led by the DTCC, starting with Microsoft, CUKQ, SPY, and SHV, with a formal program launching in October."
Let me say that again. They're going to do a tokenization of these assets — CUKQ, Microsoft, SPY, SHV — with a program that launches in October. As we've talked about on this channel, we are in a four-year cycle. And it's not just Bitcoin and digital assets — it's a four-year cycle that is actually relevant to the midterm election years, which we are in right now. Bear markets abound.
It is interesting how they talk about launching in October, because that is what we believe is the peak of the bear market as we go down. Now, it could do anything. We could see it just rise up. We could get the Clarity Act to pass, just like we got the Genius Act to pass roughly in May of 2025, and everything could just go gangbusters. I'm not sure. It could happen. Anything's possible. However, launching in October is a pretty good time frame if we're looking at the four-year cycles as they pertain to Bitcoin and digital assets.
The DTCC will use both the current traditional way and tokenized options. This is a very smart thing, and we'll talk about that in a second. But the question you probably have is: what's the rail? Because you don't care about the other stuff. You don't care about the traditional parts. And you're right — that's what we're here for. Digital assets. Well, good news. I have that answer from Eric Balchunas. Many are asking what blockchain they are using. Here's the answer: Hyperledger Besu — I think I'm saying that right — DTCC's private network, and Canton, a public network. Hyperledger Besu and Canton, a public network, which you can buy on a lot of different exchanges. It's making rapid gains, almost in the top 20 — I believe it's in the top 21 right now.
This is part of DTCC's multi-chain strategy to ensure resiliency, scalability, and choice.
The RWA League Table and Canton's $330 Billion Position
We've been talking about Canton on and off for about four or five months. What led me to it was a market overview of tokenized assets for real world assets on the website rwa.xyz. What this does is break down what tokenization is being put into. Most of it's debt, commodities, asset-backed credit, stocks, corporate credit, things like that.
If we scroll down, we can see the RWA League Table. There are two things you want to notice: distributed and representative. Distributed real world asset tokens use the blockchain as a distribution layer, enabling on-chain investors to subscribe, hold, and manage assets directly through their own wallets or custodians. Sounds pretty good. Number one is Ethereum at a whopping $14.8 billion. BNB Chain at $5.2 billion. Solana at $3 billion and Stellar at $3.0 billion. I've always been talking about the best, which is Binance, Ethereum, Solana, and Tron. Tron isn't here, but three out of four ain't bad. And Avalanche, Liquid Network, Arbitrum — which is also the second-layer EVM for Robinhood — and so on and so forth.
What you don't notice is Canton's not there. Well, if you switch over to "representative" — RWA tokens using the blockchain as a recordkeeping layer, enhancing transparency, reconciliation, and operational efficiency without enabling on-chain investor transfer or distribution — which is essentially what the DTCC does — let's see what it is. And there's Canton at a whopping $330 billion total value. Not bad.
So taking a look at this, as far as representative versus distributed, Canton's looking pretty good.
Canton Token Price and Tokenomics
Now, as far as price action, Canton is very new. It was released November 9th, 2025. What a horrible time to launch a token — that was right after the top of October 2025. But it launched, went down, and rallied pretty well. It's not doing too bad. It launched at 13 cents and today it's at 13 cents. As far as circulating supply and total supply, they're roughly the same — actually they are the same, 100%, at 39 and 39. As far as tokenomics go, I'll take it.
Larry Fink's Tokenization Vision
So the question then is: how big is tokenization? Well, don't take my word for it — I think it's going to be huge. Let's take a look at Larry Fink, BlackRock chairman. He says, "If history is any guide, tokenization today is roughly where the internet was in 1996, when Amazon sold $16 million worth of books." That was what Amazon was back in the day. I remember thinking it was ridiculous — who's going to buy a bunch of books? That's dumb. Here we are, part of the Mag 7. And three of the rest of today's Mag 7 tech giants hadn't even been founded. Tokenization could advance at the pace of the internet — faster than most expect — with enormous growth over the coming decades. That's why it's kind of important to invest early. Not financial advice. This has worked out pretty well for me.
