Allen Konevsky, Chairman and Chief Executive of tZERO Group, one of only two firms to hold a special purpose broker-dealer licence from the US Securities and Exchange Commission, has said he has a long-term bias toward tokens that function as infrastructure ingredients rather than stores of value, singling out $XRP and Ether as assets better suited to the future of tokenized capital markets than Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Versus $XRP Question
Asked directly to choose between Bitcoin and $XRP, Konevsky said the question is one he gets in various forms regularly, and that his answer consistently comes back to the same underlying principle.
“I have a long-term bias for native tokens that support infrastructure needs, that can be used as oil, as ingredients to build tool sets on,” he said. “Bitcoin historically has not shown itself to be that.”
His argument is that assets like $XRP or Ether carry structural advantages for market participants building financial infrastructure because they are functional components of the systems they power. Bitcoin, by contrast, has established itself primarily as a monetary asset and store of value rather than an operational ingredient in financial architecture.
Konevsky acknowledged the answer would generate pushback, noting he expected considerable criticism, but maintained that for the specific context of building tokenized market structure, the distinction matters significantly.
AI and Blockchain as Complementary Forces
Konevsky described artificial intelligence and blockchain as complementary rather than competing technologies, and said the machine-to-machine economy emerging from AI will act as a forcing function for the tokenization of financial assets and records.
The logic is that as AI agents conduct autonomous transactions at scale, the need for efficient, programmable value transfer between those agents will create structural demand for tokenized assets and the infrastructure supporting them.
Real Estate as the Most Underrated Tokenization Opportunity
Asked to name the most underrated asset class for tokenization, Konevsky pointed to real estate without hesitation. Despite years of discussion, real estate tokenization has not achieved meaningful scale, and he attributed the shortfall largely to regulatory complexity around the securitization process for single-asset properties.
He said tZERO has discussed with the SEC the need to simplify the process of fractionalizing and tokenizing individual real estate assets, arguing that lowering those barriers would create the kind of user experience that would drive real adoption.
Regulatory Change He Would Make
Konevsky said his priority regulatory change would be to push further down the path of breaking down silos among regulated entities, a principle he said is built into the structure of the CLARITY Act.
“There is no reason why a regulated broker-dealer should not be allowed to do more with crypto,” he said.
tZERO holds a significant head start in that area, having been one of two firms to receive the special purpose broker-dealer designation that allows it to custody and accept crypto assets including stablecoins as part of the securities settlement process. But Konevsky argued that even that framework remains too restrictive, and that broker-dealers should be permitted to offer crypto directly as an investment product to clients with appropriate guardrails rather than operating within the current siloed structure.
