Watch the full panel discussion on Gamma Prime’s YouTube channel
Panel discussion with Bulat Sukhanov (Trading audit and OTC program manager at Prime Link), Rey Fernando Verboonen (Co-Founder of CurioInvest), Graham Lee Pickavance (CEO at MV Global), Jan Strandberg (CEO at Acquire.Fi), and Nikhil Joshi (COO at EMURGO)
In this panel discussion, experts from the Web3 sector share insights on the operational challenges, strategic partnerships, customer acquisition strategies, and capital management involved in scaling Web3 businesses within traditional institutional environments. Each panelist offers their perspective on various aspects of the industry, including the importance of product-market fit, the role of token utility, and effective treasury management. The conversation also delves into the significance of M&A activities in the space and explores current opportunities in the tokenization of traditional finance assets.
Bulat (Prime Link)
Okay, let’s start with just basic introductions from all the participants. Let’s start there from Fernando.
Fernando (CurioInvest)
Hello everyone, Fernando here, based out of Switzerland. I’ve been in digital assets since 2013 and also building since 2018 in the space of tokenization.
Today we help asset managers tokenize some of the assets they trade as well as create liquidity distribution strategies. Telegram, respectively, picked one of our ventures among the leading finalists in the hackathon. We see a very interesting market that I’m very happy to share with you today.
Jan (Acquire.Fi)
Hey guys, my name is Jan. I’ve been in crypto since 2011. I built two very well-known startups, but now I built one of the biggest M&A and secondary marketplaces.
We facilitate a lot of different secondaries, including equities, OTC, SAFEs, and on the M&A side, we represent both the buy and sell side. Happy to be on this panel.
Lee (MV Global)
It’s a real pleasure to be here today. I’ve been investing in, building, and scaling companies for 20 years. I’ve been doing it in the crypto industry since 2016–2017.
I run a company called MV Global. We are an investment firm. We’ve deployed close to nine figures in about 300 companies. We run an early stage venture fund, we also have a liquid strategy, and we’ve built a bunch of companies. We have a number of operating companies across the value chain in our industry.
Nikhil (EMURGO)
Thank you. So good morning. My name is Nikhil Joshi. I work for a company called Emurgo. We’re a co-founding entity of Cardano, but essentially we are chain agnostic, and we position ourselves really to work within the finance space—be that working with traditional finance players or indeed in the more DeFi space.
Our focus very much for this year is around private credit tokenization and also SAF trading, rendering it more liquid. We’re headquartered in Singapore. We have about 65 people globally.
Okay, thank you.
Bulat
So basically our panel now is called Institutional Opportunities and Scaling Web3 Businesses. The main topic would be exploring operational, financial factors, and innovative frameworks that enable Web3 ventures to scale within traditional institutional environments.
So guys, let’s start with some baseline questions. The first is going to be: What operational challenges must Web3 startups overcome to achieve integration into established institutional custodial and compliance infrastructures?
So let’s start with Fernando.
Fernando
We saw a few cases where some of the startups that went down had close to non-existent accounting systems and so forth. What I see from developers is their claim that many of these transactions are already recorded on blockchain, therefore it’s redundant to have a system that tracks all these transactions.
Now, I feel for companies to scale, you want to have proper CFO operations, proper accounting, and audit in order to assure all money flows and treasuries are properly recorded. This is key.
Second, when it comes to managing customer funds, clients, and so forth, you want to assure this is segregated and separated from the operations that you’re handling. You also want to create gateways in terms of accessing that sort of capital. That includes implementing ISO protocols for security, for opening and handling the wallets—as we saw with ByBit—as well as adding additional security protocols to that touchpoint.
Jan
Yeah, I think the biggest problem is licensing at the moment. We see a lot of players coming in and basically they want to tokenize everything, but the problem is that depending on your jurisdiction you need different licenses. Overall, governments are still a little bit behind.
That’s one. A second one is the banking rails. Integrating all of this into a legacy system just doesn’t work yet. On that front, I see a lot of new and up-and-coming companies solving this, but it’s still a problem we see here.
