theCUBE + NYSE Wired: BitGo IPO | Robert Leshner, Superstate

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More from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: BitGo IPO

Robert Leshner

CEO

Superstate

play_circle_outline Bitco has gone public and shows strong stock performance, reflecting market trends.

play_circle_outline John Furrier introduces Robert Leshner, CEO of Superstate, discussing crypto's mainstreaming.

play_circle_outline Superstate Secures $82.5 Million Series B Funding to Boost Product Development and Forge Key Partnerships for Success

play_circle_outline Tokenized stocks maintain rights and governance similar to traditional shares.

play_circle_outline Superstate acts as an SEC-registered transfer agent for tokenized securities.

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Robert Leshner, Superstate

Robert Leshner

CEO Superstate

In this interview from the NYSE, Robert Leshner, chief executive officer of Superstate, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to discuss the significance of BitGo’s IPO and Superstate's newly announced $82.5 million Series B funding. Leshner frames BitGo’s successful public debut as a pivotal moment for crypto infrastructure, drawing parallels to the early days of cloud computing where custodial platforms act as the foundational "IaaS" layer for financial services. The conversation highlights how the market is shifting from speculative assets toward a "blockchainifica... Read more

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What is the current status of Bitco's stock and how is it performing in relation to the broader cryptocurrency market? add

What is the significance of the NYSE Wired program in relation to technology and capital markets, particularly in the context of cryptocurrency and financial infrastructure? add

What recent funding announcement was made by Superstate and what are its key details? add

What are the different methods for recording ownership of a stock, and how does the tokenization approach work? add

What is the role of Superstate as a transfer agent in the share ownership and tokenization process? add

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Robert Leshner, Superstate

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John Furrier

>> Welcome back, everyone. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here at NYSE, so we're actually in our studio here on the East Coast. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio here and the New York Stock Exchange, connecting Wall Street and Silicon Valley tech and money. The market is technology, everything going on in business. The market, its technology is the market. This is our Crypto Trailblazer series. We feature the leaders, and one of those leaders went public this morning. Bitco now trading. Stock's up 20-plus percent. Nice little bump. It shows us not going too frothy, which means a nice trajectory, so congratulations to Bitco. Robert Leshner is here. He's the CEO of Superstate, another company that's on the rise, with some big financing news. Robert, great to see you again. It's been a couple months since you were on theCUBE. Thanks for coming back.

Robert Leshner

>> Thanks for having me back on the show.

John Furrier

>> The NYSE Wired program, a CUBE Original that we put together, really hits the intersection between technology and capital markets. What you guys are doing really hits that mark perfectly, because as we've been discussing and chronicalizing and documenting and sharing and educating, crypto is going mainstream, but not cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and just Ethereum and Solana and others. It's the financial stack behind it. It's the ecosystem. It's essentially the infrastructure. Bitco's an infrastructure company for digital assets, physical and digital conversion. It sounds like Nvidia's pitch. AI is physically connecting into there. So a lot of similarities between these massive growth markets. The financial infrastructure is being re-plumbed. Bitco has just been one sign that a platform, nail custody, enables financial services, you start to see the rising tide. Yeah, we might be in between tides, but still it's coming in strong.

Robert Leshner

>> Yeah. I mean, Bitco is an infrastructure company that supports the blockchainification of markets. What we're seeing at Superstate is every asset is making its way over to blockchains, because blockchains are the best place for assets to trade, settle and move. We're seeing demand from every corner of Wall Street. There was announcements by the New York Stock Exchange just a few days ago that they're deeply passionate about tokenization. We've seen announcements from everybody else, all the other exchanges and custodians, and the story is extremely clear. Eventually, all assets are going to trade and settle on blockchains instead of the way that they operate today.

John Furrier

>> Let's rewind next. I think I want to say it again, because this is super important. This is the number-one takeaway right now. When you squint through the noise, look at the signal, it's the signaling like the NYSE is inevitable ...

Robert Leshner

>> It is....

