EN | The Future of Asset Management in a Digital Asset World | MERGE Madrid 2025

So hello hello Mish Madrid. It's it's a pleasure to be here. It's such a wellorganized event and we're going to talk about the future of asset management uh with these three guys on the right of me. Um I let you guys introduce you but I don't I had a better timing for this event since well all the assets are doing alltime highs. um maybe we're witnessing a change of regime and yeah it's excited to talk about uh the future of of asset management digital assets etc.

So we can start by you Bruno.

Yeah. Uh thanks. So I'm Bruno Sosa. I'm one of the founders at Hashtex. Uh Hashtex is one of the first uh crypto fund ETF managers globally.

Uh we started off in Brazil 2017 2018. Uh we have ETFs, CTPs in Brazil, here in Europe, uh in the US, uh close to two billion uh AUM today, and we're the largest um index crypto index manager globally. Our focus is on index uh ETFs mostly. Next, we've got Max here.

Hi guys. Yeah, Max uh founder CEO of Coinchange. We're actively managed u asset management fund and a platform out of Canada. We have a presence in US Geralta Europe manage around $200 million actively managed across D5 and CFI mostly trading strategies. So I'm going to be talking about active management

and we've got Karim here.

Uh so yeah, hi everyone. I come from 21 shares. We are one of the largest crypto ETF issuers in Europe. We have around 14 billion dollars in AUM. Uh we've just launched our 50th product.

So we span all across the crypto ecosystem and yeah it's a great opportunity considering where the market is at right now to be to be getting into some of the weeds about this.

So Bruno you're based in New York. Um and from your vantage point uh how is demand uh for digital assets evolving among institutional clients and what barriers remain uh for bigger adoption? Yeah, I I mean we've seen the story of institutionals are coming uh for years. Uh this doesn't mean much when you read it in Twitter. You know, people mean different things by institutional, right?

Uh the the fact of the matter is that globally aum in crypto products has been mostly retail. Uh that started to change after the US ETFs came out early last year. Right? So you can start if you look at the tape you can see some you know large sovereigns you know Mubatala uh some some you know corporate investors too into the US ETFs mostly uh so that's a big trend if you look at Europe uh most of the institutionals they would be if I mean what let's say professional investors is probably a better term uh family offices private banks Switzerland mostly u few let's say you know investment advisors in some other countries but still early. So, so that means that I', I'd say probably the exception there is Brazil.

When you talk about institutional adoption, Brazil, I think, is by far the most advanced country in the world. If you look at the large banks, most of them have active crypto offerings. You can buy, you know, uh you can buy the tokens in your Itu app, in your BTG app. Uh you know, very traditional banks like Braesco, Bank of Brazil, so on. Uh if you look at the US, this is still starting.

Uh I mean the the gates being open from the different gatekeepers. Uh but yeah, it's I I mean the hardest part is is behind us. I think we're we're just bringing legitimacy to the asset class. It's there already.

So now we're going to start seeing bigger and bigger inflows into the products.

You know, even uh Citadel Ken Griffin yesterday, he said that the Bitcoin is a debasement trade. So people don't trust fiat no more, right? Not euro, not a dollar.

So they're starting to buy gold.

Yeah. Yeah.

Alltime high,

Bitcoin alltime high. So, it's part of the debasement, not only the institutional adoption, but also debasement because people don't trust the currency as much.

Yeah. Well, I'll take the this comment. I do you think we're witnessing a change of regime, Max, in terms of monetary regime or is it we're at a crossroads right now? You'd say,

listen, it's impossible to predict anything with Trump, right?

Yeah,

man. He farts here, says something there. The markets are all over the place,

right? I mean, it looks really nice on surface, but under the surface, not a lot of people are making money either.

Yeah.

A lot of funds are losing money that are actively management. Uh because

it's very unpredictable. There's a lot of manipulation to the market as well. I mean, it's a pretty thin market crypto compared to

stocks or currency markets. So, it's still kind of a nice Bitcoin is growing, but I'm not sure that a lot of people are making money. So, maybe the OGs that bought it like for 2,000 bucks, 20,000 bucks, but under the surface. I mean, the adoption is there. Obviously, it's nice.

Everybody loves Bitcoin. It's here to stay. And the debasement thing helps, but overall in terms of the like you like retail, not I think retail is also pretty bad. I mean, right now BNB memecoins like if you guys I don't know heard of it, BNB is at all time high as well.

Yeah.

Right. Why? Because memecoins, right? And memecoins that Salana Salana became a people's chain just because of memecoins. So BNB is doing the same right now.

And uh by the way there it kind of looked nice. I looked at the stats yesterday out of 100,000 traders on uh memecoins B&B chain 70% made money. I mean for now right they did a report yesterday but I think the retail is still coming right now. So memecoins is usually the indication of liquidity.

Where the liquidity coming and where is it sitting? So I think the retail is going to start coming in right now as as always like exit liquidity. So retail comes often quite late, right? I mean, we're not retail. People who are here, they're far from retail because you guys are in the know.

