# tx co-founder says 20 to 40 percent of crypto holders lack brokerage accounts

Stabledash Live, a Stabledash show. Aug 25, 2026. Ashley Ebersole.
https://live.stabledash.com/shows/the-live-show/episodes/txs-chief-legal-and-operating-officer-on-who-really-holds-3HZ474JHv0A

Ashley Ebersole describes tokenized stocks as a way to reach crypto users without brokerage accounts, while the GENIUS Act still waits on agency rules.

Ashley Ebersole, co-founder and Chief Legal and Operating Officer of tx, says estimates go anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of people who hold crypto accounts but have no traditional brokerage account. He presents that group as the opening for tokenized stocks on tx, the Layer-1 blockchain and tokenization marketplace that went live across US and global markets in March 2026.

## Who adopts first

Ebersole expects adoption, but says the first users will probably be people who are "natively comfortable" with crypto, and older cohorts will need interfaces that hide the on-chain complexity. He argues that the back end is not unusual: every user who clicks buy in a traditional brokerage account does not necessarily understand how the trade is processed and settled either.

## An operating system, not a broker

tx was formed by merging Sologenic and Coreum into one network and one token. Ebersole says it connects regulated entities worldwide with the user base and on purpose performs no regulated functions itself. Tokens on TX Chain are smart tokens, he says, so restrictions, such as a ban on being held in blacklisted wallets, are enforced at the token level.

He says tx is a platform where users find a regulated entity to transact through, and it will also roll out an API for more traditional institutions. tx is partnered with Kraken, and Ebersole says having the relationship is the important thing for now.

## Rules still unwritten

On the GENIUS Act, Ebersole says that a year after enactment, not all agencies have issued proposed rules, let alone final ones. When firms call a system GENIUS compliant, he takes it to mean the system was designed around the law's broad mandates and will probably be acceptable once regulations come out.

He says tokenization is advancing regardless of the Clarity Act, which he says does not do a ton for asset tokenization. He cites new initiatives from DTCC, NASDAQ, major banks and asset managers, and calls a tokenization strategy increasingly a table stakes thing in finance.

Ebersole describes the current SEC and CFTC leadership as technologically savvy and willing to work with the industry, which he calls diametrically different from some past SECs. His advice to builders is to engage with those agencies while rules are being written, because, as he puts it, that is how good law is made.

## Key takeaways

1. Ebersole says estimates of crypto account holders without traditional brokerage accounts run from 20 to 40 percent, and he names that group as the users tokenized assets serve first.
2. He says the GENIUS Act was enacted but agencies have not yet issued all proposed rules, so compliance claims today mean a design built around its broad mandates.
3. tx describes itself as an operating system linking regulated entities and users, with compliance rules programmed into the tokens themselves.

## Chapters

- 0:00 GENIUS Act remains in implementation without final agency rules
- 2:35 Asset tokenization wave, not GENIUS, drove the company's founding
- 6:37 tx connects regulated entities and users without regulated functions itself
- 10:33 Institutional interest and awareness grew during the first year
- 12:22 Crypto-native users without brokerage accounts are the core pain point
- 19:03 Kraken partnership is early, and tx offers platform and API
- 21:47 TX Chain smart tokens enforce compliance rules at token level
- 23:45 Tokenization advances without Clarity Act, so builders should engage regulators

## Transcript

**Drew Rogers** (0:00)

Ashley, welcome back to the show.

**Ashley Ebersole** (0:03)

Hello again. Thanks having so much me, Drew and Zach. It's great to be here with y'all. We were... We had you on last time, and we had Drew and Zach, but there was a different Zach. So this is the first time you're meeting Zach Hughes. Yeah. It's great to have you back. I know we got cut short last time. It was kind of a brief Yeah. Felt like we were just getting, like, momentum and opening some fun things. And then we're like, okay. We gotta move on. So, yeah, excited to have you back. Not on the other, Zach.

**Drew Rogers** (0:31)

Yeah. We'll blame it on the other Zach. We'll throw him on the bus, but he's He's the worst. Pardon. Well, let's get back into it. By the way, if you... If you're watching this, you're not the one. Yeah, Zach.

**Ashley Ebersole** (0:42)

I was... We're just joking, though. We're just joking. No. That's great. We're

**Drew Rogers** (0:47)

really happy to have you back on. You know, I was thinking about this interview even as we were speaking just a minute ago with Mark from Zero Hash, and he mentioned sort of the post genius world. You've got a lot of things going on, but I'd love your perspective sort of. We're in... Is it a year post genius world? Like, what's... What are you seeing in terms of how this world is shifting from a regulatory and legal perspective that's kind of affecting your world?