John Furrier

>> that all assets will be digitized, and they'll be digitized in a way that's not a centralized thing, but decentralized with blockchain. We all see Venmos out there. We all have Apple Pay on our iPhones. If you're Android, you have a similar service. So we're already digital. It's not distributed.

Robert Leshner

>> Right. And when you talk about a centralized set of records versus a blockchain where there's a single transparent shared set of records, it's just more efficient. So anytime a stock like Bitco's trading on the New York Stock Exchange today, at the end of the day, you have multiple different perspectives. You have the New York Stock Exchange blotter, you have each broker's blotter. And most of the time they agree, but you have multiple different perspectives of what happened. And all of that gets settled and netted at DTC when all is said and done, but there's multiple different perspectives. When everything's on a blockchain, there's a single ledger and a single source of truth that everybody can share, and it just leads to a more efficient, lower-cost, faster set of transactions.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. Our CUBE original program, theCUBE original, covers tech. We cover funding announcements, a tech company just gets a Series B. You guys have news. You've just closed a $82.5 million Series B.

Robert Leshner

>> That's right, today.

John Furrier

>> Not C or D or E or Z, as Databricks has done, or K, whatever number. It's way down the alphabet. Now you're seeing these kinds of announcements in the capital market. So what's interesting about the NYSE Wired program is that it looks at the intersection of technology and capital markets where technology is the market. Take us through the Series B. What was the traction? What was the driver behind this financing for you guys? A significant amount of capital. I mean, we were talking before camera, it's like almost a half of an IPO raise, so a significant chunk of change. You got dry powder. Take us through the announcement.

Robert Leshner

>> Yeah. So we announced $82.5 million of new funding for Superstate. Superstate, we're a technology company that tokenizes securities. We bring securities onto blockchains to move faster. Up to this point, we've really focused on a couple different securities. We have two private funds that we've brought on chain that have about $1.3 billion of AUM, a T-bill fund and a high-yield fund, tokenized, operating on blockchains. A lot of crypto hedge funds are using these tokens, and settling them and moving them around. A really clear success story there. A few months ago, we really started tokenizing public company stock by working with an issuer, to say the same exact CUCIP that's trading on the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ can be tokenized and brought on chain, and it's fungible between those two systems. We've announced and we've tokenized Galaxy Digital shares, Forward Industries shares and SharpLink Gaming shares, and we're starting to see real proof of concepts of real companies, and that's the preface to this fundraise. We raised a very meaningful Series B. We're going to use it to build out our team and build out the product suites, both the types of assets that we're bringing onto blockchains to settle and trade, as well as the things that those tokens can do.

John Furrier

>> So just as a clarification, are you going to focus the use of funds on product building, go-to-market, both?

Robert Leshner

>> Both. I mean, at the end of the day, we're building out our team, we're building more products, and we're going to be working with more and more issuers for tokenizing their new issuance.

John Furrier

>> So take me through this, because this is one of the nuances. I really want to unpack this, because I think this is something that's confusing to most normal people that aren't in the ropes. When you tokenize equity like a stock, we all buy and sell stock, or people who have either an E-Trade account or an online day trading account or if you're institutional, we know the concept of buying an equity. The stock went public. I'm NYSE. It's in the market. I call my broker. I do a trade on my own, whatever. I buy a stock, I put it in my account. Okay, that's a stock. What is a tokenized stock? Is it a new stock or is it different? I mean, I know the answer, but I want you to explain because I think this, people get confused.

Robert Leshner

>> Well, there's a couple different approaches out there that exist, which I think adds to the confusion. So the approach that Superstate takes is we work with an issuer such that the stock, the exact same CUCIP, the exact same security that's registered with the SEC and trades on the New York Stock Exchange, that exact share of stock, instead of being recorded in a paper certificate or in book entry at the transfer agent, or dematerialized and held in the DTC, we introduce a fourth means of recording ownership, which is a token, and so every token is a share of the company. It's just a different way of recording that share. And when somebody owns that token, they're actually the registered shareholder on the company's books and records of the company's shares, and so it's identical to owning the shares in any other way. It has the same rights, the same governance, the same characteristics. The only difference is your share is recorded using a token in a wallet you control, instead of recorded and held at a transfer agent or through a broker dealer.