You're in the market. You're following.

But people that don't follow daily, they come quite late.

So trying to time the market.

I got to say, I wasn't expecting talk about memecoins in such an institutional event in the second question, but that's fine. Uh so what what would you say uh institutional investors can do to manage risk uh with this volatility intrinsic volatility that crypto brings uh

who are you asking

max yeah

so how do how to manage volatility in the crypto markets

yeah risk

depending on what you're trading crypto markets are so big I mean you can look at defi markets right and you can look at memecoins you can look at uh market making you can look at ETFs they're pretty low risk I mean still a rapper but pretty low risk you can look at that digital asset treasury businesses that people buy to get exposure, right? I think volatility I mean in crypto is everywhere just which volatility are you willing to take and if you're not professional investor you're going to get screwed sooner or later anyways. So volatility is really hard to manage. Uh you have to be a professional asset manager to do that

as well as regulatory risk, legal risk. You know volatility is just one of the little pockets of that that risk. people trade volatility professionally and extract gamma or whatever you know profit they feel uh possible that market so

it's hard to manage volatility pretty much

okay so Karim uh you come from the ETF ETP side um institutions have been adopting uh in the past year year and a half uh uh well buying these ETFs at a big rate um would you say that uh with all these assets making all-time highs, Bitcoin, achieving very close meme coins, etc. And that the retail opportunity to be ahead of the big money is already gone or you say that there's still opportunity out there because the market has still ways to go.

I think there 100% still is an opportunity because like it's not an information edge anymore because everyone has access to the same information and institutions are aware of Bitcoin and Ethereum and all the large caps. But if you look down the longer tale of risk assets, uh you have things like Legion and Echo. These are ICO launchpad platforms that democratize access to private opportunities that only institutions gained access to before. Some of the most successful launches recently were things like Plasma. The the stable coin chain people did 300x on initial investment and people were allowed to invest up to $100.

So they democratized access but they also made it very much accessible uh to to the small retail. You have things in DeFi. Uh in DeFi even though it seems like we've we've gone through a lot of it there is still a lot of really cool new innovative products that are coming out whether it's innovations around stable coins. Um in AI we have the same thing. You have things like AI agents uh decentralized AI inference and learning.

Uh so yeah there 100% is still a lot of opportunity. It's just about understanding where the innovation comes from and not just about how in the past two cycles it was more of a p like a a pinball like you just throw throw some darts and hope for the best. It it is not like that anymore but there is an opportunity if you know where where to look at that's that's for sure. And Hyperliquid even if you look at Hyperlid this was one of the most successful uh retail driven community funded uh launches. did like what 60x 70x and there were no VCs in it.

Yeah, you have Aster right now, right? By by CZ as well.

It's debatable how how it got so much traction but that's a topic for a different

for a different time.

Listen, in terms of the volatility, I was thinking I read also something yesterday S&P for the last five years is like 106% up in five years, right? But in Bitcoin terms, it's 88% down, right? So I mean the again the debasement of the currency make all the investments look good on paper when you really earning something in dollars but if you

benchmark it against another asset it might be losing or gold or bitcoin right so

yeah a open question for the panel like it's been a common perception for many years that there was some career risk for asset managers to hold crypto or bitcoin on their portfolios and the tide seems to be changing particularly in the US h but would you say that is it something now that it's reversed like is there career risk maybe for some of these guys to not hold crypto refuse to hold crypto uh it's started to change uh it's not completed yet right and it's directly proportional to the size of the institution right so the larger the bank or platform or gatekeeper the slower the movement that's expected

uh if you take you know Swiss banks which are interesting example given you know the breadth of you know clients and services that they have you have private banks that have been you know dabbling in crypto for their clients for a long time but if you go to you know UBS or you know pt the larger banks you're still not there so so it's still a factor and very much concentrated at the top so you depend on approval from CEO level CIO level for the bank to open up the gates uh down uh that's where I think the US can leaprog some of the U the European banks. Uh we're seeing accelerated movement in the US in that direction. Uh but make no mistake, this is still very much concentrated on Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, maybe ETH. Uh you talk to most of these guys, they've never heard of Salana. You think Salana?

So anything beyond ETH is already very very out.

Okay.

Okay. So uh uh then of course we come with the index narrative which is different. you know, index investing is something that uh that you know, an adviser, a bank can get behind. So, I I don't understand the market. I'll just buy the market.

Uh but it's always tricky when we talk about, you know, institutional adoption because you see people talking about all the assets and that's like there's no uh professional money in anything beyond uh Solano. It's maybe know and if there is, it's irrelevant. It's a few million dollars.

Yeah.

If you're looking at the top, yes. Then you're going to have Millennium. you're going to have, you know, some big hedge funds, some big sovereigns, uh, some corporates in Bitcoin, and some in ETH, but that's it, right? So,

I would I would add also, I mean, I very much agree with this sentiment, but I would add that specifically for Bitcoin and Ethereum, like risking being behind the curve is much more worse now than uh having measure measured exposure. like even if you don't want to have any exposure to any of these three assets, your policy needs to be clear and to be rational enough to know to say that yeah, we're not we're not touching this for now, but we have to explain why. And I think that's a severe difference from four years ago.

