by Damien Black
If tokenisation digitises everything, what happens to the culture of finance? The Square Mile in London and Wall Street in New York have become legendary hubs of fiscal activity – the Intersection asks if the shift towards DeFi might diminish their status.
Everyone above a certain age remembers what happened to Fleet Street. Once the hub of print journalism in the UK, the ancient London road that runs parallel to the Thames lost its centre of gravity when the trade digitized in the 1990s. Of course, newspapers themselves didn’t disappear overnight (it would take social media a generation later to deal the death blow), but the culture changed as the industry became more diffuse. Nowadays, Fleet Street might be taken as a byword for nostalgia – gone are the halcyon days when career journalists worked, drank and debated on a single street.
I’ve been wondering if the same thing could happen to the Square Mile and Wall Street if tokenisation continues apace – if trading happens onchain, you don’t need to be physically near an exchange. Middlemen and clearing houses are already under threat. Custodians and market makers can now be remote, with tokens trading 24/7 online. Does this threaten the culture of doing business that has developed in key cities like London and New York?
‘We’re upgrading the culture’
Mitchell Williams worked on Wall Street for twenty years before joining Streamex, a company that specialises in tokenisation.
"Having spent over two decades on Wall Street analyzing the financial impact of change, I can say the comparison to Fleet Street is remarkably apt,” he tells me. “Tokenization and on-chain trading are dismantling the structural necessity of traditional hubs like the Square Mile or Wall Street. When assets trade 24/7 online – like our GLDY token at Streamex – and middlemen operate remotely, the gravitational pull of legacy infrastructure disappears.”
This has certainly ruffled feathers among some of his former colleagues, who genuinely fear a loss of culture and nurture “an undeniable nostalgia for the chaotic density of traditional finance”. Williams and his cohort in the digital asset space, on the other hand, are rather more upbeat. “We view this not as a loss, but as an evolution. We aren’t abandoning culture – we are upgrading it.”
Though DeFi eliminates the need to be physically tethered to an exchange, he tells me, the human beings at the heart of tokenized trading still rely on face-to-face teamwork to get things done. “Instead of being forced into high-stress, high-cost epicentres, talent is migrating,” he says. “Firms are unlocking value by building local density in regions offering a superior quality of life and lower cost of living.”
He cites his own new employer, Streamex, based in Winter Park, Florida, as an example. Located near Orlando, it is a far cry from New York’s concrete jungle, boasting what he describes as “canopy-draped green spaces”. It has top-notch schools, and from what Williams says, the nightlife seems to revolve more around fine dining (think Michelin-starred restaurants) than boozy pub crawls. Streamex shares this idyllic space with the likes of BNY Mellon and Robinhood. “New micro-hubs are thriving in places like Winter Park,” says Williams. “We are replacing the gruelling Wall Street grind with first-class infrastructure, proving financial culture doesn’t need a famous street sign to flourish.”
Wall Street’s deal with the devil no longer appeals
Sounds lovely, but come on – bankers migrating from Wall Street to Winter Park? Seriously? “The evidence of top-tier talent migrating to Florida is overwhelming,” Williams insists. “You only have to look at institutions like Citadel leading the charge in Miami to see the macro shift. On a more granular level, the surging home prices and the fierce competition for private school admissions across Florida’s most desirable enclaves are direct metrics of this relocation pressure. Wall Street isn’t just taking notice, they are watching the migration happen in real time.”
Gone are the days when leaving Manhattan meant career suicide, and changing jobs simply meant walking across Wall Street to work in a different building. “The true baseline for comparison is net quality of life,” adds Williams. “I would wager the typical New York transplant is immensely grateful for a minimal commute and a low-stress environment – when nostalgia for that old dynamism hits, a two-hour flight to NYC is an easy fix.”
Lifestyle values and innovation, he tells me, are the new go-tos for finance professionals and not the “traditional prestige or legacy badges of Wall Street elitism”. TradFi’s old-school “brutal bargain” of absorbing the pain of a burnout work culture to get rich is losing its appeal. “Today, top talent has options to build highly meaningful and financially rewarding careers without accepting the trade-offs of Wall Street,” says Williams. “It simply means fewer people are willing to take them up on that bargain.”
