Mantra CEO: Trillions in Real World Assets Coming to Crypto!

The entire crypto market I think is 3 trillion or something like this at the moment. But rwas are a massive, massive opportunity. There are companies operating today that believe the technology can change how we interact with real estate. We believe the next step going forward will be the tokenization of financial assets. $1 billion of real world assets on the blockchain, which is incredible. Congratulations, guys. In July 2024, the company tokenized $500 million worth of real estate for Dubai based MAD Group. Mantra Finance has secured a Dubai VASP license. There' $278 trillion in assets globally or just real estate alone. So we've only started to scratch the surface of it. I wanted to make sure that mantra had 100 billion by the end of 2026. And still 100 billion is kind of a drop in the ocean.

The World economic forum predicts 10 trillion of GDP on blockchain by 2027. So how do you see RWA contributing to that growth?

The entire crypto market I think is what, 3 trillion or something like this at the moment, mostly comprised of Bitcoin. But RWAs are a massive, massive opportunity, right? If you're thinking about all the different types of financial products and instruments, if we're talking about all the real estate, you're talking about all the things that aren't even really categorized yet that could be unlocked via tokenization, this is a massive, massive opportunity. I put out a tweet probably sometime at the end of last year that I wanted to make sure that mantra had 100 billion by the end of 2026. And still 100 billion is kind of a drop in the ocean and hopefully we'll exceed my expectations. Seems like actually things are moving in the right direction. We expect to have several billion on chain just within the next few months. Again, because we've been around for a long time and we kind of had this resurgence last year. So really to see that come to work with the announcement of the billion dollar real estate tokenization deal that we're doing with DHAMMACH in the uae, the announcement of Avara licensing, that just came out as a world's first, these are all things that show the credibility. It shows the maturity of the space in general, but also of Mantra. And it shows that just we're serious player that's here to stay. But I think my main message is this is just the beginning for us and we just launched our chain at the end of last year. The ecosystem is just getting developed internationally. We're expanding assets on chain, we're expanding our DAPP ecosystem.

Do you remember the first time you ever bought some bitcoin?

Absolutely. Do you? So I was in university in Madrid. My friend Trey Tomlinson, shout out to Trey, was a computer science major and you know, was messing around with stuff on the dark web and he told me I should check this bitcoin thing out. And this is like 2013. So Bitcoin is about 500 bucks. I was a poor college student, so 500 bucks for me was a lot of money. But I got some exposure, got interested and kept following it for, for some time. But I wanted to go on a traditional finance path, you know, during school. So I, you know, didn't necessarily go straight into. I never even thought that founding a company was something I could do. So I wanted to go into banking and, you know, eventually ended up moving to Asia and then really went down the crypto rabbit hole, say probably 2015, 2016, when I actually was working at a bank kind of interestingly. Yeah.

Right. So what inspires you then as the, as the co founder of Mantra?

You know, I never really thought that entrepreneurship was something that I, you know, wanted to do as kind of like an accidental thing. And kind of the story was, you know, after leaving my job at the bank, I wanted to do something. I tried to start a, you know, an idea for, you know, buying different types of luxury items with bitcoin and crypto that didn't last very long. I ended up joining a crypto exchange project, moved down to Hong Kong, kind of started setting that up for a bit Bear market hit very badly in 2018 and 2019 and honestly just kind of had to figure stuff out. We did some early onset tokenization in 2019. We actually tokenized a professional basketball players contract back in 2019, 2020. So that was kind of interesting thing. And then honestly, I was just like straight up running out of money and going broke and I had to do something. So we just figured something out. And I was an early defi user, so we thought building a defi application would be cool. So we started tinkering and building and then just kind of went for it. And I think that's kind of the story of my life, my story, career. I think that's one of the things that's made me a relatively successful entrepreneur so far. So young guy, this was, I feel like it's truly my calling. So I never really feel like I'm working. I'm just living life and I've kind of found a way to make life and work just kind of seamlessly. Become one thing, and I love it. And then they'll continue doing this for a very, very long time.

