Watch the full video of this panel discussion on Gamma Prime’s YouTube channel
Panel discussion with Sebastien Borget (Co-Founder & Global Ambassador at The Sandbox), Alex Esin (CEO at P2P.org), Kenneth Shek (Head of Projects at Animoca Brands), and Evan Szu (Co-Founder & CEO at Gamma Prime)
In this panel discussion, industry leaders from The Sandbox, P2P.org, Animoca Brands, and Gamma Prime explore how TradFi and DeFi are converging to shape the future of investing.
Speaking at VNTR’s event, Sebastien Borget (CEO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox), Alex Esin (CEO of P2P.org), Kenneth (Project Lead at Moca Network, Animoca Brands), and Evan Szu (Gamma Prime) discuss the biggest frictions between traditional finance and decentralized finance—from regulation, UX, and liquidity, to programmability and identity.
They share insights on tokenizing real-world assets, the role of stablecoins, regulatory clarity in the U.S., and what founders must focus on to prepare for the next bull cycle. This conversation highlights where capital and innovation are flowing, and who might drive the next wave of adoption—retail or institutions.
Host:
I just wanted to say welcome everybody and thank you so much to the VNTR team. Yuri, what a fantastic way to continue putting on some great events, especially for various different people. Thank you.
I’m going to keep it very light today. We’re obviously discussing bridging TradFi and DeFi co-investment models for the next boom. I think the best thing to do is to maybe start off with a little introduction.
Sebastien, do you want to start?
Sebastien (The Sandbox)
Hey, everyone. My name is Sebastien Borget. I’m the CEO and co-founder at The Sandbox, a decentralized virtual world that’s grown as one of the largest projects in metaverse and gaming using blockchain.
We have more than 400 major brands in partnership, 6.3 million users with a wallet, and over 500,000 token holders across different assets, avatars, and lands that we sold. I’m also the president of the Blockchain Game Alliance.
Alex (P2P.org)
Hey, hello. My name is Alex Esin. I’m CEO at P2P.org. We are the biggest staking and restaking operator.
We put a date 1.2 mil if, for example, or I know 60% of Eigenlayer or 53% of Neosymbiotic and 10% of Polkadot. We’re the biggest in the world.
Kenneth (Animoca Brands)
Hi, I’m Kenneth. I’m a project lead of Moca Network, basically Animoca Brands. What we’re building is a digital identity infrastructure.
A couple of days ago, we announced the Moca Chain, which is an end-to-end digital identity infrastructure. It allows users to issue data and have their identity data verified everywhere in any apps on any chains.
We work with the largest telecom in South Korea, for example, with 10 to 20 more partners coming on board embedding digital identity into their consumer apps.
Evan (Gamma Prime)
Hi, I’m Evan. If you weren’t here earlier, we are with Gamma Prime. We are a marketplace for hedge funds.
It allows people to come, pick their own funds, have us build a portfolio for them, buy our fund of funds – anything that you want in terms of that. We are the marketplace for that.
Host
Thank you, everyone, for being here today.
Now, just getting back to the topic, I wanted to bring up: what’s the biggest friction point between TradFi and DeFi? I mean, this is a very basic question, but also, I think, a very important answer.
Sebastien, do you want to start?
Sebastien
I cannot maybe speak too generally about the topic, but I want to apply a little bit of knowledge and experience I’ve acquired in video games.
Typically, gamers, I believe, have been intuitively – or maybe without knowing – some of the best people in the world that tend to make arbitrage and take decisions to optimize always for the best outcome.
Whenever we decide to make a purchase in a game, we buy currency, or we choose to spend the hard-earned experience points to upgrade the different characters, avatars, etc., we will always optimize for the best outcome that will deliver for us the best return afterwards—to collect more resources, and so on.
I do believe that gaming has been one of the best ways not only to bring adoption to our blockchain, but to bring more understanding about financial literacy into the world of blockchain, and kind of bridge a lot of users who are not DJs, who are not traders, to actually learn and become actual traders, but using all the benefits that DeFi has to offer through decentralized exchange and the quick access to crypto.
Yet, a whole bunch of the media and the industry still think the UX is difficult, the onboarding is difficult in general, because they want to bring even more users. But I do think, obviously, in the disguise of a very simple entertainment product, we’ve already been able to push more people to actually become traders without necessarily knowing about it.