John Furrier

>> Okay. So take me through the sausage factory, as they say. Making the sausage can be messy, but let's unpack that.

Robert Leshner

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> So a company goes public like Bitco today and they have a bid and a sell, so we watch the market makers do their thing. Do you guys buy the stock or do you get stock? Do you hold it and then you issue it? Is it like then pooled in the bigger number? I mean, I can see it being maybe an aggregate. I just don't know. Explain it to me.

Robert Leshner

>> Yeah. So the way that Superstate operates is we're an SEC-registered transfer agent, and an issuer like Bitco hires Superstate as an official record of their shares. So we might work alongside another transfer agent, we might be the exclusive transfer agent, but the Superstate shares are the official record of the company's ownership. And so a shareholder can take a share that's currently in a brokerage account and instruct DTC to move it to the transfer agent, and then at Superstate to tokenize it, and so it enables a share to move between brokerage accounts and tokens on a blockchain and back and forth again. So we're not like a broker. We're not going out and buying shares and then issuing an IOU against them.

John Furrier

>> You're at the root level.

Robert Leshner

>> We're at the root level. And there's other forms of tokenization, where someone goes out and buys shares and essentially issues like a share-stable community.

John Furrier

>> They're a quasi, wannabe transfer agent, basically.

Robert Leshner

>> Correct.

John Furrier

>> You're in the fold, in the plumbing, of the number of shares in the distribution of that stock for the purposes of tokenizing it.

Robert Leshner

>> Exactly. We keep score of how many shares exist and who owns that.

John Furrier

>> So you're a new mechanism.

Robert Leshner

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> That really is what you guys are doing.

Robert Leshner

>> Exactly.

John Furrier

>> You're not replacing, but you sit side by side. So, okay, so let me just replay that back to you, see if I got it right. I buy, say, a thousand shares of Bitcoin. I'm feeling good, boom, buy a thousand, or someone buys a million, whatever. I buy a thousand. I put it in my account and I say, "Hmm, I hold stock." I'm like, "You know what? I really want to put it to a token. Maybe pledge against it to get some collateral because there's benefits there." I then go to you and say, "I'm opening up an account," and I transfer it over. I get a dashboard and I see my tokens. I see my equity. Nothing's changed except how it's recorded. Is that right?

Robert Leshner

>> That's exactly right. And when you own that thousand shares of Bitco, you're not actually on Bitco's shareholder registry. Indirectly, you have ...

John Furrier

>> They can make a query for the other transfer agents?

Robert Leshner

>> They can query how many shares you own, but you're not actually on the company's books and records. And so the way Superstate works is you would move your shares from your brokerage account back to the transfer agent level, where you're the registered shareholder. It has your name in the company's cap table, so to speak. And then from there, you can say, "Move those shares to my Solana wallet or my Ethereum wallet," so that I can pledge them as collateral, settle an OTC transaction, and eventually move them to another type of exchange.

John Furrier

>> Okay, so I love it. I want to get that out there. I really want to explain that. It's a good explainer. All right. Talk about velocity and scale. Okay. As you start bringing it into the market, obviously funding's going to help you build out your platform. I'm anticipating that we'll see uptake on this, because once this jumps in, it's like the first penguin in the water. They all jump in. You're going to see a tsunami of people coming in. You're going to have volume. How do you address that? Is that something you guys look at? What's the answer to that?

Robert Leshner

>> Yeah. So I think right now there's about 6,000 public companies, right? There's some that close every year and more companies that go public every year. I think eventually, all 6,000 companies are going to have tokenized shares that the issuer is tokenizing. There's other models out there where a third party can go and make a token and say they've tokenized every company, but the model we use is that the issuers really sign up, and it's their shares and they can use them for raising capital. They could sell tokenized shares to raise more money as a follow-on offering. They can use the tokens as their own shares. Eventually, all 6,000 companies are going to have tokenized their shares in this way, but it's a journey.