Lee
Yeah, I’d echo the two comments already. The operational hurdle is actually very high in this space. But what a lot of these companies forget is: you need to make money.
On the commercial side of the business, making sure you can last long enough in the space to actually get to market is even more important. If they want to scale and become institutional level, they need to be in the market for a long time. You have to pass the test of time; otherwise, there’s no chance.
Nikhil
I think it’s just the three Cs: custody, compliance, composability.
Institutions are not ready to self-custody, so the wallet infrastructure—multi-sig, MPC, etc.—needs to be in place with the right custodian or custodians, plural, giving optionality.
Compliance is just a thing. If you’re dealing with institutions, they have to tick certain boxes. It’s a hygiene requirement, so it has to be done.
Thirdly, composability. Institutions don’t care about chains, so it’s all about chain abstraction. The underlying needs to “talk to each other.” The tech stack needs to be able to talk to each other. Institutions are not going to be loyal to a particular layer one or two, so it needs to be seamless from that point of view.
Bulat
Thank you, guys. So the second question is: How can strategic partnerships with traditional asset managers, custodians, and compliance experts expedite enterprise-level adoption and distribution of Web3 products?
Let’s start again with Fernando Verboonen from CurioInvest.
Fernando
We were very early approaching institutional players. UBS Future of Finance selected us among the leading Swiss finalists, and we saw that a main portion of the time was spent on education—on transferring some of these learnings from our tech division to them.
Now, this has changed. We have collaborations with auditors, accounting firms, and asset managers. We are decreasing the friction that enables those asset managers to do what they’re good at, which is, in this case, perhaps trading gold, issuing bonds backed by Swiss mortgages, private debt loans, and so forth, and using some of these capabilities, such as tokenization, to expand their distribution.
It’s very important that there is a strong dialogue with top management, so you have a vision of the project from the start to the finishing line. It is important that these relationships are supported by a CTO of the asset management firm. Asset managers do have CTOs—they are actually very strong in cybersecurity, so having collaboration with them makes a lot of sense.
And third, you want to prioritize the concept of building an ecosystem. Launching a token, creating the token is one thing. Creating a market for that digital asset is an entirely different journey. Prioritizing ecosystems, collaborations, discussions across different stakeholders improves communication, creates synergies, and most importantly, enables everyone to profit from it.
Bulat
Okay, thanks for the insight. I definitely never heard of CTOs in asset manager firms before, so thank you. The word goes to Jan Strandberg from AcquireFi.
Jan
Yeah, I think it’s more about the distribution. We need legacy ChadFi companies to come into the space. We need their liquidity, but at the same time, they need us to build stuff for them, so I see one thing there as a collaboration opportunity, but it’s the same thing.
Building a brand, you need very good players behind you. If you don’t have them, you can’t attract money. If you can’t attract money, you can’t get liquidity. If you want to have a lot of customers or a big customer base, you still need legacy media.
You need a lot of legacy companies to come in and work with us, but it’s very hard to be honest. I think working side by side is a very good partnership that can build up good growth, but at the same time also leverage revenue.
Lee
Yeah, I think there are great points: brand, market reach, distribution channels.
There’s going to be an operational compliance stack from a large corporate partner, so you can go up the learning curve very quickly. A lot of companies try and structure a pilot program to get access to all of this, but the flip side is that all those points are why large incumbents actually have a lot more market power to operate the space and beat ambitious young Web3 companies.
So I think looking at the market strategically and thinking through the path for your startup and where you think the exit’s going to be—whether it’s issuing a token, whether it’s an acquisition path—we see M&A activity increasing quite dramatically, which is a sign the industry is maturing. Looking at it more strategically and timing the partnership is quite critical today.
Nikhil
So I think it’s been covered. It’s essentially trust and distribution.
I’m just going to go one layer below trust, which is that if you’re working with traditional asset managers, they’re going to come with a traditional customer base, and all of that comes to sales lead time, sales pitch, and education. That means taking products in a particular sequencing for that customer base to be ready for.
