DWS CEO Stefan Hoops doubled down on his firm’s ambitions in the digital asset space with plans to launch 'digital twin’ funds accessible to clients with digital wallets as well as ‘striving to issue’ a euro stablecoin.
At the firm’s annual general meeting (AGM), Hoops (pictured) said “the time has come” for trusted participants to offer blockchain-based products such as tokens and crypto.
“We are convinced that the time has come for trusted, regulated market participants to offer services on the blockchain,” he said. “That is why we are working, for example, on bringing so-called ‘digital twins’ to the market, which make existing funds investable for clients with digital wallets.
“We are striving to issue a euro stablecoin, i.e. a digital currency that is backed one-to-one by the euro,” he continued. “In the medium term, our vision is to become a ‘tokeniser’ ourselves – to be able to bring real and virtual assets onto the blockchain.
“We consider this additional service relevant because we believe that more and more assets will be mapped on the blockchain in the future.”
These plans follow DWS’s strategic alliance with crypto asset manager Galaxy Digital at the end of April.
“The aim of this alliance is to develop digital asset management solutions in Europe,” Hoops continued. “Together, we want to drive the development of ETPs – exchange-traded products – on certain digital assets such as cryptocurrencies in Europe in the future.”
Earlier in the month, Hoops said “the majority of crypto coins are between worthless and fraudulent” but added tokenised assets could be transformative.
Keshava Shastry, global head of capital markets at DWS, previously told ETF Stream: “Baby steps are being taken to understand the implications and tokenising ETFs is one of the easiest ways to do it because it is already a listed security, already quite efficient and trades at a different time to the underlying.
“Tokenisation is just pushing the boundaries to the next step and making it more operationally efficient because it is T+0 settlement and 24/7 trading."
