Aliya Das Gupta - Opportunities in CeDeFi

Transcript

thank you guys for being here I know this is the vampire session of the day it's the second last one I just noticed on the schedule so I appreciate your patience your diligence especially when the weather is so nice outside to be here um so before I fully dive into what we're doing though I have quick show of hands of um do you guys know who Signum is uh not so many all right cool so I'll give you a very quick overview of uh who Signum is first and then I can tell you what we're doing with cd5 so Signum is the world's first uh digital asset bank it's founded in Switzerland and in Singapore we have uh now 250 employees and we were built with a digital asset

Focus so we started the the concept began back in 201617 where we worked with finma to explain how we can actually regulate digital Assets in existing regulatory Frameworks and we received our banking license two years later in 2019 and and uh today in 2024 we have over 4 billion in Assets in custody 1,800 clients around the world and clients in 70 countries and we like to say basically everywhere except America um but we're also backed by some of the bigger names in the industry like animoca Brands bitrock and so on as a bank you are typically also get you know your classic iban accounts and Swiss frank US dollar um Swiss Swiss frank US

dollar Sing dollar and uh Euros but also you can buy sell trade all of your crypto assets directly from your ebanking portal you can stake your assets we're an Institutional grade custody provider so that means that you know you really know that your assets are safe and regulated by the by finma here in Switzerland and that's that's interesting right it's cool that there's a bank that's gives you access to crypto like well done but we'll get to the good stuff I promise uh we're regulated in Singapore Luxembourg and UAE and um what I really like to emphasize is what does it mean to be regulated so you have lots of players in the space that say that they

are regulated financial institutions but being a fully licensed Bank means that all of your crypto assets stay off balance sheet and that means that when you know things go absolutely upside down um if there's a bankruptcy event if there's a liquidation event any of these things with Signum uh all of your assets are simply transferred back to you you returned your private keys there is no counterparty risk which is usually the biggest concern with banks and also with working with um custodial institutions as we saw in 2022 so with these other institutions they're typically quite easy to set up but uh tents that are quick to set up don't really do well in

Stormy Weather and that's why it's still important to have fully regulated players like Signum in the space so all the things I talked about so far was yeah yeah Bank cool to have a bank what do we do with defi first the overview right so we've got um CI providers very very categorically different from what all the D5 providers in the space do the D5 ones are exciting they're cool they have lots of new opportunities on the CI side um they have easier access maybe there's some partially regulated um but there is still a lot to be uh discovered I think in the integration of both of these sectors so at Signum we talk a lot about cdy which

is really embracing the innovation of defi but doing so within the regulated Frameworks of the traditional world and that means honoring you know the rules of kyc the rules of AML and making sure that whatever we're doing as we innovate we're not breaking things we at signal we say um The Future Has Heritage and that is we believe in this like great you know super Sovereign really well uh individualized world of Finance but the direction there is from where we are today and that means we have to move with care and with and taking the institutions with us so on the defi side of course it's really permissionless it's inclusive anybody can go on there do whatever they

want they've got flexible composable money Legos but there are these risks that you don't really know who your counterparties are a lot of the time and there is the risk of key loss you know there is no fail saves on the CI side it's kyc it's permissionless and so on but also it's very slow I mean everybody in this room knows that there's a lot that the traditional world can gain from defi but the truth is if you want the institutions to come if you want the institutions to play you've got to bring in these safeguards that make it safe for them to do so so how do we do this when I was building this presentation I kind of went through the bank I went to

all the Departments and said hey guys give me give me a good story what are we what are all the things we're doing and the truth is I have probably I don't know another 20 slides or so but and I don't think I'm going to be able to cover all of them so we're not a huge number in this room so I would basically encourage you to jump in and ask me if there's something that pops up along the way that you think is interesting if there's something more you want to know because then I can spend more time on the stuff that actually is um interesting to you all so the first one the most obvious one probably is ecosystem support so uh we work with network security and governance for a whole bunch of protocols which is running their valid data nodes running

governance for them um and we do this through our Venture arm then we have uh Signum rise which is really designed to support younger players in the space which is uh help them with their fundraising help them with um connections with the in the ecosystem especially when you're starting out it can be quite challenging and so there's a specific arm dedicated to just supporting this ecosystem and then the third is of course uh the clients of the bank where you get access to banking services so on the first leg you've got you know um definity costos lease and Clayton these are all networks that we work with that we run valid dat nodes for and um then in turn also support their

ecosystems at the bank and with our rise initiative so there's of course you get a bank account which is great um you get to fundra in a compliant way which is actually quite challenging because in many parts of the world there isn't a lot of clarity around what you really need to be doing to make sure that you're being compliant and so when you work with the bank at the outset you already know that um in the future whenever regulation does come you can always point back and say hey look we we started on the right foot we were we wanted to be compliant and we worked with the most regulated player in the space to ensure this and then like I said on the community side matchmaking

