Jonathan Steinberg, founder and chief executive of WisdomTree, said the U.S. asset manager is not currently making money from its digital asset efforts, but is ‘in line of sight’ of taking the business into profitability.

Steinberg spoke at the Ondo Summit in New York on 3 February 2026 and said tokenization is in its early days, but it is no longer an experiment.

“We believe everything will eventually go onchain,” he added. “You are seeing tokenization go beyond the crypto-native community to traditional finance (tradFi) firms like us.”

WisdomTree is well-known for being an innovative issuer of exchange-traded funds. Steinberg said that about eight years ago the asset manager started asking itself what could be the next development with the same impact as ETFs. He argued that ETF growth was driven by the funds providing better functionality and the firm concluded that tokenizing funds on a blockchain had the same potential. For example, tokenized funds can be accessed 24/7 or potentially be used as collateral.

“ETFs provide the least friction on the old rails,” he said. “We needed to make tokenization better than the best in the world today so we went big every step of the way.”

In January 2020 WisdomTree made a strategic investment in Securrency, a developer of institutional-grade blockchain-based financial and regulatory technology, to pursue the integration of blockchain technology into the ETF ecosystem. Securrency was subsequently acquired by DTCC, the U.S. post-trade market infrastructure in 2023.

“Tokenization, a digital wrapper, has functionality that is potentially much greater than the ETFs,” Steinberg said. “Once we saw that, we went all in and it served us well.”

WisdomTree launched its digital fund WTGXX, a 1940 Act–registered government money market fund, in 2023 and has since added 14 tokenized funds.  Last December the asset manager launched the WisdomTree Equity Premium Income Digital Fund available to both retail and institutional investors via the WisdomTree Prime and WisdomTree Connect platforms respectively. The platforms offer access to real world asset exposures in regulated structures without having to operate offchain.

Steinberg added: “When I think about my journey in ETFs, I launched in June 2006 but was 13 years behind the State Street  and seven years behind iShares. For WisdomTree it was important that we were first through the regulatory door.”

Steinberg said WisdomTree wants to continue to scale the digital asset business and that it is important to gain customers. He added that in 2025 WisdomTree’s digital assets grew from $30m to about $750m.

In its full-year results for 2025 WisdomTree reported record assets under management for the group and said it had strong organic growth in each of the U.S., Europe, and digital assets business lines.

Jarrett Lilien, chief operating officer and president at WisdomTree, said in a statement that the firm closed 2025 with strong momentum, delivering $8.5bn in net inflows, approximately 8% organic growth, and meaningful margin expansion.

“Model portfolios and separately managed accounts (SMAs) continue to be a major growth engine, with model AUA surpassing $6bn as adoption deepens across our client base,” added Lilien. “Combined with continued strength in ETFs and early traction in digital assets and private markets, we enter 2026 well positioned for sustained growth.”

Galaxy Digital

On 3 February 2025 Galaxy Digital, the digital asset fund manager, said in its 2025 results that it made a full year net loss of $241m due to lower digital asset prices and approximately $160m of one-time costs during the year.

However Galaxy said its global markets business elivered record trading adjusted gross profit, volumes, loan book size and advisory fees, including execution of one of the largest notional bitcoin transactions in history.

In addition, total assets ended the year at $12bn, with $2bn of net inflows in the asset management business, representing 34% organic growth.

Laser Digital

Nomura Holdings reported in its fiscal third quarter results in January that losses in its crypto business, Laser Digital, contributed to the Japanese financial group’s company’s 9.7% decline in profit, according to Bloomberg.

Bloomberg reported that Hiroyuki Moriuchi, chief executive of Nomura, said on the results call that the company has put stricter position management in place due to the volatility in crypto market prices.