In August this year there was an unusual merger announcement when TruGolf Holdings, a Nasdaq-listed golf simulation company, said in a statement that it was acquiring Polymath Research, a privately-held Canadian technology company focused on blockchain and tokenization. Polymath will become one of the first Layer-1 blockchain companies in the public markets, making institutional-grade tokenization accessible to the financial industry at scale, according to the statement. A Layer-1 blockchain, such as bitcoin and ethereum, confirms and executes transactions.

Natalie Hirsch, chief financial officer at Polymath, will become chief financial officer and chief operating officer of the combined company following closing. She discusses the rationale behind the deal and trends in tokenization.

How would you describe Polymath? 

Polymath is a blockchain-first company built around real-world asset tokenization. We started in 2017, so we’re nine years in now. At the time, none of the existing layer 1s had the compliance and protocol-level design we needed to make adoption workable further downstream, for institutions. So we built our own. That became Polymesh, our layer 1, which launched in 2020/2021, alongside our utility token, POLYX. The business today covers software on both sides of an offering, for issuers bringing assets on chain and for the investors buying them. We’re currently undergoing a reverse takeover merger with TruGolf, which we expect to close in the next few weeks.

What differentiates Polymesh from other institutional-grade blockchains designed for regulated assets?

We built our own layer 1 blockchain, purpose-built for institutions and compliance. We aren’t Ethereum-based and we don’t lean on smart contracts to handle that work. We redesigned the whole thing from the ground up and built the compliance attributes directly into the protocol level. It’s a completely different design system.

Why does it make sense for Polymath to combine with a golf simulation company?

That’s the pink elephant in every room, and the honest answer is simple: we’re both technology companies.

TruGolf is a software business at heart. It came out of Microsoft and Xbox software development teams, and its thesis is that golf was built for reinvention, because so many people can’t access the game or spend the prices it costs to play outdoors. They’ve built simulators that have scaled quite a bit, made around $20m in revenue last year with a similar forecast for this year, in a market projected to grow roughly 3x over the next few years as players move indoors.

We’re doing the same thing in our own space, reinventing tokenization and blockchain infrastructure. Two technology companies innovating in otherwise saturated industries. The stories have genuinely synergistic elements.

There’s a practical layer to it as well. We recently posted our investor deck, which sets out the consolidated vision for the combined company. One of the things we discuss there is using our tokenization platform to bring TruGolf’s golf courses and franchise operations on chain, so blockchain runs through their business model too.

What do you see as the major trends in tokenization?

For a while, the assumption was that decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and DeFi exchanges would reinvent finance outright and everything would end up completely decentralized. The thinking has moved on. What’s interesting now is bridging the two worlds and bringing elements of blockchain infrastructure into traditional finance. Fix the plumbing rather than rebuilding from scratch: settlement, custody, the pieces that are better served by blockchain tools.

Within real-world assets specifically, a lot of people fixate on tokenizing traditional financial instruments, equities in particular. I understand the appeal, since those come with built-in liquidity and distribution. The opportunity I find more compelling is taking genuinely intangible assets and finding a way to bring liquidity to new asset classes.

Are you seeing more institutional interest in tokenization?

Without question. You sit down with Citi or JPMorgan and they’re running pilot programs of their own, working out how to be on the map and how to apply the technology across a variety of asset classes. Securitize breaking into the space with its IPO in July set the stage for a lot of us to follow.

Institutions are seriously looking at the thesis of tokenization and how it serves their particular business model, and everyone is chiming in. You hear it in day-to-day conversations, and you see it in investment banks, in the way people traditionally manage deal flow and are now looking to reinvent that on blockchain.

What advice would you give to women who want to work in finance?

Stay focused and don’t get distracted by the noise. Blockchain and crypto more generally tend to be very broey cultures, and there’s a lot of hype in this industry. Find your niche, find a company building a product you believe in, and ignore the rest of it. Stay true to yourself and the rest will come.

How do you relax outside work?

Travel, mostly. A lot of it is business mixed with personal, like a trip to Europe I have coming up. Beyond that, staying grounded with friends and family.