Author: Jack Keating, CEO of Webull Tech US & Head of Institutional

1. “I’m excited—and a little bored”

Hello. I’m here today to talk to you about the future of digital investing and trading.  To paint a picture of what brokerage is going to look like as the age of tokenization and agentic trading progresses.

My name is Jack Keating.  I am the CEO of Webull Technologies Inc.  I lead Webull’s Institutional Business and our AI Strategy.  Webull is a fintech, broker dealer with over 40 million global users, regulatory approval to operate in over 30 markets, and offering investing into equities, options, futures, prediction markets, and digital assets to retail and institutional investors.

I’m extremely excited to talk to you today.

I’m also a little bored.

At a tokenization conference we are going to spend a lot of time talking about infrastructure and technology.

Blockchains, protocols, layers, smart contracts, Distributed Ledger Technology.  Bitcoin, blockchain, and tokenization are great inventions.  And we need to make sure we don’t fall prey to obsessing over product and failing to find market fit.  Therefore, this talk has two sides.

The awesome side.  What becomes possible with tokenization: global access, instant ownership, 24/7 markets, reduced counterparty credit risk, and AI agents trading around the clock.

The boring side.  The machinery under the hood: protocols, wallets, chains, and settlement rails.

As we wade into this new age, both will matter.

To set the backdrop.  Modern brokerage is being impacted by three powerful forces that will eventually rebuild digital investing:

1. tokenization changes what we invest in;

2. AI and agents change how decisions are made; and

3. open, trusted infrastructure changes how the ecosystem connects.

The future of investing is global access to programmable assets, managed by intelligent agents, operating across open and trusted infrastructure.

The Awesome Part

2. We have seen this movie before: information went digital

I studied Philosophy at Boston College .... Go Eagles...  and can’t help getting a bit metaphysical.

For thousands of years, information was stored in physical form.

Forty thousand years ago, men drew on cave walls.

Thirteen hundred years ago, Irish monks sat by candlelight painstakingly copying the Bible one page at a time.

While the printing press allowed for information to be reproduced and distributed at scale, a physical component remained.

Then ... the internet.  The Information Age.  Digital information allowed for distribution:

• Instant

• Global

• Free

The consequence of that change has been felt in every aspect of life.

One key concept is that in the Information Age, information shared on the Internet is authentic.  It is as good as the real thing.  In fact, it often is the real thing.

The internet did something extraordinary: it separated information from the physical object that historically carried it.

A brief history of brokerage:

The history of modern brokerage is shorter.

We moved from paper tickets and phone-based trading, to desktop platforms, to the web, to mobile, to social investing, and on to open APIs.

Each era removed friction, reduced costs, and widened access.

Today, the era of tokenization and agentic trading is upon us.

With the internet, we digitized information.  We also democratized access to investment services.

“Tokenization is doing something similar for value.”

Money, securities, funds, Treasuries, real estate, private companies and other ownership rights can increasingly be represented, transferred, fractionalized, and programmed as digital assets. This is not merely a digital certificate. It is the beginning of a new ownership layer.

The fundamental property rights shift of holding the IOU to holding the thing itself.

“Information moved onto the internet. Now value is moving onto digital networks.”

3. Tokenization changes the properties of ownership

So, why should we do it?  What is so great about tokenization ?

For brokerage, tokenization presents an opportunity to upgrade the financial rails. 

Brokerage back offices have been tortured by legacy protocols.  ACATs.  ACH. DWAC. Wires. DRS. NACHA. 2 Day Settlement.  The list is long.  Tokenization is an opportunity to upgrade to an entirely new infrastructure.

Digital investing on tokenized infrastructure introduces five defining properties:

a. global access,

b. instant settlement,

c. 24/7 availability,

d. native fractionalization and

e. programmable ownership.

Portability is an important consequence of this new ownership layer, but the central point is that tokenization does not simply improve the wrapper around an asset—it changes the properties of the market itself.

Let’s walk through each one.

A. Global

Someone living in a mature market generally has access to:

• Regulated brokerage accounts

• Stable banking infrastructure

• Public markets

• Government bonds

• Funds

• Sophisticated custody infrastructure

Someone elsewhere may live in a country with:

• Little or no brokerage infrastructure

• Weak capital markets

• Limited investment products

• Currency instability or hyperinflation

• Restrictions on global investments

• A financial system they may not fully trust

Today, geography often determines financial opportunities.

Further, the types of products available to investors remain constrained by lines on a map.  Investing in a foreign security often comes with rigid, region-specific requirements.  Data privacy, custody, etc.

Alignment around tokenized financial infrastructure can dramatically reduce some of those distribution barriers.

Tokenization is a path to a single, global financial infrastructure. 