The Pros and Cons of Tokenization
But there are some fallbacks. Tokenization of all different types of assets has positives and negatives. The positives are 24/7 global liquidity, fractional ownership — which is very nice because some of us can't buy everything. Imagine a skyscraper. I can't buy that, but I could buy a fractional ownership of that real estate. Lightning-fast settlement, low cost, transparency, new investors can come in. Fantastic. That's the good part.
The bad part is there's massive, massive risk. And if you're part of the TradFi world, this is what you want to avoid. It's great to make your clients money. It's not so great to lose it because of some exploit or hack or something else. That's why they're moving so slowly, and I got to tell you, it's a pretty smart move. Massive risks: fraud and scams, hacks, regulatory mess, lack of clarity, tech vulnerabilities, illusion of liquidity, tax and legal headaches.
Why DTCC's Dual-Chain Strategy Is Smart
As a reminder, this is why I think this is a smart move by the DTCC — and it's interesting that JP Morgan is a part of it, because they're going the opposite way with their stablecoins. When they do their own permissioned chain, which they just said they're going to do, but they're also going to do it on Canton, which is permissionless and public — when you do it on a permissioned chain, it's centralized, it's private, it's KYC/AML compliant, there's an undo button if something goes wrong, it's fast and cheap, and you can make it private. And banks like private.
So why would they include any kind of public chain? It's because of the liquidity. The DTCC is the only one that's gotten it right so far. They realize: we want to do this because of those problems we just talked about, but we don't want to leave any liquidity behind. We'll make sure we scoop up as much as possible. With a public blockchain, you get global interoperability, trillions of dollars, 24/7 global liquidity, and you can pretty much trade and do other things as you want on the internet and smartphone. This is a pretty smart reason.
This is launching in October. I think this could be big — very bullish. But just wait, because I think we're going to see a shift to this market growing up, which is as it should be.
Base Founder Jesse Pollak Pivots Away from Memecoins
This is from Woo Blockchain. Base founder Jesse Pollak, who is the founder of Base, will focus on trading, payments, and AI agents after moving away from social push like memecoins and stuff like that. Look, everybody gets caught up in it, but I think we know where we're supposed to go, and it sure as heck wasn't Fartcoin.
Base founder Jesse Pollak said he was wrong to focus heavily on social products and content coins, acknowledging the strategy caused Base to fall behind in such areas as perpetuals, prediction markets, tokenization, and payments. If they would have focused on this part, they would have been way ahead. Unfortunately, they focused on something different. And I think there's an even bigger play as they focus on AI agents and payments on the base layer. I'd like to see more of this. I'd like to see things grow up, because we can't keep focusing on betting on stupid memecoins that do absolutely nothing. Hopefully we can get things to actually work.
Cantor Fitzgerald and Securitize Collaborate on Blockchain-Based IPOs
Moving to the adult side of things: Cantor Fitzgerald and Securitize are collaborating on blockchain-based IPOs. This is good because if we can get more people investing into private markets and private companies — and hopefully we don't have to do the accredited investor route, which we have here in the United States, and let people free-flow invest into things, get trained, understand things — this is a pretty big thing.
What they're doing with IPOs is creating a pathway for public companies to raise capital on-chain and issue tokenized securities. Cantor Fitzgerald will leverage its equity capital markets and trading. Securitize will handle the tokenization infrastructure and all that. This is interesting as far as Securitize goes, because if I go back to rwa.xyz and look at the RWA League Table under platforms, here's Securitize with a total value of $4.8 billion assets under management. And if you click on that, you can see which chains they're using: Ethereum, Avalanche, Solana, zkSync, Binance, Arbitrum, Mantle, Algorand, Aptos, Polygon. If you're looking for winners, I think these are some that are there.
Morgan Stanely's Pending Approval for In-House Crypto Custody
Morgan Stanely plans to bring crypto custody, staking, and lending in-house. Morgan Stanely won preliminary OCC — the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — approval for a digital asset trust bank that could bring custody and staking in-house.