That may mean the distinction between digitized assets versus digital assets. Going out with stablecoins, yield-bearing stablecoins, or real-world asset tokenization is a set of steps one needs to take before you can get to a structured product made up of a series of digital assets.
So for me, the trust has to come through handholding. Traditional asset managers will bring trust and distribution. I’m just saying that you need time for the underlying client to understand the product.
Bulat
Okay, thank you so much. The third question would be: Which customer acquisition strategies have been most effective in expanding tokenized asset offerings to institutional investors without compromising the underlying token economics? Let’s still go this way around. Let’s start with Fernando Verboonen from CurioInvest.
Fernando
Right, so I mean, this is partially business secret. When it comes to business development and customer acquisition, you face reality, you face a market, you face challenges, you face introducer’s fees and so forth. What I’ve come to realize is that first, you are required to segment a specific customer target.
You want to have enterprises, you want to have asset managers, you want to have entrepreneurs. Once you have nailed down those customer targets, you need to understand what problems they’re facing and what solution you can bring to them. Are they seeking to raise capital? Are they asset-rich and seeking to perhaps use their assets as collateral? Are they looking to create a new business venture?
Tokenization is just the beginning of solving that problem. It essentially opens a new gateway. Typically, these clients don’t have the experience to navigate across these new territories. As a founder, I help them end-to-end to source, to leverage ecosystem partners, to leverage that journey, and to achieve integration within their ecosystem.
In the past, I’ve seen many projects piloting and launching a token. However, as we mature in the market, we see protocols prioritizing collaborations and distributions, creating venues—whether it’s panels, events, or institutional-rich venues like in Singapore, Dubai, Zurich, and so forth. Using that as a platform, I would argue Token2049 is exceptionally great to meet different institutions. Some of my shareholders are coming here. Some of my clients, asset managers tokenizing high volumes of assets, are meeting here and attending these side events.
Jan
Yeah, I think one thing is to build your brand. If you can build trust and a brand that people really trust, you will bring liquidity. Another thing that we builders in this space build is product-market fit.
If you don’t have product-market fit, it’s really hard to attract any real users. If you don’t have real users, it’s really hard to launch a token and get some volume on it. I think it’s very simple: get product-market fit, get a brand that people trust, and you will have a token that people actually use.
Lee
I was basically going to talk about product-market fit, so I agree.
Nikhil
I think there are a few things, but probably token utility focus. If you don’t want to screw up the tokenomics, make sure your token has a utility. I’d place that as the number one.
Bulat
Okay, thank you. The fourth question is: How should Web3 companies strategically manage capital raises to sustain operational growth while maintaining token value and investor alignment? Let’s go the other way around for a change. Let’s start with Nikhil Joshi, Emurgo.
Nikhil
So I think this is probably not unique to Web3 startups. I think it’s across the board—raising milestones. You can think about equity-token hybrids, but again, to the earlier point I made, what is the utility of your token?
People want access to tokens for the immediate liquidity. There are pros and cons to that, but are you looking for cash to fund yourself for the next six months? Are you looking for a strategic partner? Then strategic investor selection kicks in as well. I don’t think it’s unique to Web3 necessarily. It’s the same path any startup should be following.
Lee
Yeah, building on that, the biggest challenge and mistake I see companies making in the Web3 space is rushing to issue the token. Once you’re managing a publicly listed token, the complexity, dynamic, and pressures that brings to your business—when you’re still at the earliest stages of trying to scale and build—quite often causes businesses to fall over.
In our industry, many see issuing a token as success, and we all know rug pulls and people pulling out money. But if that’s also a core pillar for building your treasury, which is going to give you your runway for the next two or three years, you have to be very clever in how you manage your treasury.
We have huge volatility; you don’t want to rug your own project and community. I want to see teams that have a laser focus on the highest priority activities, know what they’re building, understand capital efficiency and how they’re deploying money into the business to get the biggest impact, so that when they are ready to issue their token, it’s actually a scaling and positive growth narrative rather than just adding complexity.