I once visited a Wall Street bar and noticed a bunch of ties hanging up behind the counter. When I asked my partner what this signified she told me it was a sort of tradition – stressed-out Wall Street pros would hit the bar straight after work, taking off their ties, get loaded and leave them behind. It was a sort of informal tradition. Any similar defining quirks to be found at Winter Park?
“I think the defining ‘quirk’ of Winter Park is simply happier professionals,” says Williams. “When you eliminate soul-crushing commutes and the anxiety of exorbitant property values, you fundamentally restore a person’s quality of life. The culture we are building in DeFi is less about late-night, aggressive bar-hopping and more centred around high-quality coffee meetups and phenomenal dining. The celebrations look different here because the baseline stress level is much lower.”
‘Culture doesn’t die when geography stops mattering’
Eric Wade is another professional who made the jump from TradFi to DeFi. Formerly an executive at Merrill Lynch, he is now editor of Crypto Capital at Stansberry Research, the flagship firm for MarketWise. As well as covering tokenization, he also mines Bitcoin. From shuffling papers at Lynch to covering the cutting edge of digital money, he’s been on the whole ride.
He agrees with me that fears of a culture change in London and New York are real and that the Fleet Street analogy is on point. Well, up to a point. “Tokenization dissolves the reason to stand next to an exchange, and the culture built on that proximity thins out the way Fleet Street did. But diminished is the wrong word. Culture doesn’t die when geography stops mattering. It relocates, and it usually comes back bigger. The only people who should be frightened are the ones whose single asset was their address.”
Wade cites the demise of the trading pits in Wall Street when everything moved onto digital terminals a few decades ago. “When trading moves on-chain, the reason to be within a mile of an exchange evaporates,” he says. “The open-outcry pit was the loudest, most physical finance culture ever built, all coloured jackets and hand signals and shouting, and electronic trading decimated it, but the culture didn’t die. It moved to screens, then to terminals, and lately to a group chat.”
So not killed off then, more like… modified.
Tokenization is good news for London
“Fleet Street is the sharper parallel, and it cuts the opposite way from the fear,” says Wade. “When the presses left, the concentration ended. But journalism went global, 24/7, and handed a printing press to anyone with a device. Granted, you can argue that’s both good and bad, right?” Tokenization, he argues, does the same thing to finance: it takes a culture that used to live on a single square mile “and lets it live not anywhere but everywhere”. “Cities, then, have an opportunity to attract minds who could be anywhere they want to be,” he concludes. This is not hypothetical, he insists – and it’s actually good news for London.
Wade points to London company Quant Network, chosen in September 2025 by six of Britain’s largest banks including Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, and NatWest to build a trial infrastructure for tokenized sterling deposits in the UK across bond settlements, property transactions, and online payments. In June it rolled out a system, Fusion Rollup, that unifies 74 blockchains for institutions. As a result of this project Quant’s token is up more than sixtyfold from its 2018 value ($68.13 at the time of writing) and its holder base has nearly doubled (to more than 167,000) since 2022, says Wade. But the price, he insists, is the least interesting thing about it. “The interesting thing is that the plumbing of tokenized British money is being built in London, by Londoners,” says Wade. “How fascinating would it be if a decentralized-by-default technology created a geographic resurgence?”
It’s a tantalising prospect – a second Square Mile built around DeFi and tokenization, based on clear regulation and affordable energy (London might have a ways to go before it qualifies on the latter metric, though I didn’t have the heart to point that out to him). “It’s a real storm,” concedes Wade when I ask him if the DeFi fears on Wall Street and the Square Mile are nothing more than a storm in a teacup. “But it’s a relocation, not a demolition. The trading floor fades, the protocol layer rises to take its place, and the new financial centre turns out to be wherever the rules are clear and the electricity is cheap. I know, because I already live in it. I trade tokenized markets from the Nevada desert at hours when the City is asleep, on the same power I mine Bitcoin with. The Square Mile can be on that map, or a museum on it. That choice, not tokenization, is what decides whether its culture diminishes.”