with other VCS um working with our social media coming on a podcast um we have demo days and VC days so there's all these ways to encourage smaller younger startups in the space to grow and gain visibility and credibility from being associated with a bank like us um regulated staking Solutions this again seems kind of um yeah anybody can stake assets you know what's the big deal but actually imagine doing this inside your own banking UI so logging into a UBS portal maybe there's Bitcoin there you can buy some Bitcoin great but imagine being able to just take your ethereum and then get a tax statement at the end of the year on what your reward your taxation is on the rewards that

you've um gained and doing all of this through a really simple easy user interface and knowing that it's from a regulated banking provider so today we offer ethereum cardano definity tesos and Cosmos but this list is always growing so those are kind of like the low hanging fruit right what else are we doing so um in the asset management space I talked about this earlier on the panel that I was on we really were looking at how to expand our offering so the first thing with asset management is of course like you know buy a single token great now what pooled investment Solutions okay you can bring a couple of

things together put a strategy on top of it then you've got uh an interesting product perhaps then you want to create the next level which is an Institutional grade solution for uh larger players to also participate in the crypto space all of these things are offchain these are just banking products so we said we also need to build something that's happening on chain and how do we and leverage kind of the power of C crypto in the assets that are also crypto and so in case it wasn't clear why are onchain solutions uh important or interesting um they're super scalable there's a lot of speed uh increase in speed um the amount of oversight or not oversight but the amount of man or person hours dedicated

to managing all of this is a lot lesser and for the last for the individual who's actually doing the investment you get a lot more personalization in the actual assets that you're investing in so it gives you this this level of individualization on investment strategy that typically would not have been possible unless you are you know an ultra high net worth individual or something like this but when you're doing this onchain and doing it through a bank suddenly a lot of these things become options for you as well and of course increase transparency so at the end of the day you can always log on see onchan and exactly what your nav is um how your assets are performing you don't have to wait for the end of the month for an asset manager to generate one specific like sheet and then also have

to trust that sheet here you can see everything on chain which is fantastic so we decided to work with uh enzyme Finance uh they're based here in cich they're uh they've been around for a while so when we were looking into the market looking into what we wanted to do it was really important to partner with a provider that really prioritizes institutional grade features so this includes things like subscription queuing because we've got a whole bunch of people bringing money in we can't have them going in one after the other and that means that everyone gets different value on their trades so being able to do that in a way that everyone has these individual books but has them also at an even uh with an even trading record um the governance model how do we

make sure that um everything that's happening on chain is also being governed in a way that doesn't allow rug puls to happen doesn't allow the original protocol creators to step in and then change the Rules of Engagement halfway through cuz we all know that this is still possible there is a back door for a lot of the D5 protocols out there and then also ensuring that the market makers that we work with are verified because with finma with being a fully regulated institution this is something that's super challenging we have to know that the counterparties that we have even if it is um you know happening in not inside of Signum necessarily but on um enzymes interface that the counterparts we work with over

there are also verified so we really got this Buy in from the enzyme team to work with us on a compliant um vision and this is a very high level of uh what the actual solution looked like so you can see that the client works with Signum storage and Signum score banking solution then there is a pulled wallet that engages with the enzyme interface enzymes interface Works only with um a specific Market Market maker that we've prev vetted and decided and said that is okay um and the enzyme governance Council has an owner wallet but then Signum is also involved in the

governance of that so it eventually creates a solution that enables us to kind of unleash the power of blockchain in a kind of classic Asset Management solution another uh cool product that we're working on is called social recovery this one's very close to my heart because it's something that I'm personally working on as well um you all probably know I talked about key loss uh earlier on but also in the crypto space there's been a lot of conversation around uh multisig social recovery so everyone knows that EAS are quite um risky as a place to store all of your assets and so you typically people would need a smart contract wallet and in that

smart contract wallet like it's nice if I make my mother or my husband or somebody else um sign signatories with me but what says that they're going to be able to actually come in and retrieve my assets should things go really badly and so there is a rule role here for institutions to play you can have your own devices you can have your family and friends but there is an important role that institutions need to play and we believe that Signum because of where we sit in the ecosystem is the right sort of person to enter the market and um offer this solution so we we work with um safe it's one of the largest multi-c wallet providers out there it's um in development but this is like a teaser of

what the solution looks like so it begins with identification I know that a lot of the pure DJ people feel that you know kyc is a problem but I'm sorry if you're working with a bank kyc is a part of the story get on board um but you have to identify yourself uh you subscribe to the service and then let's say you know things go terribly you lose your access you lose your key so then you come to Signum report your loss event you um reidentifying with custody in any sense