John Furrier

>> So the difference between you and other approaches is let's just say I want it again in the business of putting stuff on chain. I'm going to buy. I get an investor, I got say $100 million in capital. I buy a boatload of shares. I take them in, I get them in maybe an account, and then I have to figure out how to tokenize them and then do all that reporting and do all the analytics, do all the ...

Robert Leshner

>> Exactly. We have an issuer-led model where we partner with a public company, and they say my shares are not tokenized.

John Furrier

>> What's the downside? What's the difference between the two?

Robert Leshner

>> The biggest difference between the two is scalability, frankly. So when a third party goes out and mints their own stock tokens, there's no barriers to entry. They can get up and running in two seconds. Any startup can go out and buy a bunch of stocks in a brokerage account, right? It's incredibly scalable, but it's a different security. In our model, the downside, frankly, is the speed of winning issuers tokenizing their own shares. And so that's the downside, is that it's higher quality, there's more that a company can do with those tokens, but we have to win issuers one by one.

John Furrier

>> Okay, so what's the benefit for being on chain? Okay, because I can see there also being stock options. Brian Baumann at the NYSE and I've talked about this all the time. I mean, why not put my options on there? If they're worth something because the company's going up or can get value, what's the value do I get out of that?

Robert Leshner

>> Yeah. So eventually I think companies will have most of their securities on chain. Their shares, their preferred, their convertibles, their debt. Eventually all these things are going to be on chain, because it's just a file format that makes it backwards-compatible so they can trade and settle in the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ and all of the traditional ways but also forward-looking, such that they can be traded or settled in crypto exchanges or new platforms or things that haven't been built yet. And so the advantage is really the future-proofing of new use cases that they want exposure to. It'll be a different investor base and different settlement rails.

John Furrier

>> So you guys have the Opening Bell platform, supports direct-issuance programs on regulated systems. The SEC allows you to do that. Talk about the relationship between regulators.

Robert Leshner

>> Yeah. So we're focused on U.S. issuers and the U.S. regulatory structure. There are issuers in other jurisdictions, right? Every country has their own securities board of some variety, and there's people that are partnering with offshore companies. There's people that are building offshore platforms. We're focused solely in the U.S. market for now.

John Furrier

>> What's the go-to-market strategy for you guys? What's the focus? What's your objectives?

Robert Leshner

>> Our objective is to work with each issuer of publicly-traded securities to tokenize those securities, so that they can be exposed to a larger global investor base.

John Furrier

>> On the Bitco IPO, what jumps out at you? Obviously they did well out of the gate. First crypto IPO in 2026. We had a great run on the second half of 2025, which is awesome. We see the regulatory environment looking really good. The fog's lifting. A lot more builders are going to come out, more application developers, crypto-native and AI-native as well. What's your view of the IPO? What does it mean? What's the signal?

Robert Leshner

>> Yeah. So the signal that I see is Bitco's the first real pure-play custody and infrastructure provider that's public, right? Coinbase has been public for a while. They have a custody business, right? Gemini went public. They have a custody line, right? But Bitco is really just an infrastructure company, and they do that extremely well. And so I think some of the excitement that you're seeing today is because of the fact that it's a very simple-to-understand business that offers infrastructure to anyone who's building in this space to store and custody assets. And today, they mostly store Bitcoin and a few other of the majors and the long tail of assets, but eventually, because they support crypto rails, it's my belief that they'll be able to offer custody for the future of securities in general. As stocks come on chain, as bonds come on chain, as new assets come on chain, Bitco's going to be able to work with them, and so I think the growth story for Bitco is actually really clear. Today they are a custody provider for crypto-native securities. In the future, they're a custody provider for all securities, and it's a huge market.

John Furrier

>> And they're an enabling platform. And what I like about Bitco is they're a platform.

Robert Leshner

>> Exactly.