Imagine a single account where an investor -- or maybe their agent -- can swiftly move across asset classes and geographies: selling USDC, buying Bitcoin, borrowing against Apple stock, recalling assets from a DEFI yield product, liquidating a real estate token, buying an STO-interest in Samsung, all through a single account.

In the future, a person with a smartphone will be able to interact with markets without having to navigate the nightmarish user experience of a dozen accounts, transfer delays, and high costs.

We have already seen how blockchain-based finance can open markets where traditional financial infrastructure was limited. In countries such as Nigeria, a smartphone became an entry point into digital assets and blockchain-based financial services. The larger lesson is not that every investor should use crypto. It is that when the local rails are incomplete, people will be quick to adopt a new rail if it gives them access, portability and greater control.

“The internet democratized access to information. Tokenization has the potential to democratize access to ownership.”

That does not mean regulation disappears. Securities laws, investor protections, sanctions, identity requirements and jurisdictional rules still matter. Technology can remove technological borders much faster than governments remove regulatory ones.

Direct token distribution can initially serve as a shortcut, but the scalable model ultimately has to coexist with regulation.

B. Instant Settlement

Today, trade execution, matching, confirmation, settlement, and final transfer of ownership are distinct processes.  Significant resources are required within brokers, exchanges, clearinghouses, and other market participants to reconcile those books.

DKs. Multi-day settlement periods.  3-5 days for an ACH to move cash from one account to another.

Much of market infrastructure exists because these key processes occur separately.  As we shift toward 24 x7 it becomes more challenging to compress the old processes running on old infrastructure into tighter schedules.

Some of the best businesses are middle men. Connecting buyers and sellers. Delivering liquidity.  While the best technology often disintermediates a system.  Tokenization offers both.

For financial transactions, blockchain makes another architecture possible:

Transaction + payment + transfer of property = one event.

That means potentially:

• Instant ownership

• Instant payment

• Less counterparty exposure

• Less settlement credit risk

• Less reconciliation

• Less capital trapped between institutions

“Today we trade at internet speed but settle through infrastructure designed for another era.”

Tokenization can be the unlock to close that gap.

C. Markets become 24/7

Traditional market hours are largely a function of legacy market structure.

The internet doesn't close at 4 p.m.

Blockchain doesn't go home for the weekend.

And an investor in Seoul shouldn't necessarily have to organize their financial life around New York's working day.

A lot of people are hanging the killer use case on 24/7.

TradFi markets, including BRUCE and BOATS, have already delivered overnight access to US equities.  Just yesterday, BRUCE , announced plans for 24 by 7 trading.

“Global markets ultimately want global market hours. Tokenization is one path to round the clock trading.”

D. Fractionalization becomes the default

Traditional finance asks:  “Can we fractionalize this asset?”

Tokenization may invert the question: “Why wouldn't this asset be fractional?”

A million-dollar asset can be divided into thousands or millions of economic units.

That matters enormously for:

• Private companies

• Real estate

• Private credit

• Funds

• Infrastructure

• Alternative assets

Fractionalization + global distribution is particularly powerful.

It simultaneously reduces the minimum investment and increases the potential investor population.

E. Ownership becomes programmable

Smart contracts can potentially embed rules into the asset:

• Dividends

• Interest

• Voting

• Vesting

• Transfer restrictions

• Eligibility

• Collateral

• Corporate actions

• Revenue sharing

“The breakthrough here is that ownership becomes programmable.”

Through the tokenization software upgrade, we unlock:

1. global access,

2. instant settlement,

3. 24/7 availability,

4. native fractionalization and

5. programmable ownership. 

“Put those characteristics together and we aren't simply improving today's securities market. We are starting to create a different kind of market.”

Part II — AI: When Programmable Assets Meet Intelligent Agents

4. The investor is becoming digital too

“There is another transformation happening at exactly the same time. Assets are becoming programmable—and investors are gaining intelligent agents.”

The next forum of battle in the retail broker war is happening within API and agentic trading.  Investors and traders will spend less time in point and click trading interfaces and rely more on agents.

AI has evolved rapidly.

Information → Intelligence → Agency

First:  “What happened to this stock today?”

Then: “What does this mean for my portfolio?”

Next: “Manage my portfolio within these rules.”

That is the leap from AI assistant to AI agent.

“Maintain six months of liquidity. Keep my risk moderate. Don't let any position exceed 10%. Minimize unnecessary taxes. Give me diversified exposure to global growth. And notify me before making anything outside these parameters.”

The agent can:

monitor → analyze → recommend → execute → rebalance → manage risk.

“Today investors operate software. Tomorrow investors will increasingly manage agents that operate software for them.”