**Zach Fowler** (1:17)

So, I mean, I think we're still in the implementation phase for for Genius. You know, mean, it was enacted, but you don't have all the proposed rules from all the agencies yet or even the enacted rules much less. So you've got the broad concepts out there. That's what the legislation does. But you don't have to use a maybe cliched phrase, you know, the... Where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. You know? Okay. These... This is the concept.

How does that actually apply to entities operating in this space in terms of what they need to do, you know, and get very specific on on the legal requirements? So that's kinda where we are. I do think you're seeing... That doesn't stop people from saying, you know, we have this Genius Act compliant. You know, stablecoins are, you know, our system's Genius Act compliant, and and that's fine. It...

I take that to mean it's been designed around the broad mandates of the Genius Act, but which which will probably be acceptable under the regulations when they come out. It's just, you know, we don't know everything yet, I guess.

**Ashley Ebersole** (2:35)

Yeah. It looks like you started the company, right, like, a month or so before Genius was was passed. Was was the... Just given your background in, you know, law compliance and and everything that you've done in your career, maybe speak a little a little bit about the kind of timing around why and when you started what you're building today.

**Zach Fowler** (2:59)

So I don't know that genius drove the timing necessarily. I think what drove the timing and just, you know, the fact that we formed the the company and its mission was that we saw asset tokenization as the next wave of of of assets coming on chain. It, you know, was not necessarily gonna still be, you know, big... Know, someone started a layer one, and now you're seeing the tokens from that coming on chain. And do they... What new functionality do they add? And so you'll see that it's getting adopted.

Now it was gonna be tokens that were pretty clearly securities in the first instance because they had an asset back in them. You were buying them for the features that came with that. That's true if it's a tokenized security, like, is one of the products that that TX is is rolling out or if it's a tokenized interest in real estate or something else where there's a middle layer doing the work that's expected to generate profit for the the buyer. So that's what kinda changes it into a security or makes it a security.

**Ashley Ebersole** (4:14)

Yeah. Do do you find... What are the... When people are trying to wrap their heads around the legal frameworks or the security related frameworks of, like, building products and delivering products on chain, are you finding that it's like, you know, this is the same type of conversation that we would have if these things were off chain, and it's just like getting people up to speed on the law itself?

Or are there things that are very uniquely nuanced and, like, challenging because these things now exist on blockchains? Or is it just like same types of... Same same stuff? It's just, you know, we're actually overcomplicating it a little bit. I don't know that we're overcomplicating

**Zach Fowler** (4:57)

it necessarily because, you know, the technology doesn't change the nature of, you know, the regulatory treatment necessarily, but the technology from the industry side, from the purchaser side, from, frankly, the regulatory side does introduce a lot of new complexity that leads to the existing regulatory structure around assets like this because now you're taking the old way you were doing it.

What you're increasingly seeing, especially in, know, the tokenized asset market is it's slow moving in this development in terms of what larger institutions are doing because they're most comfortable under the frameworks they're used to, under traditional securities, under traditional derivatives, that kind of thing. And... Okay. So what's this new thing? Okay. So that's just an on chain representation of that. Okay. So pretty much the same. It's just it's now on chain.

There's some tech tech aspects to that that our tech folks need to be on top of, you know, from a regulatory discussion. It's not, you know, looked at different. But, you know, I do think that, again, that's the first wave of these, and that's what institutions are comfortable with in this sort of incipient phase. But going beyond that, I think, you know, you're going to see a broader acceptance of new types of products as the comfort level grows.

**Drew Rogers** (6:37)

Yeah. Can you... Thinking about the product side and what people are gonna be receiving, I'm looking at the TX website and seeing traders, issuers, developers. Can you talk about the... What... How TX is playing in this space? Like, what you're enabling for these different kind of buckets of potential users?

**Zach Fowler** (6:59)

So TX is an operating system, more or less, that connects regulated entities worldwide and the user base. So we don't... We're not a regulated entity. We don't directly perform any regulated functions purposely. We need to remember when name Parker's. So the regulated transaction is the tokenization when that occurs. In The United States, that's usually gonna be as a security, so you've gotta find either are you gonna register it, or is there an exemption you can set it within, you know, in terms of offering that.

And outside The United States, there are different mandates in the EU, in the, you know, Dubai, in Singapore, Southeast Asia, Asia generally. It sort of depends what geography you're in. But we're, again, just the rails connecting those entities. So the... What you're... I think you were pointing to is a solution for issuance because you'll be able to connect to regulated entity partners who can, again, you know, handle the issuance for you in whatever the relevant market is. Compliant distribution.