Can you tell us what inspired mantra to create the real world Asset Tokenization Accelerator and how it aligns with the growing interest in RWA as well?

We launched our mainnet end of last year in October and one of the things when building on an ecosystem that builders require is capital and resources and you know, technical support. So it's really important that we're able to fund and support builders coming in to build real world asset applications and infrastructure within the Mantra ecosystem. And having a partner like Google to be a key part of this RW accelerator gives access to capital, access to technical support, and access to infrastructure that they wouldn't be able to get in other ecosystems necessarily. So we want to spearhead that, really kick it off strong and get builders building as rapidly as possible, experimenting, trying new things. And obviously this helps us push the boundaries of innovation for real world assets by having different types of applications and different types of products coming on chain. So we're really excited that we can finally start doing that. And you know, this accelerator is kind of the starting point.

So how did the partnership with Google Cloud come about and I guess what unique features does it bring to the program as well?

We got in touch with the Google team probably right after we launched our testnet, which was in April of last year. So almost a year ago, we started building a relationship, getting them familiar with some of the things that we were working on. We launched a mainnet in October as I mentioned, and Google became a validator on the network. So know, asides from actually just using Google Cloud infrastructure ourself within our business, we also have them as a node operator on our network. And then of course we want to do this accelerator program together. So this is something that I've been working on for some time, but we have a lot of other things that we're working on in terms of integration. So actually Google supports our testnet to allow actually developers and builders to come and get testnet tokens to start experimenting and trying things straight from their own hosted webpage. And we have a lot of other things on the kind of the technical side that we're cooking with them. But this accelerator part is quite important, as I mentioned, helps fund builders, gives them access to technical resources both on the Mantra and the Google side, and it gives them effectively free cloud, which all builders need to run applications.

What criteria will you use to select projects for the RWA accelerator?

To be honest, it's open for Everyone, the basic thing is you need to be building within our ecosystem and you need to effectively pledge tokens that will be airdropped or distributed to our community of token holders. So we've actually had a precursor to this. Last year we had a couple of projects that were building different things actually just literally just downstairs we're going to be hosting an event with one of them that's kind of an EV motorcycle project on call Pisces. They're doing some really interesting stuff, the tokenization, financing these motorbikes which are deployed all over Dubai. But anywho, you need to be, you know, again building in the Montrecosystem, you need to be willing to distribute tokens to our community. This is a good way to distribute your token to a wide range of, you know, token holders. And it's also good for our token holders obviously to get participation in these various different projects. Within the ecosystem we're very open to whatever applications you may be interested in building. There's not like you need to be building this particular product or this particular app. So very open from that perspective. But again, mantra aligned and ohm token holder aligned, those are the two main things.

What resources can participants of the RWA accelerator expect to receive?

So we do everything from technical support, you know, go to market, you know, exchange support, you know, we're listed on many major exchanges. We can help with those relationships, we can help with fundraising. We're obviously going to be committing capital ourselves. We will also be, you know, giving again cloud infrastructure through Google. So you get free cloud and you know, to be honest, depending on where these builders come from, you can come in and use our offices. We have office in Hong Kong, office in Dubai. Expanding all of the place, you know, access to our network, office hours, things of this nature will obviously help with marketing support and things like that. So pretty comprehensive, zero to one type of building activity. Just to really, you know, allow builders who want to, you know, leverage this network, this foundation that we built over the last five years to really kickstart their journey into RWAs. Another thing I think is quite important is legal and compliance support. We just also got recently issued the world's first kind of crypto native or on chain native licensing from VARA in Dubai. So we have brokerage, exchange and investment management licensing that's all natively done on chain. So having that kind of understanding of compliance, legal frameworks is another thing that they'll be able to benefit from and really help them kind of learn from our mistakes and learn from our learnings. Over the last few years to really kickstart their, their activities.

What should the crypto community expect from Mantra and the accelerator next?

