My name is Alex Thorn, and I am Head of Firmwide Research at Galaxy Digital. Galaxy is a digital-assets and data-center firm serving institutions through trading, asset management, and high-performance compute for AI. We are publicly traded on Nasdaq as GLXY, and as of August 2025, we became the first Nasdaq-listed company to tokenize our stock on a public blockchain. Today, shareholders can convert traditional shares into tokenized versions on the Solana blockchain—natively issued by us, not wrapped in SPVs or synthetic structures. Many tokenization models will emerge, but we believe that only issuer-originated tokenization reflects true public company equity on a blockchain. That is the standard we are advancing with tokenized GLXY. Public, permissionless blockchains are not speculative toys; they are infrastructure. They deliver transparency, predictability, censorship-resistance, and global access at a scale no centralized system can match. Millions of Americans already rely on Bitcoin to preserve and transmit value through these properties. The same technology can materially improve how public equities are issued, traded, and settled. We believe that enabling public equities to function inside decentralized finance applications will be the most consequential capital-markets innovation in the last twenty years. Why? Because decentralized systems provide what investors and regulators have always sought: transparent rules, neutral execution, lower costs, and fairer access. Tokenized securities could broaden investor participation, compress fees, accelerate settlement, and strengthen capital formation. Will every benefit materialize immediately? No. But we must have the freedom to learn empirically what works. That is why we commend the Commission, and Chairman Atkins specifically, for considering innovation exemptions that allow responsible exploration before formal rules are written. Markets cannot innovate under total prohibition, but we also need more information about how this technology may be used before comprehensive rules can be written. Let me be clear: we are not advocating for a future without rules. Participants in issuance, trading, and settlement may need to meet existing obligations or new ones. But many of our rules were drafted with an unspoken assumption: investors cannot transact without intermediaries. Public blockchains fundamentally challenge that assumption. Today, there exist decentralized systems that operate autonomously, without a controlling group, and whose transparency prevents theft, favoritism, market disruption, or hidden fees. They embody principles that regulators have spent decades trying to enforce through oversight alone. Predictably, not everyone welcomes this progress. Some entrenched intermediaries are fighting to preserve regulatory moats under the banner of “investor protection.” In practice, they are protecting their margins, not investors. Some have even proposed that software developers should register with the Commission—a notion that is not only unworkable but also un-American. You will hear supporters of the status quo call for years-long rulemaking, for applying outdated frameworks to systems they were never designed for, or for procedural hurdles meant only to delay competition. This is not about investor safety; it's about incumbents shielding themselves from innovation. Galaxy believes in responsible innovation because it has always strengthened American markets. The United States leads global finance precisely because we have embraced technological change rather than feared it. No one in this room wants to undermine market integrity and investor protection; we seek to enhance it with tools that deliver better transparency, better resilience, and better outcomes for investors. Chair Atkins recently invoked the 1960s “Paperwork Crisis.” Back then, markets were expanding faster than infrastructure could support. Brokers lost certificates, failures skyrocketed, and exchanges had to close early to reconcile their books. A quarter of brokers went out of business. That crisis led to the creation of the DTCC: a centralized system designed for a paper world that no longer exists. Human beings naturally prefer peer-to-peer interaction. But at scale, we defaulted to centralization because we lacked technology for trust-minimized coordination. Central intermediaries can be efficient, but they require deep regulation because they can (intentionally or not) steal, preference, or cheat. Public blockchains and decentralized software cannot steal, cannot preference, and cannot cheat. That is not a marketing slogan, it is a structural property ensured by code, transparency, and distributed consensus. It is a profound innovation. And it is why regulators should permit controlled experimentation rather than assume the old architecture must forever dictate the new world. We commend the Commission for its willingness to explore this frontier. Allowing innovation to proceed carefully, responsibly, and transparently is the only path to understanding how these systems can strengthen U.S. capital markets for decades to come.