The fact that you've got regulated entities at both ends, at the issuance... On the issuance side, so the issuance is compliant. And then on the distribution side, so it's getting distributed to... Through a regulated entity, that's gonna be compliant with the mandates in the... Whatever the relevant jurisdiction is. And then secondary trading in, you know, whatever the market is is going to be executed again in compliance with with the local mandates and the mandates that

**Ashley Ebersole** (8:49)

may still be with the the asset from its from its issuance if it's in the same market. I love it. So it looks like the Go ahead. Go ahead. I was just gonna ask about the user experience here of, like, how this takes shape, and I was pulling this up. The... Like, walk us through a little bit of, like, what we're looking at here in the in the front end of, like, how the platform comes to life, and then what's actually happening under the hood when when someone's using this. Certainly. So it's...

**Zach Fowler** (9:19)

So, yeah, look, but you're... You pulled up the the example of a of a tokenized equity product on the website. The... We expect that most users are actually gonna come in through the app, but, you know, the... Yes. We're... This is a representation of what the functionality on the website would look like.

So what's going on when you're transacting in a tokenized equity is the user is, at the time of purchase, getting a token minted that they can hold in their wallet that says, I hold, you know, whatever number of shares of Amazon. You know, it's one of the companies there. And they'll either have one token that says that, or if it's one security per token set up, it'll be 10 tokens each, you know, representing one share.

And then in the background, that security is acquired and custodied at at the clearing broker level. So, again, it's, at this phase, still very much the familiar to those in the securities industry procedure of how securities are acquired. The difference on the front end now is you've got a tokenized representation of that that you can hold in your in your wallet. Tell us a bit about the, like,

**Ashley Ebersole** (10:42)

progress so far in the in the business. We're, like, a little over a year into building it, at least from my LinkedIn my my LinkedIn stocking, what year and three three months? What would you say, like, when you look back on the first year of the company and the the growth and progress that you've made? Like, what sticks out to you in terms of the most meaningful

**Zach Fowler** (11:05)

things that you guys have built or achieved in that in that time? I think what sticks out is, a, the institutional interest. A lot more conversations are being had now because there's a lot more interest on the institutional side. And, yes, I mean, to your point, Genius was passed in... You know, during this rollout. So I, you know, am am confident that that that had an effect on it. I think you're also seeing different levels of what people are conversing in from a technological point of view.

So, you know, at those institutions, at the issuer, you know, people are a lot more up to speed on how do these assets work, what are the important pain points to consider, and that kind of thing. So I think that there's a greater awareness just among the general public and and among the industry, certainly. And then on our end, yes, you know, we're... Things are in their final phase, and we are, you know, readying for... Readying them for for rollout.

As with serious tech development that has to adhere to regulatory requirements, things go not as fast as as would be... As you'd want them to necessarily, but they go at the speed they have to to ensure that all of the relevant requirements are met. What sort of pain

**Ashley Ebersole** (12:30)

specifically are you finding is, like, deepest? I was reading something this morning in my... The thing I probably shouldn't do when I wake up, and I, like, look at my phone and, like, open LinkedIn. It's, the worst. But I think in this part of my day so far, I was looking at some random post about sales and how to do sales effectively in, an enterprise context. And the way that this guy framed it was you don't... People, you know, sometimes buy vitamins, but people really buy aspirin. So sell sell aspirin.

Like, I think his point was like, sell pain relieving products. Don't sell, like, nice to have benefits. What is that, like, aspirin

**Zach Fowler** (13:21)

feeling for TX? Like, what is the pain? I think it's from a couple of different angles. I think on the user angle, you have the surveys that were done maybe about a year ago by the industry. Who's using crypto? Who's holding crypto tokens? What are the... What... For that cohort, you know, what is their financial road map generally? Do they have traditional security accounts to... Versus do they have crypto accounts, and they have both?

And what those found was that there is a cohort of of folks who are of a certain age that they came younger than I am, that they came of age in, you know, the most recent financial crisis. They saw banks failing and that kind of thing. And perhaps understandable, a sizable number of them. It's... You know, estimates go anywhere from 20 to to 40% hold or have crypto accounts, but do not have traditional brokerage accounts.

And for that cohort, having the tokenized representation of security when they decide, I've heard investing in the stock market, I think you're supposed to do. I wanna do that. If there's an option available to them to do that on chain, would you think they're more likely to do it that way versus I better go open a traditional brokerage account and and go through that. You know? I I don't know, but, you know, I do think that it's serving...