When you see a lot of the games from the early Axie Infinity and what they pushed with Play2Earn, or now we’re seeing new games like the MapleStory universe, Craftworld, or NFL Revolve, those games are actually making people trade more and more game items, collectibles, or tokens, towards generating more outcome and more revenue for the players.
The game field is much bigger thanks to the use of the technology here and the use of DeFi.
So, that’s my take on the topic.
Alex
I think the short answer first is regulatory. We still have a lack of clear understanding of the rules for some specific regions. In some cases, it’s just moving forward in the dark room.
The second, I think, is we speak a lot about KYP, KYC, but right now the issue is about the KYP – know your protocol. Right now, we have a lack of a common standard system to measure some risk of protocols. And every time, it’s a new game.
And right now, between both, there’s regulation and assessment of different protocols. As a result, there’s friction between TradFi and DeFi from my point of view.
Kenneth
Yeah, I think there are four main angles.
One is the user experience, more on the key management side of things.
Second is liquidity, in terms of DeFi side and CeFi side. If it’s TradFi, how do you bridge that liquidity? We see the likes of Coinbase already tapping into that, basically having centralized exchange liquidity flowing into on-chain DEXs.
Third is regulation, which digital identity plays a big role in. That’s what we’re building—how do you balance decentralization, privacy, identity and data, and the compliance and regulatory requirements?
I think fourth is programmability. In TradFi, having programmability would take a lot of time and is prone to error, just because they’re not codes. But once you tokenize more assets and securities, for instance, there are many ways to play around with DeFi, such as collateralization and under-secured loans.
There are many things that you can do with data and programmability between TradFi and DeFi.
Alex
You mentioned user experience as one of the frictions between TradFi and DeFi. But what does it mean for you? Because right now, as we work a lot with big institutional players, TradFi players, every time I hear about user experience as a problem.
But what specific problem could you maybe add more color on?
Host
And where are we actually seeing the meaningful collaboration?
Kenneth
The fact that when you’re on a DEX, the user experience is—”I want to swap this token to another token”—is not an intuitive experience.
In normal user behavior, it’s just, “I want to buy this token.” Just something as simple as that.
And then there are multiple signing processes, approving tokens, on-chain transactions, and then you can trade. Obviously, some are optimizing user experience by having a bundle or a session key to abstract that away.
HyperLiquid is doing an amazing job on basically a hybrid mode of a centralized trader user experience, but having an on-chain smart contract for trading with relatively centralized market-making liquidity in some ways.
So, I think there’s a collection of multiple things there on user experience.
Alex
Yeah, but what do you think is the problem for TradFi? Because if you speak TradFi, they mostly look like custodians for exchanges, where people just interact with their interface.
They don’t care about the behind process, the ground process. For them, it’s the same as in the bank. You just click, and you don’t care if it takes the on-chain, off-chain, etc.
Why do you think it’s a big problem?
Evan
Maybe I could take a slide at that, because that was actually my response too. The user experience needs to add something, right? It can’t just be, “Oh, we’re tokenizing for the sake of tokenizing.” But why does somebody care about that?
So, I’ll give you an example. There are a lot of people tokenizing treasuries. But there’s already a tokenized-like experience if you want to go buy treasuries.
You don’t need to go and bid with the U.S. government. You just log on to E-Trade, and you can buy fractions. Now, you don’t get self-custody, but you get a lot of the effects of tokenization. You get margin across all these different products.
So, in my mind, it’s about—what’s the motivation for bringing these worlds together? How is somebody going to go, “I want that version and not this”?
One example might be more like real estate. But there are ETFs now, right? We focus on hedge funds, of course. We think that’s a good area.
But I think that’s a key question, which is, why? Why would this matter to anybody? Are you solving a real problem?
Sebastien
I’d like to jump on the topic as well.
I do think people are criticizing the onboarding, the user interface. But if you’re legitimately trying to onboard a traditional TradFi platform – a broker – to buy some stocks, some commodities, etc., it’s so complex.
First, you have to find a bank, a financial partner, to go through a lot of paperwork. It takes usually weeks. And then, nothing is perfectly correct. And you need to have upfront cash.