Here's the problem with banks. The problem with banks is lending — fractionalized reserve lending. And I think we're going to fall into this trap as well. Banks could consolidate custody, transfers, fiduciary staking, and lending collateral work. That lending part scares me. Pressuring outside crypto service providers to catch up or fall behind. And unfortunately, if banks are doing these things — if they're doing fractionalized reserve lending — we've got a problem, because it's hard to compete with that. You take in 100% and you lend out 96%. That's not a good thing. Hopefully with the Clarity Act, which says you have to back it one-to-one, we can get away from this nonsense.
Final approval is still pending. Execution venues, liquidity, counterparties, and blockchain infrastructure would remain external. This is still pending even though they appear to have gotten preliminary OCC approval. And I don't know how they're going to get through this without the Clarity Act coming in and actually being passed.
The Clarity Act: What It Does and Where It Stands
As a refresher, we passed the Genius Act last year — I want to say May 2025, somewhere around there. The Clarity Act does the following. First of all, it tells us who is responsible: the SEC or the CFTC. The CFTC will handle digital commodities, which will be Bitcoin, Ethereum, Canton, and things like that. The SEC handles investment contracts and fundraising. The asset categories are digital commodities, investment contracts, criminal payments. And the rules are what's important — enhanced disclosures, anti-fraud, anti-manipulation, and custody, as well as customer fund segregation, which is a pretty smart thing. Voyager, Celsius, and BlockFi didn't do that, and that's one of the reasons why we had such a problem before.
Also as a reminder, it has to pass by a supermajority. I know this was supposed to be passed in July. Now everybody talks about August. We'll see how it works out. House reconciliation is August to September 2026. We'll see what it is.
The changes they want to include are limiting bank crypto exposure, aiming to remove parts of the bill that allow bank holding companies to engage in risky crypto trading practices and hold crypto assets, citing risk to financial stability. And the big one, of course, is ethics — if they can pass that. That means people in positions of power — congressmen and women, people in Congress, the President of the United States — they can't trade with this. It's the same thing they have for the STOCK Act, which says you can't use insider information to trade equities. Of course, they just ignore that, do it anyway, and get a slap on the wrist of like $200. So I don't see the problem — just pass it through and let them pay a fine. They're not going to listen to us anyhow. We'll see what happens with the Clarity Act.
Ricardo Salinas Backs Lyn Alden's "Orange Juice" Bitcoin Treasury Venture
I think this is a pretty good business too, and I got to tell you, I apologize for all the bullishness. I'm usually not this bullish, but I really couldn't find too many bad things going on.
That is Ricardo Salinas. He is, I guess, the third richest person in Mexico. Just in: Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas just announced he's backing Lyn Alden's treasury company. He states, "I learned two things. Cash is king. Can't count on governments. That's why I'm backing this team." And I think this is a pretty good business.
Private equity firms typically buy businesses, cut costs, and sell them within four to seven years — it's pretty much like a pump and dump, but actually they do build them up and it's all regulated, SEC and all that stuff. But this venture from Lyn Alden is called Orange Juice. I like the format. It's the opposite strategy. They want to acquire profitable businesses between $1 and $10 million, improve them, hold them permanently, and build a Bitcoin treasury along the way. Tell me what the problem with that is — that sounds pretty good.
It's founded by Ego Death Capital partners including Jeff Booth and Lyn Alden. They've raised $40 million. They want to acquire US businesses generating $1 to $10 million. And rather than preparing companies for resale, Orange Juice says it will preserve each business's identity, strengthen operations for the long term, and reinvest retained earnings into a Bitcoin treasury. That's great.
And I think the last thing was the most impressive to me. The company also plans to build an in-house AI operating team to help portfolio companies improve productivity while using leverage conservatively.
Q&A: Price Predictions, the Banana Zone, and priceprofits.com
As a reminder for all these different great stories we just talked about and how fantastic and bullish it is — remember, it doesn't do too much if you pay a bunch in taxes or lose it because of a hack.
Let's get into a little Q&A. That's the most important part of this whole channel.
Ben Cowan better be on that list. He better talk about my alts. I don't think he's going to talk about alts too much. Bitcoin maxis were right on a lot of things. As time has gone on, I really do see the favorability and the actual utility of Bitcoin. It has moved away from what the white paper stated it was supposed to be for — peer-to-peer transactions. Now it becomes more of a gold 2.0 store of value. That's how I see it. But it's like looking at technology — when early man discovered iron ore, they never had any idea that iron ore would be made into metals and would actually build skyscrapers. Technology moves.
