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Five digital-asset leaders joined moderator Emma Joyce for an unusually candid panel on what's actually changed in the industry over the past year. Boris Bohrer-Bilowitzki (Concordium), Christian Schmid (BCG), Dr. Adam Back (Blockstream), Sunil Sabharwal (Securitize/Blackstone), and Simone Maini (Elliptic) tackled regulation, bank-fintech tension, tokenization's real opportunity, and whether AI is stealing digital assets' moment or supercharging it.
Regulatory clarity alone was never going to be enough
Simone Maini said much of the "regulatory clarity" the industry got in the US actually arrived through enforcement rather than collaboration, and that clarity alone was never going to be sufficient. She argued three ingredients had to come together: real regulatory collaboration, businesses bringing concrete products for regulators to respond to, and time, since systemically important financial institutions move deliberately by design. Christian Schmid added technology readiness, deregulation, interoperability, and client adoption as further preconditions, and said interoperability specifically remains unsolved. Sunil Sabharwal pointed to something concretely new in the past 12 months: traditional finance itself showing up, with the New York Stock Exchange partnering with Securitize as a design agent and Computershare doing the same.
AI is accelerating tokenization, not stealing its capital
Every panelist agreed the honest answer was both, but landed on it ultimately being the same underlying trend. Boris Bohrer-Bilowitzki called AI an accelerant, arguing that autonomous AI agents transacting value need an identity and accountability layer that blockchain, not more raw intelligence, actually provides; he said Concordium was built for exactly this moment. Sabharwal and Schmid agreed AI is pulling venture and bank investment away from early-stage tokenization projects right now. Adam Back added a technical wrinkle: AI has also made it easier to find smart-contract exploits, which is why Blockstream built its Liquid network on a formally verifiable contracting language called Simplicity instead of the harder-to-secure Ethereum Virtual Machine model.
Tokenization is starting to build genuinely new markets
Adam Back said Blockstream's Liquid network already runs organic, non-speculative use cases, including a portfolio of tokenized small-business loans in Mexico, financed by two major US banks, worth over $2 billion and growing roughly $100 million a month. Schmid projected tokenized real-world assets growing from roughly $30 billion today to $88 trillion, and said tokenization both upgrades existing markets and creates new ones by widening the pool of investable assets. Sabharwal pushed back on the "new markets" framing, noting the real opportunity is distribution: public equities and ETFs alone are a $150 trillion market, and only $30 billion of that is tokenized today.
Speakers:
Boris Bohrer-Bilowitzki, Chief Executive Officer, Concordium
Christian Schmid, Senior Partner & Global Leader | Global Banking & CIB, BCG
Dr. Adam Back, Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer, Blockstream & BSTR
Hon. Sunil Sabharwal, Operating Partner, Blackstone Growth Equity Fund & Member of the Board, Securitize.io, Blackstone Growth Equity Fund
Simone Maini, Chief Executive Officer, Elliptic
Host:
Emma Joyce, Chief Revenue Officer, Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC)
Point Zero Forum 2026 | Zurich, Switzerland
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