Crypto Is About To Change How You Buy Stocks Forever | Arjun Sethi

Arjun Sethi argues Kraken’s next phase is not just a bigger exchange but a full financial platform built on one ledger, one risk engine, and one onboarding stack. He says the company already built the hard infrastructure for custody, fiat rails, liquidations, and global access, and now wants to layer trading, banking, lending, asset management, and services on top of it. In his view, the point is to make money, crypto, tokenized collateral, and stocks behave like one balance so customers can borrow, spend, and earn without constantly selling assets.

He says the European bank acquisition is meant to unlock true banking functions like deposits, lending, interest, and passporting across the EU. He also frames U.S. progress around regulated perpetual futures and other products that keep the guarantees inside U.S. clearing and compliance structures rather than offshore entities.

The biggest long-term thesis is tokenized equities. Sethi sees three stages: today’s wrapped stock products, issuer-sponsored tokenization with shareholder rights, and eventual native onchain issuance where the share register itself lives onchain. He argues the traditional IPO process is slow, expensive, and exclusionary, while onchain capital markets could make going public more like a dial than a cliff. He closes by saying Bitcoin matters because it is scarce, borderless, and self-custodied money that cannot be frozen or debased by a counterparty.