Thanks to you guys, because yesterday we did a quick little video on a website that my AI agent Claude whipped up called priceprofits.com — that's "prophets" like biblical prophets. A lot of you put in there that you wanted to see some different people, and one of those was Raoul Pal. I'm just the messenger. I put him into the system. If you don't know, you go to priceprofits.com — it's a free website. All we're doing is tracking the calls that people make and holding them accountable so people can realize just how unreliable price predictions are.
We put in Raoul Pal and his predictions, and so far he is the worst offender. He's got two wrong and he's cruising for a third. As a reminder, I'm also on there. I said Bitcoin is between $150,000 and $170,000 by 2029. When you click on a name, you can see the call because it'll take you to the post or the video where it was said.
Let's see Peter Schiff. And then Raoul Pal — he said $140,000. There it is. This is just created by AI.
Right now Raoul Pal is unfortunately in the wall of shame as number one.
Ben Cowan, Mike, Mark, Gareth — all great TA guys. I don't do TA. The only TA I do is called Trump analysis. When he goes on Truth Social, I'm like, "Oh, that's not good. I think the market's going to tank because we just invaded Iran again for the 37th time this month." And sure enough, it works. But I think it's important to talk about business opportunities, tax minimization, and using AI in everyday life and how you can actually use that for your businesses.
On the price prediction website, you can break it down by price, by time, or do a 2D version which is both together. Some of the problems are you've got people like Peter Schiff and Dan Peña screaming that it's going to a dollar or zero or $20,000 — which Peter Schiff is not going to hit. And then you've got people like Samson Mow saying it's going to a million in 2026. Sailor at least is reasonable — a million by the end of the decade. And then Matthew Sigel from VanEck is saying a million by 2029. There's a dichotomy between what's reasonable and what's not. If you're somewhere in the middle as far as price and time, that makes a little more sense.
My price was $150,000 to $170,000 by 2029 — that's relatively conservative. And I think Peter Brandt is going to nail it even better. He thinks $250,000 to $500,000 by late 2029. I don't know if that's going to happen, but he says $40,000 to $60,000 in September to October 2026. I think he's going to nail it.
Rebecca asks about Arthur Hayes. Let's take a peek. Arthur Hayes says $125,000 by December 2026. He's not going to make that. I think he's more of an altcoin kind of guy.
Is CTO Larson on the price profits site? No, but I really should be adding them all in. I should be adding CTO Larson, James, Ben, Guy — all of them. They should go in there. When I have people on the show, I'll just ask them price predictions and stick them in.
Rusty says, "I see Bitwise AR invest B, but I don't see Rusty. I carry weight 69%." That could be true.
Jimmy says, "Was the banana zone a hoax?" Not a hoax. I don't think most people are malicious and do it on purpose. For Bitcoin, I don't think so. For altcoins, on some of them, I do think they manipulate the market — that's just my personal opinion, don't sue me. But I think with the banana zone, Raoul Pal looked at the business cycle and all — he's a smart guy — but it just got away from him and it just didn't work out.
It's the same thing with M2 money supply. How many times did we hear that when the M2 money supply goes up, that's a sign for Bitcoin to also go up? And as we took a look at the M2 money supply, it keeps going up, but yet Bitcoin went down. What happened? Same thing — it makes sense in theory, it just didn't pan out. Ed is right — M2 was on spot for the traditional markets, TradFi. We saw like a good $3 trillion. I think we're almost at $38.2 trillion in debt in America. Greatest country on the planet.
The ITC Miami Conference
Everybody's looking forward to Miami. We'll be doing a conference. There's a link in the description — it says the ITC conference and you get 10% off with the code "rob." It's going to be a nice little conference. It's not a Michael Saylor rah-rah type of thing. It's just the people that you know and love. There's Ben, Kemp Carson, Marusco, Mike McLoone, Guy Turner, Gareth Soloway, David Lin, Tommy Crown, Epic Kamichi, Crypto Kid, Ianaldo, Jason Pizzino, and Matt Crosby. I know there's some other ones coming. It's the 20th to the 22nd of November.