It literally takes a few minutes to a few hours, at best, to onboard to one of those platforms. And no matter what kind of asset you actually want to trade – whether they are Pokémon cards, sneakers, a fraction of them, or art, or game items on marketplaces – there’s already a much simpler onboarding.
However, the trade-off between this onboarding speed and behind-the-scenes security of what actually you are trading – and how secure and legitimate or backed by a real-world asset or real value those assets are – is important.
And so, the risk also comes from the fact that it’s very unregulated. Anyone can trade whatever without a strong fundamental behind.
Host
Interesting. Very cool. What new co-investment or capital deployment models are emerging that excite you at the moment?
Sebastien
Well, basically, any asset class is very interesting. I think we’re seeing people that have been tokenizing art, tokenizing Pokémon cards, wine, and values like spirits, collectible cars, vintage cars.
I think the whole industry is moving to real world assets and commodities. And what’s interesting behind is those are yield-bearing assets. You can really start to predict what kind of return you can generate while those are backed by actual real properties, real buildings, and actually real utilities that actually contribute to the financial ecosystem by creating jobs, creating work.
And, for example, you can start to buy and tokenize cocoa beans or future shares into farmers in Brazil or other countries and then own a stake into what’s going to be generated behind.
And the other interesting aspect is those asset classes also can be utilized because of the programmability of blockchain and interoperability of assets into other use cases like gaming and other purposes as well.
Alex
One hundred percent. I mean, I support the idea about RWA, but maybe one of the examples, I’m not conscious of the time, I think the risk-taking protocol — could we call it a co-investor or not?
Because all, I mean, some different users put their assets as collateral as a way to support security for middle layer to get some rewards. That sounds like it’s a co-investor or not?
Host
Just maybe going on to the next question: how do institutional investors really view DeFi risk versus opportunity?
Evan
I’ll take a swig at it. This is something we deal with a lot at Gamma Prime. A very common client that comes to us is an institutional investor whose boss said, “Go get some crypto.”
And then they come to us and are like, okay, I want to get crypto, but I don’t know how to do this. Do I just go long coin? It’s like, no, there’s a lot of other ways to do things. Like what you guys do at P2P, it’s like that is a whole class of yield that is orthogonal to the market.
And yet, it’s not tokenized. So you have institutions buying yield in crypto, but through a regulated entity. We actually think that’s the gateway drug. We think this is what gets people in institutions to be like, oh, you can have auditors. It’s not FTX.
And it’s legitimate yield because you’re providing a real service. Staking is a product. Without liquidity providers, that DEX doesn’t run.
So people realize, oh, there’s actually real value being created here. And then they start digging deeper. Then they start being more interested. Like, well, how else can I get involved? So we have seen this a lot. And we think it is a source of new capital. It’s not just the same retail capital going in circles. This is new money that could potentially come into the system.
Kenneth
I guess like that and adding on top of that is, as I said, the decentralized exchange and the DEX’s flow that we’re seeing now, where the likes of using a centralized exchange balance to actually buy DEX’s tokens, I think that it’s yet to be seen in terms of how much liquidity are flowing in from there.
And obviously, with structured products, right now it is majority going into BTC, ETH. And we don’t see that liquidity actually flowing to other altcoins. But once more structured products are being unlocked in the future, there will be more liquidity there.
Host
What needs to evolve, out of curiosity? What needs to evolve, like tech, legal, UX, for the adoption for the TradFi and DeFi space? What really needs to evolve to promote this next wave of adoption?
Sebastien
Well, from my take, I would say make those products attractive, not only from a financial standpoint, but also in terms of the meaning, the value they carry, and sometimes just the fun, the coolness.
So when I see projects like Mocaverse, which started just by the collection of NFTs, or when I see VanEck that goes on the NASDAQ with a Pudgy Penguin and invites Luca, the founder, on stage. When I see a lot of people from traditional finance owning pumps, owning lands on Sandbox, for example, I think they are attaching themselves not just for the coolness of owning some random NFTs.
No, they are understanding the value of culture and community building to tap into new gems that maybe are not there, to gain prime access to information, and to basically plan for the next 10 to 20 years where the next generation of their clients, the children of the typical investors and clients that they have, are more into valuing the future.
And we can see the best cliché picture of it is how we look at PopMart and Labobo in the world right now, and how it became a representation of financial status and a go-to-market strategy for many products and financial services as well.