5. Tokenization + AI is where this gets really interesting

The intersection of tokenization and AI is where sparks start to fly.

AI agents:

• Don't sleep

• Don't care what time zone they're in

• Can process enormous amounts of information

• Can continuously monitor portfolios

Tokenized assets:

• Can span global markets

• Trade 24/7

• Settle immediately

• Can be fractional

• Can be programmable

These changes will not simply automate the way markets operate today. Intelligent agents can increase trading volume, autonomously move across asset classes, optimize for tax, or rebalance portfolios continuously. That means more decisions, more transactions, and more interaction among markets that historically operated on separate schedules and systems.

Pairing tokenization and agentic trading.  Imagine an agent continuously allocating capital among:

• public equities, Treasuries, private assets, tokenized funds, commodities, cash, crypto and other instruments.

“A portfolio stops being a static collection of securities that a human periodically reviews. It becomes a continuously operating financial system.”

Part III — The “Boring Talk”

6. Users don't care about blockchain

“This is the boring slide.”

Engineers care deeply about these things.  They should.  The people building the infrastructure need to care passionately about protocols.

Operators, they care less, but are still interested.

Users, clients, consumers?  Traders?  “They don't care.”

Management cares.  Because the entire financial services industry is built on trust.

Almost nobody wakes up and says:  “I can't wait to use TCP/IP today.”

They say: “I want to watch Netflix.”

Or: “I want to send someone a message.”

Or: “I want to buy something.”

The internet became widely adopted when the technology disappeared behind the experience.

Blockchain will likely be similar.  People don't fundamentally want a tokenized security.  What they want is:

• Better access

• Lower costs

• Faster settlement

• More investment choices

• Global markets

• Better liquidity

• Easier movement of their assets

The winning blockchain experience may eventually be the one where the customer doesn't even know—or care—that they are using blockchain.

7. The third pillar: Trust + interoperability

The third critical element isn't another technology. It's trusted, open financial infrastructure.

Tokenization gives us programmable assets.

AI gives us intelligent agents.

But neither achieves its full potential if everything lives inside isolated walled gardens.

The future needs:

• Open APIs

• Interoperable assets

• Portable identity

• Permission systems for AI agents

• Regulated custody

• Global connectivity

• Investor protection

This is also where traditional financial institutions continue to matter.

Blockchain can replace or compress certain functions.

It does not eliminate the fundamental needs for: identity, trust, compliance, risk management, custody and market integrity.

Brokerage continues to evolve:

1. Brokerage 1.0: Execute my trade.

2. Brokerage 2.0: Give me a great digital investing app.

3. Brokerage 3.0: Connect me—and my agents—to the global financial system.

“The broker of the future isn't simply an execution venue. It becomes a financial operating system.”

While we are on the topic of trust, I want to emphasize the importance in this new technology.  We all witnessed the missteps taken by the crypto industry.

No one takes advantage of a crisis like a regulator.  Should these private tokenization projects go the way of Celsius Lending Protocol, government and regulators will leverage the opportunity to centralize.

As stewards of fintech, there is an onus on us to not let greed overtake our reason. 

8. Closing: From Brokerage to Blockchain

1300 hundred years ago, information was copied by hand.

The internet made information instant and global.

Looking ahead:

Tokenization changes the assets. 
Global. Instant. Fractional. 24/7. Programmable.

AI changes how investment decisions are made.  From clicking buttons to managing intelligent agents.

Open, trusted infrastructure connects the two. Allowing people, agents, assets and markets to interact globally.

Picture an investor in the near future:

"Protect my family. Maintain sufficient liquidity. Grow my wealth over the next 20 years. Give me access to the best opportunities globally. Manage my risk.”

The investor doesn't need to understand the blockchain. They don't need to understand the API. They don't need to understand the settlement architecture.

They care about the outcome.

To Conclude

The internet made information global, instant and abundant. Blockchain can do something similar for ownership. AI can make that ownership intelligent. And together they may transform investing from a collection of transactions into a global, autonomous financial system.

That is the journey from brokerage to blockchain.

Disclaimers:

Webull Financial LLC, Member SIPC, FINRA. Investing involves risk. More info at www.webull.com/policy.

The Webull OpenAPI and MCP Server are provided "as is" without warranty of any kind and do not constitute investment advice. All trading involves a substantial risk of loss. By utilizing these tools, you acknowledge that Al-driven agents may misinterpret instructions, act on delayed data, or perform poorly under certain market conditions. Webull assumes no liability for losses resulting from automated or Al-directed decisions. You are solely responsible for verifying all order details prior to execution, actively monitoring your positions, and ensuring that any connected agents, algorithms, or tools operate exactly as intended.