Institutional-grade protections for crypto markets

Transcript

[Music] Perfect. I've got the green light. I can get started. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for being here. I know it's after lunch. It's very hot outside. So, hopefully this is a nice place to get a little bit of respite and also enjoy um the story I'm going to tell you. Um this I know is meant to be the demo stage but actually today what I'm going to talk about is you can see it maybe as a demo and uh you'll understand why at the end but before I kick off everything that we're going to talk about the first question is how many of you are familiar with signum have you heard of signum just a show of hands wow

almost no one love it okay perfect this is uh it's not so often that that happens anymore so I'm very happy to tell you just the elevator pitch at least Uh, Signnum is the world's first digital asset bank. We've been around since uh, 2017 when we were conceived in 2019 when we got our banking license. So, we have the same banking license as you know, HSBC or UBS in uh, Switzerland. We work with primarily crypto companies. In fact, we don't have a single client that doesn't have something to do with crypto. And so, it's uh, perhaps becoming more common now for banks to be a part of the space.

But certainly in 2019, this was not uh, there weren't many players doing what we do. And in terms of our offering, it's kind of classic banking services. Iban, you know, Swift, SEPA payments. And for if you look on Coin Gecko at the top 100 listed projects, about 70% of those actually use Signum for things as simple as, you know, paying their rent, paying salaries, you know, everything that everyone needs access to traditional infrastructure for. And Signum is able to support that. Uh, of course, we're also a cryptocustodian and um a broker enabling on and off ramps. Uh but that's what we call our value added service that we add in addition to all the other things that we do. Uh we have today over 5 billion in assets in um custody and uh

more than 2,000 clients around the world. These are all uh institutions and uh ultra high net worth highet worth individuals not retail and um we work with over 20 banks providing them the back-end infrastructure to have access to crypto. So uh some of the ones are labeled here for example Post Finance which is one of the biggest uh banks in Switzerland uh now offers their 3 million clients access to crypto directly from their application and it's simply a white label of the signum text stack. So yeah we do this for more than 20 banks we are located across the world now in many places. uh Switzerland is where we have our kind of headquarters with more than 200 uh employees but we also have presence in Singapore, the UAE and uh in the EU now as well in

preparation for Mikar. Uh in addition to the features I talked about before, there's also uh tokenization which I'll talk about and uh rete where we also offer crypto compliance as a service to other players in the industry. Now, why is a bank a different or an important thing to have in the ecosystem? Everybody at the back, come in front. There's plenty of space here. Um, everyone knows the tragic story of 2022 when we saw multiple players actually crashing in the industry. Uh, people who were exposed ended up losing a lot of their money. Some of them hopefully have regained their funds now.

But the benefit of a bank is that even um when times are stormy it's uh all of your assets are always held off balance sheet and that means that once if you ever you know run into issues or if we run into issues rather uh you are simply returned the uh private keys to your accounts you crypto assets are never part of any bankruptcy um proceedings and that's what makes us really special because with any uh place where you're holding your crypto assets, they often say right not your keys, not your crypto. Uh but at Signum, actually your crypto is always your crypto because it can't be part of any uh bankruptcy or uh story like that. So we're clearly in the

story uh era of institutional influx, everyone's finally here. We've been here since 2019 and so we've learned some things along the way. And the question is what really happens when institutions uh enter? And to this effect, I have uh set up what I call the institutional playbook. And you see how institutions grow as they engage with the space. So step one, let's use the technology. We don't believe in the asset class, but the technology can do something. And so the earliest headlines that we saw around this was uh first public bond on uh first digital green bond on a public chain or UBS issues tokenized USD money market fund and so on. This was the first kind of era of people

experimenting a little bit with the tech stack because they believe in the technology and not the asset. Um this was also a little bit where sign came at the market back in um 2019 when we got our license. One of the first things we started working on as well was setting up a tokenization uh unit within the bank which had um both the issuance platform as well as the secondaries market. And so over the years we've done started with art and collectibles with wine and a Picasso painting. Uh we did a tokenization of matter labs you know ZK sync with money market fidelity international. And today we offer a lot of um uh different types of assets that typically you would never have access to. So access to a money market fund

like Hamilton Lane you can do through through the signum account which is um typically you would be able to enter at let's say 125k and today you can buy in for 5,000 Franks and that is really one of those like stories of how you democratize access to more complex financial instruments through the operational efficiency chain of being on chain. And so what's the thesis? What's the learning? Clearly we're going to see a lot more assets on chain. We're watching that happen in real time. Um the operational efficiency uh enables accessibility of more complex assets to wider audiences. And if you think about what the stable coin did for more far-flung markets, you know what we see in um Argentina or Uruguay or places

