Crypto Chaos in a Suit: WisdomTree Bets on the Blockchain

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Finance

What to know:

  • In the murky glare of the boardroom, WisdomTree’s captain of coin, Jonathan Steinberg, proclaims that the crypto venture has ceased to be a wisp of air and has taken a seat at the grand table of strategy, almost profitable enough to make even the most skeptical auditor crack a smile.
  • The asset manager has grown its digital-asset menagerie with the speed of a gust through a dusty ledger, leaping from about $30 million to roughly $750 million in tokenized assets, while marching into new realms like Solana as if it were a well-lit staircase to a fiscal heaven.
  • Steinberg casts crypto as the backbone of a modern financial mechanism, pointing to tokenized funds, the WisdomTree Connect platform, and a steadfast faith in compliance-minded tokenization tech as the keystones of a grand, patient plan.

New York – WisdomTree’s crypto business is no longer a caprice of a breezy afternoon but a pillar of the firm’s strategy, perched on the verge of profitability, according to the man who wears the crown of CEO, during a fireside chat at the Ondo Summit in New York on Tuesday.

“We want to continue to scale,” Steinberg declared, with the gravity of a man who has counted coins until his spectacles fogged. “Last year, we went from like $30 million in assets to about $750 million in assets,” he added, noting that the firm doesn’t currently make money on its digital asset efforts but is “in line of sight of taking this to a profitable business.”

The firm, $150 billion in assets under management, has been pouring coin into blockchain infrastructure, launching tokenized funds, and striding into new chains like Solana. Steinberg said the effort is driven by long-term conviction. “It’s still early days, but it’s not an experiment now. We have conviction. So we believe eventually everything will go on chain.”

It’s not hard to see why WisdomTree has been pushing further with digital assets. Most recently, during its earnings presentation, it said its total WisdomTree tokenized AUM grew to $770 million, up 25x from 2024.

WisdomTree has taken an aggressive, early lead among traditional asset managers in digital assets, launching a suite of tokenized funds and recently expanding distribution via WisdomTree Connect, which enables those assets to move across self-custodied wallets and institutional platforms.

The firm also made a strategic bet on blockchain infrastructure by acquiring Securrency, a compliance-focused tokenization company, which it later sold to the DTCC. Steinberg said that move was a foundational step in enabling “compliance-aware tokens” and programmable finance, helping WisdomTree build a long-term, interoperable digital asset strategy.

For Steinberg, crypto represents more than a product opportunity – it’s a new financial infrastructure. “Really, this is bigger than asset management. This is really about financial services,” he said. “Financial services – some of these banks go back a couple of centuries. So they built on legacy, on top of legacy, on top of legacy. There is that modernization that has to happen.”

As for WisdomTree’s ambitions? “We just want to continue to scale what we’re doing,” Steinberg said.

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2026-02-04 04:07