Everett says, "Rob, you're speaking at Ben's conference. What will the topic be?" Well, I have an idea of where I think things should go. One is because I think around that same time is when the market will bottom. I'd like to talk about tax strategies — I know it's not very fun, but you know what's not very fun? Paying 30% cap gains. I'm going to talk about some of the things I've done along the way, and then I'm going to talk about the dangers of doing those things, one of which is audits. Then I'm going to get into a little bit about AI and how AI can help you do these things. And then we're going to talk about investments — what you can do later, which for me will include real estate.
When I come and talk, I don't want to talk about the markets and where they are because you can see that on the live stream. I want to share what I do with my funds after I make those gains, how I roll those into businesses, and ideas for people to use and take home with them.
I'm waiting for the Ben Cowan altcoin conference in Las Vegas. Now that would be something.
Is Max Keiser on the list? No.
Where is James from Best Answer on there? You know what's great about Claude? I can just throw it in there. But here's the thing — I'll put some people in there, but I need your help to do these things. If you go to the website and check all these different calls, there's a button that says "submit a call." You're going to put in who you want — you can put in Simon Dixon, for example — and then his handle, direction, a year, target range, deadline, and then I need the source. If you submit it without the source — which could be a YouTube video, a social media post, or an article — put it right there so I can verify it. When this goes into the website, it automatically gets archived into the Wayback Machine so nothing gets lost and people can't say, "I didn't say that." Hey, you did. It's right there.
Javier says, "I say $180,000 to $240,000." Sounds good.
Should you add SBF and Mashinsky to the conference? Well, that would have to be a prison call and they'd have to accept the charges. And no. Or if you're talking about the price prediction website — no. I wanted to make it clear that anything before 2026, we're not even going to mention, because that's just kicking somebody when they're down. They all made bad calls. I made really bad calls. I thought it was going to go over $200,000. It didn't happen. So we're just going to do away with that and start from January 1st, 2026 moving forward. That way it gives everybody a fresh look.
James should be in jail with Alex Mashinsky? I don't know if we're going to go that far. Mashinsky did a straight-up rugpull — a Ponzi essentially. James made some calls that didn't work out. Allegedly.
Ed is right — M2 was on spot for the traditional markets. Yeah, we saw like a good $3 trillion there.
His channel is an echo chamber for sheep. I hate people that can't admit they were wrong. There are a lot of people like that. Thankfully I was in the military and they said if you don't admit your mistakes, people die. So make sure you fess up. Made sense.
Ben, Mike, Mark, Gareth — all great TA guys. I don't do TA. I think it's going to be a lot of TA talk at the conference. That's why I don't want to talk about TA — I don't do it. The only TA I do is Trump analysis. I think it's important to talk about business opportunities, tax minimization, and using AI in average everyday life and how you can actually use that for your businesses.
On the second channel — actually, the website you're looking at for the price profits — I need to show everybody how you can make a website and have hosting for pennies every month. I need to put that video out ASAP because this website I spun up in a couple of days, and it's going to cost me — unless I get like 100,000 hits every month — probably about 12 cents somewhere around there. It's kind of important I do that. And I'm going to show you how to use Claude as your developer, because that's all Claude does. And that's the reason why people don't transfer off of GoDaddy hosting and stuff like that — because they don't realize what they can do.
Tom Crown seems like a decent guy. He's a very nice guy. I met him.
Cryptoman asks, "When do you think you will hand out free tickets to Miami?" Maybe this week. I'll put that on my list of things to do — reach out to Dana, who is Ben's assistant, and get her to give me those tickets.
Geekdice says, "I heard Ben was going to give away five Bitcoin over and Rob's community gets closed at the top." No, no, no. What you heard was I will give everybody two Bitcoin when they send me one Bitcoin.
Anyhow, that's it for today, everybody. I know it was a very bullish video. I apologize. I tried to mix in some negativity, but it's looking pretty good. I think this is a good time to invest. Anything under the 200-day moving average is pretty great. That doesn't mean we can't have a bubble pop in AI tomorrow and go down even more. But I think anything in the 50s is not too bad. We're at $63,000 to $64,000 today. Not too bad as well. We'll see.