Jan
So we facilitate a ton of secondaries, OTC and so forth. We work with most of the foundation and our number one question that we always ask them is: what are you guys using this money for? And is this a strategic round or is this something else?
And most of the answers are either you’re launching a new product, or you’re expanding the team, or you’re reshuffling basically your old investors away and bringing new ones. And this is pretty normal, to be honest.
So I think from my side and what we’ve seen in the market is that it’s either hires that are expanding a lot, or OPEX is just rising and you need to raise money because of that, or you are reshuffling your cap table and bringing new strategic partners. I think this is totally normal. If you have someone that wants to exit and you need capital, it’s the easiest way to do.
Fernando
Yes, so optimizing treasury is never trivial. On the one hand you have fixed costs, on the other hand some of the digital assets are fluctuating. We’ve seen Bitcoin and others decreasing in value sometimes minus 80%, so you want to diversify your treasury and have that strategically across stablecoins, fiat, you name it, but also other assets that perhaps provide some yield, some bonds and so forth.
One of the challenges I’ve seen is that some teams effectively just park their capital into digital assets that fluctuate without considering the runway. When volatility kicks in, they pay the cost.
So a good strategy for Web3 scalings is to ensure you already have a runway in stable capital that doesn’t fluctuate over the next 3 to 6 to 12 months. Also, if you have investors’ capital, you want to park some of that on money market funds or on geo solutions that provide yield that perhaps enable you to meet inflation.
And last, you want to reserve a portion of your treasury for strategic collaborations. I see early projects accelerating much faster when they allocate a portion of the revenue or the treasury to those partners. That creates synergies that enable you to launch faster their RWA project.
Bulat
So let’s do also a couple of closing questions. The first one would be: what are the most important time-to-market factors for projects to build, reach product-market fit and scale quickly? Let’s start with Nikhil Joshi from Emurgo.
Nikhil
So product. I think a narrow focus on product is important and then finding a distribution channel. The perennial problem with Web3 is it’s a solution looking for a problem, right? That’s the criticism that’s thrown around quite often.
I think finding a product that solves a problem and having a very narrow focus on that, and then solving for distribution, is the solution here.
Lee
Yeah, to focus on product, I think you have to be ruthless on knowing the product that you’re building and the proof points that you need to solve for to get conviction to go to the next level.
Too many early-stage businesses think they have to do everything all at the same time and so they misallocate capital, hire teams too quickly, and all of that complexity ultimately ends up slowing them down.
So ruthless focus on product development, getting feedback loops as fast as you can to iterate through the product, get those proof points, then get to market and keep pushing your sales. Proven, repeatable sales of your product gets you product-market fit.
Jan
So I think you have two ways of doing this.
You can either go the way these gentlemen are saying—have a product-market fit and build a product that actually works—or we do the crypto way, where you have a lot of hype, you build a very big brand, and then you start thinking about the product.
For me, I think the first one is better, but obviously we are in crypto and I see this more and more happening. Like, you guys all probably invested in meme coins. What’s driving a meme coin is basically hype. So I rest my case.
Fernando
I like the thing that there is a reward after a lot of hard work. And what I’ve seen is when you focus on the value that you provide to your end customer, and you shape that into a proposition, and you consistently ask yourself how that value comes across, what differentiates you—then that increasingly positions you within a niche.
This is why some clients, some asset managers that have conducted some operations, perhaps tokenization services, have returned back in our case to us and asked us to support them.
So I believe in this industry there’s lots of marketing and so forth, but ultimately I’ve also seen many teams come and leave. It’s a matter of growing in a way organically and systematically that value proposition towards finding that market fit that you mentioned earlier.
Bulat
Now before we finish our panel, we also have a few participant-specific questions. Let’s start with Lee Pickavance from NV Global. Beyond providing capital, what are the ways VCs can assist projects on the building side moving towards market success?
Lee
So I think the primary function is the provision of risk capital, but not all VCs are built the same. If you’re an entrepreneur, you want more than just capital, right? You want other value levers from the partners and the investors in your business to help you succeed.