John Furrier

>> And it reminds me of the cloud days. I remember when Amazon Web Services came out. It was very misunderstood, and I was using it from day one because I was an entrepreneur starting a company. It's like, "Okay, what do I do? I'm not going to get a data center and buy a box. I'll just use the cloud, put my credit card down." The categories in the early cloud days were labeled IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Infrastructure as a service, which was like compute, storage, networking, queuing. Platform as a service is kind of middleware, and then SaaS. We all know what SaaS is, Airbnb, mobile applications. That was a huge wealth-creating wave. It changed the game. We wouldn't see Box, Dropbox, Airbnb, Netflix, without that. So I think we're seeing the same movie play out with Bitco. They're like an IaaS platform. So the question for you ... Well, you agree, of course. What are the higher-level services that would come out? Because Amazon talks about higher-level, because now they have thousands of products on top of their IaaS and passive layers. What is that headroom for Bitco? Because if you play it forward, it's not just store. It's store, deploy, build. And like what you're doing, you're building solutions.

Robert Leshner

>> Yeah. So I think there's really two axes that Bitco has as an opportunity to scale. The first one I touched on, which is the types of assets that they support as everything becomes tokens on blockchains. So right now it's crypto-native assets, but I see a huge opportunity for them to store tokenized securities, right? Which have a much larger market cap and addressable market ...

John Furrier

>> Experience....

Robert Leshner

>> much larger than crypto is today, right? So they have a massive growth story in the types of tokenized assets that they custody, easy growth story, and the second is the services that interact with custody, right? So they've already done ... They built a settlement network within Bitco. I think there's going to be more trading, more settlement, and more things built on top of that basic building block of custody that emerge over time.

John Furrier

>> Robert, I think you're onto that, certainly on point. I'll share a story and I want to get your reaction. I was talking to an entrepreneur, and he was developing a solution with a agriculture partner that had millions of acres of trees that produced fruit. And I'm like, "Well, I don't get it." "No, it's a real-world asset." I go, "What?" He goes, "Each tree produces $3,000 a year in fruit, times a million. Do the math."

Robert Leshner

>> That's a lot of fruit.

John Furrier

>> I go, "Okay, cool. So what does that mean?" He goes, "Well, we'll tokenize it, and it'll either produce or not. Now that's a future predictive market." So I'm like, "Okay." He goes, "Yeah, but there's no middleman. It's like if the weather's bad, the market will figure it out. Now you got yield, so now you're kind of in a futures." That's a financial product applied to an asset that's real-world, that has been on paper. Someone does a forecast. They check the trees. Now it's complete transparency.

Robert Leshner

>> And you could take that financial product and it could have nothing to do with crypto, where you could say, "Hey, we've taken these trees and we've packaged them into a security," right? You could also put it on blockchain, and what that does is it makes it easier to transfer ownership, trade ownership and settle the ownership.

John Furrier

>> Buy and sell trees.

Robert Leshner

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> Again, this is why I think real-world assets is kind of an opaque topic for mainstream, but if you think about it, everything we own, the home, I mean, we all know what the assets are. No one thought about forest, trees, but that's an extreme example, but it illustrates the point.

Robert Leshner

>> Right. It makes it where there's something extremely esoteric and complicated to transfer and settle and standardizes it, makes that settlement extremely simple, and in a format that works with all of the other crypto infrastructure.

John Furrier

>> All right. Thanks so much for coming in. Last question. What are you most excited about right now with the market? Are you happy with the regulatory environment? Are you happy with the way things are going, the mainstream of crypto?

Robert Leshner

>> Yeah. I think there's great tailwinds for Congress to pass market structure legislation. I think there's a great regulatory environment right now where regulators want innovation, and they've been talking about coming out with new rules to enable innovation using blockchain. And I think that the companies that are operating in this space are working really fast to bring new products to market, and I just think the future is in our hands.

John Furrier

>> Well, congratulations. Superstate raised 82 and a half million. You're a tech company and a financial company all rolled into one. Congratulations. Thanks for coming on, being a Trailblazer, OG and Trailblazer, on theCUBE here. Our crypto traders are the leaders we're featuring who are making it happen. We're ushering in the new era of financial, money, infrastructure, platforms, applications. New creative things will emerge. It's just right in pace with the AI world. You're starting to see massive rise, a whole new generation. Crypto infrastructure and AI infrastructure are soon going to come together. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.