where the financial system is less developed, tokenization is going to actually bring all of that flexibility to those markets as well. And it has already brought it. It is bringing it in real time. uh as I think regulation becomes more mature, we'll see the growth of this go further as well. So step two of the institutional playbook is uh let's provide them access to this new exciting asset class. So you know you saw the Bitcoin ETF launch and it's it's amazing. It's unbelievable. I think everybody was surprised at how rich the uptake for these asset classes were. And of course when Signum was launched that was our first pitch as well. We wanted to have this integrated offering between fiat and crypto. And so similar how signum also came at the same

problem. But with our banking license, we were very clear that we wanted to provide access to the underlying. We didn't want to have all these layers of um you know any synthetic wrapper or additional fees. And while we started of course with Bitcoin and Ethereum as well, over time we now offer more than 50 different assets on multiple chains. So again, what's the learning? The learning is that um clearly we see access to the asset class growing and we believe that there will be further access to the underlying as well. We will see more ETFs coming the um let's say the launch of more basket products where you have um institutional access access to more rules-based passive strategies which enable access to

different sectors. We'll see more of this as well. And then synthetic access which also enables you know leverage positions um products with yield and this is an example of this of course is uh the staking ETFs which are promised not here yet but potentially soon. So step three is uh what we're seeing in the headlines literally in real time is everyone uh launching their stable coin or stable coin settlement network. I was at money 2020 uh last week which is a very very fintech conference. It's not a crypto event at all and I swear at least 30 to 40% of the boots I saw there were stable coin were talking about stable coins so it's really coming very far into the mainstream and uh Signum also

thought about this. We were like oh yeah stable coin makes sense. So we did this in 2019 let's launch our own digital CHF but of course when you're coming to the market and you have your own coin and you're the first one there it's a little bit lonely and so uh it was a fun experiment. we still, you know, have it, but now we've understood that we have to actually work with larger ecosystems in order to have the impact and the efficiency that these uh stable coins provide. And so we also have the Swiss deposit token initiative and project Agora, but when you're playing with the bigger ecosystem, I think it's a bit more of a journey to see exactly how um to what extent we'll see the impact. And so what now? I realized that a lot of

what I've said now makes us look really good. But that wasn't the only agenda today. Uh it was also to think about where we're headed because at Signnum we've had a hypothesis and so far we've really seen that play out, right? Every step that we've taken or we took back in 2019, we've seen the banks kind of following along. And so that only goes to say, okay, what's next? And so yesterday or two days ago, we saw um Bitcoin back loans being uh something that's coming up. And again, at Signum, we got our banking license in 200 Oops, this is not the right slide.

I'm missing a slide, but the SL the what I wanted to talk about was um back in 2019, we of course got a banking license, which meant we could already give out loans against Bitcoin. And more recently, literally in 2025, we've seen that our clients are very eager to take advantage of uh staked asset loans. So what happens is that it becomes a free line of credit because the staking yield actually pays off the cost of the credit and that means that uh you effectively have free money that you can use in for any any retail purpose or any purpose outside of the crypto industry even. And what does that mean really? Like it's so interesting to observe because it's really the blurring of traditional and crypto assets and the legitimization of

these different types of cryptocolateral uh just really enables access to greater lines of credit. And then the observation that I took away from this was uh we're seeing traditional rappers on crypto assets and then we're seeing crypto rappers on traditional assets and clearly this is a intermediary step. Right now, this can coexist maybe in the short term, but in the long term, we really will see the more efficient one win out play out. And so, that's what we're trying to do at Signnum with the safeguards for institutional crypto. Um, why do we need these? It reduces the conflict of interest. It improves risk management.

It enables more regulatory oversight. And of course, investor protections because you need all of these things for institutions to feel comfortable engaging with the space. And so the first one was of course bringing that kind of capital efficiency onchain but I mean onchain we anyway have it we see a lot of capital efficiency but having that offchain as well. So you know enabling brokers and institutional investors and liquidity providers to all um settle in real time. This is with signnum connect and then of course um off exchange custody which is really one of the need of the hour which enables you to hold um treasuries so the actual underlying asset but to have that as a line of credit that you can use on big exchanges. So we work currently with uh Binance with Dairbit many more in the

pipeline um where you have this line of credit that you can use uh to engage in your trading but all of your collateral is actually held completely safe in a fully regulated Swiss bank. And so this is again one of those like small little offerings that enables institutions to feel safer entering the big crypto arena. So that is the future. The future is here and uh we're building it but we're also always open to everyone's inputs to ideas. I worked I work in business development but also in product innovation at the bank. Always looking for new ways in which we can grow the industry. So feel free to reach out afterwards but uh it's my pleasure to have presented this to you today and thank you very much.

[Applause] [Music]