because we're not touching the funds at all right so this is a kind of example so let's say Alice Bob and cam have a vault which is set up as a two of three multi uh Alice and Bob both lose their access um and in this case they trigger a recovery Signum steps in and reassigns Alice's wallet to a new wallet and then Alice can continue to access the Vault with Cam because now they have a two of three setup again what have we done in this case is to show that Signum never actually touches the Vault you never touch the funds we have no contact to the money that's in the vault and also we've put in in place a buffer so this means that when you trigger a

recovery um your whichever uh notification devices that you've enlisted into the setup get a notification saying hey look something's going on with your safe is this something that you wanted or not and then there's a 7-Day period or a 30-day period depending on what you choose as your setup but then you can go in and you know move your assets out if this was not something that you wanted to do and in that way s kind of defines and codes into the actual produ product distance from the assets and that's what was really important to us because this is clearly not a custodian setup so from our side what are the safeguards we've put in one is um split recovery so within the bank as well there's the product team and then there's the banking compliance team and both of them

have to accept a recovery transaction or swap um there's the buffer period that I just talked about which means that you continue to have onchain veto rights you can stop this thing from happening if you don't want it to happen um where technically limited so the only thing we can do is swap out your wallet but we can't touch the funds we can't increase the number of um uh wallet holders decrease them none of that our capabilities are quite severely limited um we have uh the identification process and then in the reidentification process you are interviewed by a banking officer uh and then depending on the size of your Vault there's a risk weighted approach to how much more we also do like whether it's our compliance team

the head of our compliance team who else gets involved to ensure that this is uh happening the right way and then of course because as a bank we have a lot of oversight and our smart contract and our codes to make sure everything is audited so if you guys are interested you can uh scan this QR code and um join our wait list this product will be coming out I'm hoping by the 23rd of May but I will not commit because I'm going to hear from my uh product owner on Monday but the plan is very third am I out of time already almost okay um I'll talk about this one as my last case I have two more studies but I will stop after this one uh you

guys might have seen some of the big um Boh Hardings around town right now we're really proud to be working with post Finance Signum actually supports the backend for a lot of banks to engage with crypto so you might have seen you know with bardier with Society General pkb bison Bank um V said but also Finance is really exciting because it's a state-owned bank it is 30% of sign uh Signum no Switzerland's population that can now engage with the crypto and you might ask why why would kind of you know an old school state-owned Bank want to come on this journey with us so the story is actually really interesting um in 2020 post finance's profits were 129 million in 2021 they were 223 million

and in 2022 they saw 300 million of assets from from their Bank being moved to Kraken to binance to okx to crypto exchanges so they knew that their clients were actually interested in this and if they didn't get on board of get on board this wagon they were going to just lose in the long run and it was so kind of heartening to see some to see kind of what you would think of as a bit of an old school Bank to really see the numbers and understand that they have to come on the journey as well so um they worked with Signum I mean it was a longer Journey because of course there's a lot of steps and you're going within a large Bank like post Finance but eventually um it was last year that we

announced it and this year that it actually went live and uh as a postan customer you basically can buy a lot of crypto and you can do this through Signum I have more stories to tell but no what I'm good how much time do I have two three minutes cool so I want to talk also about tokenization because we've been doing some really exciting things in this space uh you might have seen um matter Labs which is of course the the the the organization of ZK sync zky era and um Fidelity which you know you probably also have heard the name of they decided to tokenize a part of their treasury into the Fidelity multimarket Fund and put this on zky era through Signum so

matal Labs is known again for ZK s era they have about 500 million sitting in their treasury like through funds that they've raised um Fidelity International has uh more than 2.9 Million customers around the world and has over 770 billion uh assets under management and this money market fund in specific that we worked with was is almost $7 billion uh deep and matal labs to participate in it would normally have to you know withdraw these assets make them into Fiat deposit them in the account which means that a it's not super transparent because their investors can no longer see what the money is and B it's kind of taking value out of the blockchain ecosystem it's putting it directly in um trafi so what we did was

um issue a token against the investment into the money market fund so all of these assets continue to be part of the tvl of ZK Sy era it doesn't move away from there and what's really important is that for all the people who are part of the ZK ecosystem they can see this on Shan they can see on Shan where these assets are what the positions are and it really just increases the levels of accountability of uh transparency that you have towards your your ecosystem and being able to then for zking to be accountable for that is I think a big step forward for Dows and DOW treasuries while still benefiting from traditional

Financial assets that might be living off chain so now I will will stop do you guys have any questions for me yeah do you build your corem uh no we have a core banking system that you know the rest of s question you run in both both so we have a um there are some protocols that we run in house some that are external um and then the only thing more to say about this is that this is these are all like great stories to tell but they are not quick things to happen all of these things are a journey and Signum

is very much on that journey and uh thank you for letting me share some of that with you today thank you [Applause] ell any other questions I'm happy to yeah if there are other questions just please wait for the mic but I think we're good super thank you so much [Applause]