Having a tokenized representation of a traditional asset is serving the needs of that cohort.

**Drew Rogers** (15:06)

Then on... Sorry. Go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna say, I can imagine that the sort of two two big movements for the kind of millennial to Gen Z era of coming of age with the 2,008, but then also COVID playing a significant role Yeah. In kind of the all bets are off. Maybe we don't trust institutions. Maybe there's, like, less rules and less stability too.

And then being, of course, just digitally native, iPhone raised kind of young people, I think what you're pointing out about not necessarily going to traditional brokerage. And when they do, that these people might go to, like, a Robin Hood. They go to the more digitally native version. So that digital asset, tokenized equity adoption is not not as big a hump. It's not it's not some cat had to cross.

**Zach Fowler** (16:01)

For for that audience, no. I don't think so. I mean, I think as you... You know, if you're starting here with that group and you then get into the older cohorts, you know, I've I've often said, like, how... As you go up in the age groups, how likely is it that that person... You know, are are we gonna get a 60 year old, a 70 year old to get a set of a digital wallet and start transacting? May... Maybe.

Yet, I'm absolutely confident that there are folks who who who do do that, but I think the percentage is going to be lower to your point. Yeah. And in terms of volume, that's comfort.

**Drew Rogers** (16:42)

That's where a lot of the wealth sits. You know? It's not necessarily sitting with the the twenty five to thirty five year old crowd or the twenty to forty, whatever... Wherever we decide to draw those lines. Obviously, a lot of the larger volume of equities and assets is gonna be at that 50, 60, 70 year old generation, which will be transferred with time. But when you think about this, is it kind of like, we're not going to play to the Gen X or the boomer side.

We're just going to try to get the early adopters, and their wealth will grow over time? Or do you think TX and other players in this space will start to actually break in because maybe a six year old person who likes to invest says, actually, I like the tokenized version. I can trade them at any time, or there's some kind of way that they adopt. What do you think? Is there gonna be adoption for the older crowd too? Yeah. I I I think there will be, and I think it's going to have to do a lot with the user interfaces.

**Zach Fowler** (17:42)

And how much can you abstract away the complexity of on chain transacting from that user, you know, such that they... All they see is there's an asset I wanna buy. I see I'm able to buy it through a regulated platform, and, you know, I... They don't think twice about it. They don't... You know? I mean, if I'm clicking... Every user who's clicking buy in a traditional brokerage account doesn't necessarily understand everything that happens behind the scenes there in terms of how that's processed and settled.

And, you know, like, the same would be true for for a tokenized asset. So I I do think there will be adoption. I just think the, as you said, the initial adoption is probably gonna be by people who are more, for lack of a better term, natively comfortable because they're already transacting in in in the type of assets. Whereas, you know, it may take something like the older cohort seeing an asset they wanna buy and saying, I didn't even realize I could buy that through that platform. Maybe I should take a look.

And then, you know, they start to learn more, and they decide, you know, this does seem a bit more efficient. Like, I'm gonna I'm gonna give it a try.

**Drew Rogers** (19:03)

And I see you have a partnership with Kraken. I see a few other familiar names on the website, folks we've gotten to know on the show. Thinking about Kraken, XDocs, how exactly are you playing with a company like that, and how might that relate to other partnerships where you're enabling more adoption of this kind of thing? Kraken's a great company, and we're

**Zach Fowler** (19:23)

very, very happy to be to be partnered with them. We're not working with them on on end stops. You know, they're... I I think having the relationship is the important thing to us, and we are just at the beginning of it. And what we do with them ultimately is is an open question, you know, in terms of how much we do, how that relationship expands. But in the near term, yeah, I mean, they're... What they've done is, you know, as an early leader in this space is laudable. And we're...

Our our product looks a little bit different, but, you know, happy to happy to be in company with them. Absolutely. Will people interact with TX

**Drew Rogers** (20:10)

as a direct user, or will it more be... I I was thinking about what you're saying with user adoption, and there might be folks who are cracking or Robinhood or all these other platforms that are going to be adopting tokenized markets in general. I think that maybe you get the early crowd once Charles Schwab is offering all the tokenized securities you can ask for. Right? But where will TX play? Will it be a more infrastructural layer, or will it be a direct to consumer interaction

**Ashley Ebersole** (20:41)

if you're trying to get involved in this tokenized side. Popping this up too as we kind of think through this, like, the stack here might be fun to break down a little bit. Yeah. And so I think,

**Zach Fowler** (20:53)

you know, to to Zach's question, subject... Yeah. To just to Zach's question, I think that we are both a platform where people can come in and find that regulated entity through which to to transact, but we're also gonna be rolling out an API. So there there will be functionality from the back end to... For a more traditional institution that may be more familiar to a user cohort to provide trading in these assets that is... The back end is actually connected by the infrastructure that we provide.