Every VC fund is different depending on their funding, what their management fees allow, and how big they are. For us at Envi Capital, we first want an alignment with the vision and ambition of the founding team. If we don’t see the vision and the path to success, we just can’t follow that business.
I think we’re unique as we bring deep researchers, technologists, entrepreneurs, people that have built and scaled businesses, and traditional VC finance skills. For us, we de-risk the checks that we write by bringing this breadth of expertise and offering it to the teams that we work with.
Our business is investing, so how we do that is more of the question, because we can’t spend full-time energy doing that. We like to structure very strong advisory relationships with all our portfolio companies. We’re there to provide access to our network, resources, expertise across the journey that startups go on.
We’re there for the journey. We often participate in later stage funding rounds and make introductions to our VC network. We often help with HR networks where we can bring talent into the business.
So there’s a big multifaceted aspect to what VCs can offer. Obviously, every VC fund is slightly different. But from both the entrepreneur’s and the VC’s perspective, it’s all about reducing risk. How do I reduce risk for this business to make sure we get a success?
Bulat
Okay, thank you so much, Lee. The next question is specific for Jan Strandberg from AcquireFi. AcquireFi is bringing M&A to the Web3 space. What role do you see M&A playing at the moment in Web3 scaling strategies?
Jan
Yeah, so I think first of all, a lot of protocols, exchanges are realizing that actually building themselves something from scratch is very expensive. Also attracting customers can be very expensive. So what’s happening now is that we actually see more and more M&A activities, and if you look at last year and this year, we’ve seen so much more activity than before.
One reason is that we are actually maturing now as a space, which is very good. We have founders finally coming to us and being like, hey, I’ve been building for six years and I have a possibility now to exit. So first of all, grants, they don’t really work.
If you want to buy customers right away, and especially projects here that raised a bunch of money and haven’t built anything yet, I think it’s a very good acquisition strategy, both from tech side, aquire side, or even customer or revenue side. You can basically buy something out right away, maybe an exchange, maybe a launchpad, maybe a DeFi protocol, and you get right away TVL, you get customers, you get tech. You basically are jumping from level one to level five right away, and I think that’s the beauty of M&A, and I’m very happy that we have actually come this far now.
If I look when I started in 2011, I wish I would have an M&A platform. I wish I would have an opportunity to exit, but we are finally here, and I think projects here should really look at it more and more, and I think also someone in this panel.
Bulat
Thank you. Next question goes to Nihil from Emurgo. What do you think is the biggest opportunity you see now in tokenization?
Nikhil
So we’re seeing a lot. So Emurgo specifically is pursuing a strategy around private credit tokenization. I think there’s a bit of a fallacy that just because you tokenize something, it immediately brings liquidity. We don’t think that’s the case.
Our hypothesis here is that actually it’s more a case of going down a liquid stack where assets that are more liquid will benefit from tokenization first, but that doesn’t include those that work well in the real world. So bonds, equities, these will be tokenized in the near term primarily because they offer collateral in an otherwise, should we call it crypto trade, but tokenizing for the sake of it doesn’t automatically bring incremental value.
For us, going to things like insurance premium financing or cash management products, that type of thing in the private credit space is where there is value to be brought from tokenizing, and there is demand for it. Over time, you go down that liquid stack, you’ll end up with something like real estate. But tokenizing in of itself will not automatically demand an access and distribution. Those are the three pain points that really need to be solved for.
So we’re working on that. But again, it’s going to be a case of sequencing, of going down what I’m referring to as a liquid stack, from more liquid to less liquid.
Bulat
And the last question is to Fernando Verboonen from Curio Invest. So what role does treasury management and capital allocation play for projects building towards broad adoption?
Fernando
Yes, so as adoption of tokenization increases, it is time for crypto institutions, foundations to diversify their treasury, to reconsider what should be there beyond Ethereum, beyond Bitcoin, and so forth. And to explore other ways to essentially diversify by including RWAs, including private debt, representing bonds or auto car leases, and therefore extracting yield from the real world.
