Matt Hougan
On Unchained
“Committees exist to say no. That's their job, right? And they're not seeing any upside to being a pioneer in this space. They can identify a downside, which is something funky happens on pricing, people get upset… They can't identify an upside, and it's costless for them to opt out, because there will be other pioneers that do the dirty work.”
Unchained · Crypto & Web3 · November 2026
Context
Shin asked why a few dozen public companies have opted out of having their stock trade in tokenized form. Hougan said it is not surprising given how corporate decision-making works, and that he does not think it matters over the long term.
Transcript
…market at some point in the future absolutely do we monitor developer forums to see how the discussions are emerging in that space absolutely is it like a nine alarm fire at this point no from a allocator's perspective but is it a like is there some smoke that we monitor yeah definitely for sure
…that it would cause so much controversy in 2026 you know we're seeing all these public companies a few dozen now who've already rejected the opportunity for their stock to trade tokenized at least for the time being i guess they could change their minds but what's your take on why this is happening
well yeah in that case the reason is that committees exist to say no that's their job right and they're not seeing any upside to being a pioneer in this space on the u.s exchange they they can they can identify a downside which is something funky happens on pricing people get upset their lawsuits they can't identify an upside and it's costless for them to opt out right because there will be other pioneers that sort of do the dirty work um so i think that that's all that's going on you can imagine being in that board meeting when the topic comes up and someone says what if this happens and then they say well we'll just let other people go ahead so i'm actually not that surprised given they were given so much sort of time space to think about it that they've just decided to opt out long term i don't think it matters i actually think like we in the u.s are overly focused on tokenized stocks replacing our schwab account which i don't think how is how this happens laura i think with any disruptive technology it gets adopted for people who don't have a good solution at all right now the people who don't have a good solution at all…
yeah i mean i it's sort of like you know just a very natural human phenomenon of people not wanting to be the first on the dance floor so hopefully after trading starts like we'll see more of them come online I don't think anybody disagrees that it's a superior technology. It's really more about…
Yeah. Well, first of all, kudos to the Avalanche team. They're one of the hardest working teams in crypto, relentlessly business focused. And it's wonderful to see them get that win. They've had a number of wins recently. So we're very sort of pleased with their progress there. So I think that's…
And out of curiosity, how do you think this deal between NYC and Avalanche will affect the Avax token?
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