Well, I think from Mantra side it's really just continuing to bring assets on chain and build up that DAPP ecosystem. And then of course exchange integrations with the, with the, with the mainnet. We're on many different exchanges, but we're starting to see mainnet integrations happen on Bybit last week, Gate will be next week, Kraken listed. So a number of different exchanges are starting to list the mainnet which is great in terms of kind of these DApps that are being built. Obviously the accelerator will be a really key part of that to bring early stage builders into the ecosystem to bring interesting RWA focused and Mantra focused apps and applications and infrastructure to life. This will be critical for us to have that on chain activity, meeting all these different assets that we're bringing on, from real estate to financial instruments, where there's this convergence of this kind of permissioned versus permissionless activity, which is really going to be where I think RWAS and tokenization takes off. And I really firmly believe that tokenization will be Blockchain's iPhone moment. And Mantra wants to lead that. We will lead it actually, I guess.

Touched on it before, but what does VARA's license approval mean for Mantra's growth?

I mean, it means a lot. It was a long time coming. We've been working on that for a number of years now. It was not easy to receive and we're very thankful to be, you know, working with a progressive regulator like VARA and you know, having them be supportive of something like what we're doing. It's a world first, as I mentioned, to have a kind of on chain, native crypto, native licensing framework. This is just a journey of that because they want to try to do interesting stuff, but doing it in again, the way that we like to build stuff safely, compliantly and not cutting corners. So having the right stakeholders, having the right regulatory support is really critical. And we believe that vara, Dubai and even just the broader UAE is a place where a lot of this innovation is going to happen and come from. And we're again happy to be at the leading front of that, I guess.

How does this license differentiate Mantra from other DEFI platforms in terms of compliance and legitimacy?

Well, for one, no one else has it. I think that's a big differentiator. I use this phrase a lot. You can fork a code, but you can't fork a license. Yes. All right. And it is a competitive advantage when used properly. It is something that distinguishes us, it brings institutional eyes and attention because many regulated financial institutions, or just institutions in general would prefer to work with a regulated partner because they know they can trust them, they know that they, you know, have certain processes in place for compliance and AML and KYC and all these other things that are, that are, that are important and it just shows a level of maturity that, you know, people want to see when it comes to real world assets. Because tokenization, real world assets is fundamentally built on trust. And we think that licensing and the compliant approach really does help build that trust. And one of the reasons we work with a lot of these issuers in the UAE and other places is they really work directly with me. People ask, why wouldn't you tokenize on Ethereum? Why don't you tokenize Solana or whatever? I mean, great. Honestly you can and we expect in the end of the day that, you know, people tokenize on all different chains and that's great, it's good for the industry as a whole. But if you want that purpose built approach like our technology Stack has, if you want that, you know, laser focus on this particular problem and if you want that direct access to myself and our team, if something goes wrong when you're tokenizing a product on Ethereum, you're not calling Vitalik. But if something goes wrong on Mantra, you can call me and we'll fix it.

This is the final one. Are there plans to secure other licenses in other jurisdictions and if so, where?

Good question. For now, we're pretty happy with the bar license, but we are definitely open to the idea and we do have various M and A strategies about how we could approach that. There's always a build or buy mentality question that you need to ask here. So obviously the UAE is another market that has different Emirates, it has different regulators. So that's something that we're actively always just keeping our, you know, a pulse on. But other countries, Singapore's one of interest, probably wouldn't be looking to get licensed in the US anytime soon, to be honest. We actually have a partner that we work with that's building on Mantra called Soma Finance that has a U.S. partner broker dealer called territorial capital in the U.S. so we actually already have some exposure in that direction and that's going to be launching soon as well, which we're excited about. So we can do it in different ways. It's not always necessarily us having to be licensed, but, but we can work with other licensed partners that give US distribution in other places. You know, some of our biggest investors are licensed in many different jurisdictions. Laser Digital, for one, which is effectively Nomura, the big Japanese banking, has licenses all over the place. So we can leverage a lot of their licensing capabilities as well for things that we're doing because we work very closely with them on so many different types of transactions, tokenizations, all different type of stuff. Sam.