The second thing I was thinking about, back to the previous question, is also definitely to look at existing regulated markets that are not yet tokenized. So when we’re talking about commodities, for example, it’s definitely one of the first, because with the tokenization comes an existing set of investors and demand and supply for those products. So it’s probably one of the fastest ways to move forward.
Alex
From my point of view, TradFi will have to see some bold signal that this market will be 20 times more than it is right now, because I think TradFi can help to build the right laws, right regulatory, etc., etc., if they see some benefits for them.
And right now, I think, as I know, approximately one year ago, as I remember, the Google Cloud also had a team who fully focused on Web3, but I know one year ago, we said, “Okay, guys, we see the speed of growing Web3, but we also see the speed of growing AI. Let’s move the team to AI.” It’s also a signal, and I think right now, if you speak about TradFi and adoption from TradFi, it’s maybe a way of predicting this market will be 20 times more than it is right now.
Kenneth
Yeah, and maybe to add to that as well, I think we start to see a lot of crypto Web3 companies getting listed, and TradFi investors are basically looking at these companies based on a certain valuation framework. What’s the revenue? What’s the flow? What’s the growth rate?
Obviously, it’s very debatable whether Circle is inflated right now in terms of valuation, but I think if you look at now where the token value accrual model, if there is a proper audit and valuation framework on tokens, it would make it, in terms of educational process, easier for people to understand and actually step in to buy the token.
And then I think another thing is access to specific asset class that usually investors do not have access to.
Recently, I wanted to buy gold because I wanted to de-risk before the war and all that, and I actually find it really hard to find traditional route, go through KYC process, and find the right product, look at the paper and all that. The easiest way for me to get exposure back then is to buy Tether Gold, and that’s actually a good way.
I got a friend who’s a founder of a company having a GPU asset-backed stablecoin. We can debate whether that’s the risk level of that, but that’s another way for people to get access to the AI GPU asset class.
Host
Now, the regulatory framework and landscape, what’s your take on it? Friend, foe, undefined? What are we currently looking at at the moment?
Sebastien
I would say it has done a lot of good in the industry in general, specifically since the U.S. clarified its position over the past few months. We’ve seen a lot of clarity around what business can do in terms of tokenizing, launching their own token, acquiring, and participating in projects that connect to Web3.
So at the sandbox level, the U.S. has always been one of the largest markets for video games. All our brands, partnerships from the Western side, Hollywood brands were kind of on hold, whether we can jump or not, typically into Web3, launch game assets, and so on, and now it’s full clarity.
The second thing is I do believe the U.S. leads the world, specifically in the financial sector, so whatever the U.S. banks will do, the rest of the banks in the world will actually follow.
And there used to be a time where talking to a bank and starting to introduce them to digital asset strategy and accepting crypto payments and so on, they would say, “Well, no, no, we don’t touch that, we don’t look at that.” Now they all have teams looking into it much more actively, and New York became the new financial center where everything DeFi-related and tokenization of assets for banks is actually very actively engaged.
And we see all the companies in the DeFi space, like Morpho, Kiehl, they are all moving to the U.S., they are getting a lot of clients and revenue suddenly. All the big players like BlackRock, Apollo, et cetera, are tokenizing massively different asset classes as well. JP Morgan recently, for example, did an announcement last week too. It was very interesting.
Evan
I take kind of a pragmatic view on this, which is, look, whether or not we think investors and regulators are the enemy or not, there’s a large number of investors that are going to want regulated, compliant products. And if you’re willing to meet them halfway, you get to onboard them, right?
So has Bitcoin ETFs and Bitcoin futures been amazingly good for the space in terms of getting wider adoption? I absolutely think so.
So I think there’s some people in Web3 that are very purist. They’re like, no, it’s all about permissionless, et cetera. It’s like, the people that want to get into space, they’re not like, “No, it has to be our way.” They’re just like, meet me halfway.
Yeah, I get it, you’ve got permissionless, but FTX, Anchor Protocol, Terraluna, they all happened on-chain. It’s not like the safeguards of Web3 cover all things. In fact, I would say it’s complimentary. I would say that the Web2 safeguards, auditors, fund administrators, would have greatly reduced those risks. And they do not contradict all the benefits of being on-chain.