But, again, from the front end, it just looks like the usual web, you know, web based or app based interaction that that user base is is most comfortable with. So it it will be from both sides.

**Drew Rogers** (21:47)

Love it. And then, Drew, what were you driving at with that with that stack?

**Ashley Ebersole** (21:51)

Yeah. I just wanted to see if there was anything... For me, visuals like this are really helpful in terms of, like, mentally forming where certain folks sit. So for you, when you... When you're thinking about TX, should we just be thinking about this kind of base layer here, or are you gonna be... And everything else above it is like partners? Or how how should we be thinking about this specific graph or visual? I think you are thinking about TX

**Zach Fowler** (22:20)

primarily at at the layer one level. And... But let me start with that. So the TX chain was built for RWA tokenization. And, you know, that sounds cliched, and that's a great buzzword, you know, slogan to throw out. But what that actually means is tokens issued on the TX chain are smart tokens, which means they're actually programmable in of themselves. So on other layer ones, you may have transfer restrictions, holder restrictions, and that kind of thing that are enforced at the smart contract level.

But with TX Chain, those can actually be enforced at the token level. So the token itself has, you know, programmed into it, cannot be held in these blacklisted wallets. You know, some of this does require an interaction with an Oracle to enforce it, but... You know, or cannot be held in these jurisdictions, cannot be held by someone not on this white listed roster of users, you know, that kind of thing.

So you've got functionality to play around with that enables compliance on chain in a way that we think is is unique.

**Ashley Ebersole** (23:45)

It's awesome. Ashley, as we close here, anything that we've missed in terms of key callouts, highlights for the business? And also just as you think about the rest of year, like top of mind things that you guys are trying to achieve over there maybe before we we catch up next. Sure. The... I I think what we're trying to achieve is to get launched, to get everyone comfortable with

**Zach Fowler** (24:12)

our technology, to meet all of our current and and and new users and have them using the the products and connecting with our network of regulated entities. I do think that where the overall industry is, you know, everyone's talking about Clarity Edge, and is it gonna happen? Is it not gonna happen? I think the important thing to realize when you look at at the landscape is that tokenization is advancing regardless of Clarity Act. Clarity Act doesn't do a ton in terms of asset tokenization.

And you've seen, you know, new initiatives from DTCC, NASDAQ, major banks, and asset managers. You're seeing new people of note saying each day that, you know, every financial institution kind of needs to have a strategy for how it's gonna interact with with these assets, and it's becoming increasingly important as table stakes thing in the financial industry. And that is true regardless of what happened in... With Clarity Act.

Clarity Act's important, broadly speaking, but it's not necessary to continue the trajectory of of tokenization on chain. Awesome. Feels good to hear that as we're still,

**Ashley Ebersole** (25:33)

you know, waiting for for clarity in in many different meanings.

**Drew Rogers** (25:37)

Zach, are gonna say something? Yeah. I was just gonna say, maybe as a last thought, if you are a builder in this space, a founder, an operator here, it sound... Sounds like you're saying, keep innovating. Keep going forward. You know? These... The wave will come and the regulation will also come, but it's not slowing down. Is there anything that you think builders, founders, operators in this space need to keep in mind or need to be preparing for from a regulatory compliance legal aspect?

**Zach Fowler** (26:06)

I think it's important to realize that we are in a good time for this industry right now. You have a very technologically savvy SEC leadership and CFTC leadership that wants to work with this industry, which is diametrically different from some past SECs, which, you know, I I thought that the industry could be ignored and it would go away or, you know, whatever it was. The work wasn't done in the past to really lay down rules for these assets and and the entities functioning in this in this space.

The work's being done now by these agencies. And so I would say, you know, both realize the moment you're in, develop, you know, everything you can now, start to move quickly anyways. So I don't know that that'll be something new. But, also, make your voice heard because these agencies, SEC, CFTC, and others, you know, want to engage with industry. That's how learning happens. That's how good law is made.

And, you know, we we just need to keep that up because we have avenues to to engage that weren't previously open to us. Love it.

**Ashley Ebersole** (27:30)

Ashley, thanks for the time. Good to see you again.

**Zach Fowler** (27:33)

Great to see you guys. Thanks so much, Drew and Zach, and look forward to seeing you again soon. See you soon.