New York – WisdomTree’s crypto business is no longer an experiment but is central to the company’s strategy and is on the verge of becoming profitable, CEO Jonathan Steinberg said Tuesday in a fireside chat at the Ondo Summit in New York.
“We want to keep climbing,” Steinberg said. “Last year, we went from about $30 million in assets to about $750 million in assets,” adding that the company is not currently making money from its digital asset efforts, but is “looking to take this into a profitable business.”
The company, with $150 billion in assets under management, has been investing heavily in blockchain infrastructure, launching tokenized funds and expanding into new chains like Solana. . Steinberg said the effort is driven by long-term conviction. “It’s still early, but it’s no longer an experiment. We have conviction. So we believe that over time everything will follow.”
It’s not hard to see why WisdomTree has been moving forward with digital assets. More recently, during its earnings presentation, it said that its total tokenized WisdomTree AUM grew to $770 million, 25x more than in 2024.
WisdomTree has taken an early and aggressive lead among traditional asset managers in digital assets, launching a suite of tokenized funds and recently expanding distribution through WisdomTree Connect, which allows those assets to move across self-custodied wallets and institutional platforms.
The company also made a strategic bet on blockchain infrastructure by acquiring Securrency, a compliance-focused tokenization company, which it later sold to DTCC. Steinberg said that move was a critical step in enabling “compliance-aware tokens” and programmable finance, helping WisdomTree build a long-term interoperable digital asset strategy.
For Steinberg, cryptocurrencies represent more than a product opportunity: it is a new financial infrastructure. “This is actually bigger than asset management. This is really about financial services,” he said. “Financial services – some of these banks go back a couple of centuries. So they were built on legacy, on legacy, on legacy. There is that modernization that has to happen.”
As for WisdomTree’s ambitions? “We just want to continue to expand what we’re doing,” Steinberg said.