Sebastien
I’ll show you a joke about that. If you think about the Bitcoin original white paper and all the movement around decentralization and really all the maxi are saying, I think Satoshi Nakamoto would probably try to flip many times in his deathbed — if he’s not still alive, who knows.
But because we moved so far away from the original promise of being so free and aggregated and censorship against government and so on. Right now we are all formatted and molded to: the only way to adoption is regulation, because that’s how markets work.
Host
Speaking of adoption, who’s going to lead this next bull cycle? Retail? Institutional?
Alex
I think, like I said, in this case we have to think about institutional like it’s a distribution layer. Because if we speak about retail, we would like to track the script through some layer. Institutional may be a good layer as well.
But the next big thing, I think the stable coins 100%, because one of the products when they have real use cases, not something like one more performance metric. And the second is about RWA, integration of real estate, integration of some different assets, which is a really good use case from my point of view.
Kenneth
Yeah, stable coin is a great point. We’re definitely very actively exploring that space. Animoca has a J.P. We’re a standard charter bank. We issued a Hong Kong dollar stable coin.
And it’s like, I believe the liquidity would be coming from institutions and enterprises because I still think the B2C payment with stable coin would still take a while for adoption. But then it’s more for maximizing the yield that you could earn or gain from the working capital that is being deployed for merchant settlement, cross-border payment, more on the B2B side. So I still think like enterprise and institutions are going to play a big role in this cycle, even for stable coin.
Sebastien
I have a bit of a contradictory one on that. I do think even it’s great that institutions are stepping in and it will solve many problems that we have in the enterprise world for settlement and so on. It still doesn’t affect anything related for consumer adoption and retail.
So we are now more than halfway the year. 2025 was supposed to be a bullish year with retail re-adopting. And the reality is all the altcoins, et cetera, are down by like two to three figures sometimes.
And we haven’t seen like a massive translation of all that influx of Bitcoin and micro-strategy funds and institutional adoption into more actual end users who find that crypto is cool and use it meaningfully and with awareness of like they are using it.
So adoption might happen more behind the scenes. The technology is there. We don’t even know that it happens. And it grows in the back, but not necessarily with this big shift moment that we had like back in 2021, 22, where there was a huge step in of hundreds of millions of users for different reasons, mainly like speculation and speculative outcomes that step into crypto. And one of the reasons, probably also many of them got burned by that, unfortunately, from Trumpcoin to FTX event, Terra Luna event, et cetera, when everyone saw their loss, like it’s going to be difficult for convincing once again that there is value in there beyond the speculation.
Host
What should founders and investors do to be prepared for the next bull cycle?
Kenneth
Well, I think it’s really focusing on real value creation, which is not very common in this space right now – like focusing on revenue generation, building products people are willing to pay for.
Like we are hosting a hacker house right now, just 10 minutes from here. We mentor almost 15 teams. Every single question that we ask is: Why would people pay for this? What kind of data are you issuing? What is the traditional business model right now? How much are you paying? What’s the market size? Why do they want to pay for that product? And I think this question is not being asked enough.
And especially the last cycle is basically, hey, let’s launch a token and make it really cool and sounds cool. So yeah, that would be really high-powered, I would say.
Alex
100% I think it’s the right approach, especially I know people ready to pay for this or not, because I know last cycle or maybe last several years, I know a lot of people build something that is more from performance side, from technology side, instead of understanding what is real customer pain points and how our solution will solve these customer pain points.
And it’s another big issue. It’s the reason why we have a lot of chains and not a lot of use cases, unfortunately. And yeah, the main advice: just keep building and think about product-market fit.
Sebastien
Well, the way I see it is, basically we kept Sandbox as one of the flagship projects in the space, even like we keep launching new product, partnership, and driving adoption through selling NFTs and having concrete utility behind. Now luck only comes to those who are able to survive through the hard time.
And sometimes we say like founders are lucky. No, like founders are just more to navigate than holds. So we look at what are the strengths of Sandbox? And typically it’s our brands, our brand partnerships, our creators community, and the Sand token.
And we’re going to launch this year a certain number of new projects and initiatives that will grow the perception that people have of Sandbox to be not just the virtual world it is now, but a larger ecosystem that taps into the token, its utility, its adoption, and the brand name that we have.
Host
Great. Well, thank you everybody for participating and thank you VNTR, Yuri. Appreciate it. Let’s give a round of applause to the participants.