Yeah. Um stable coins, so Max, um they are becoming the backbone of the onchain activity. Um you say are stable coins are the what you say are they are the killer product. uh will uh CBDC's coexist with them. Um it's a big topic.

I heard a lot of panels talking about it.

Yeah, stable coins. Uh yeah, I think there's a little misconception as well. I think a lot of volume comes from trading still. And uh when you see those billions of dollars, I think a lot of that is market makers. A lot of that is in and out liquidity into the between exchanges.

So arbitrage through. there's still a lot of volume more way more volume in trading professional trading asset management on stable coins than retail payments right and those retail payments I mean there's a lot of there's a lot of ways to do payments otherwise like wise.com revolute right all good apps all fast and cheap as well so I think stable coins I mean in the US right now a big debate in the US at least is should we pay yield back to the customer or no right banks don't like that they like to pay 25 bips on uh on on your account right and then uh guys like Circle are trying to advocate to pay some of the treasury uh yield back to the customer who holds the stable coin. So I don't think they're going to make it. I think in Congress they're going to kill it.

And the the banking committee and the lobby is really strong. Not as strong as in Europe. Europe tries to kill a lot of innovation. Right now at least US they're trying to leaprog a lot of that. But there's still a lot of uh pressure from legacy businesses, right?

not to lose retail or the banking deposits that they repopicate otherwise.

So stable coins is a great list and it always been the only use case in crypto that been real. I mean it's the first tokenized asset. We're talking about tokenizing I know real estate tokenizing headphones but really stable coin was tokenized like 12 years ago right by Tether. I mean we can talk about tether I mean uh how how how reserves are backed or you know how business is operated but I mean they are the trailblazers of tokenization of the first real world asset is a dollar. So yeah I mean I think it's definitely huge kind of use case but for me it's also still more trading and more liquidity across the exchanges rather than paying for a Coca-Cola you know in the bar.

We're seeing uh we are seeing some interesting stuff especially in Brazil for those who are Brazilian um on the FX side uh if you look at you know BTG Pak has their own stable coin so that has a dual function one is just exposure of you know your portfolio to USD which is hard in Brazil uh there's no easy way to buy it digitally let's say you know physically you can buy it but an account with USD is something hard so you can just in their app convert to their to their you you know, USD token uh and they're using it for their internal settlements of all of their FX. So that's massive, you know, it's massive volume. I think Portugu's here uh speaking about it. I don't know if you spoke about it yesterday. Uh so we are seeing the Brazilian banks for instance going that direction.

And I think it's always interesting especially this being a LATAM event because people tend to speak about regions and say oh Latam ah latam is you know Argentina's you know you're trying to get away from the currency. That's not the case in Brazil.

Yeah. like you use it for it's it's like saying Asia and you're conflating South Korea, Japan and Laos. Yeah.

Right. So, u uh it's a pet peeve I have and it comes a lot from like the American and European way of speaking about crypto globally.

Uh the use cases of you know stable coins in Argentina, Mexico and Brazil, they'll be very different.

But we are I think one interesting sign is that the thing I most hear about on the street in the US here in Europe when you go to a bank is stable coins. people want to talk about stable. So, so we really hit I'd say first use case in crypto is Bitcoin. So, Bitcoin is there. It's done its thing.

Uh, but the second is stable coins, they can touch it. They understand what it does. Uh, so it's a lot I mean a lot easier for them to grasp its potential rather than you know NFTTS or even tokenization like stable coins they can see it right.

Yeah. And then yeah sorry like in countries also in the Middle East like in Lebanon uh there are super because I have a lot of friends from there there are certain shops that only accept tether they don't even accept the US dollar they they literally have the the sign of tether like above products so it very much again depends on the region and and on the country I don't think as as Bruno has very much clarified like it depend it it it differs from one context to the other but it's it's very much gaining real world usage and even yesterday uh Alium like one of the dashboards that Visa uh uses we just reached 1 trillion in September and organic settlement volume this is the first time that we've ever reached uh that threshold so

yeah that's um we're in Europe and here things you normally are slower if we talk about stable coins the volume it's way way way down compared to the US for example um what we what do we need here in Europe for faster adoption in stable coins and in general in crypto. Have we lost an opportunity with Mika being approved ahead of the Genius Act, for example? Uh is it I mean a train that's gone? I don't know.

I'll I used to be a lawyer. Okay. So, I'll talk as a lawyer. I think there's a very wrong concept uh in Brussels, in Europe as a whole, but Brussels mostly of, you know, innovating through regulation. uh that's not how things work.

That's uh you know and if you look at the contribution of Europe's you know GDP to the world from 2008 to9 to today you know split in half. So it used to be the size of the US now it's half of the US

and it comes down to tech

like all if you look at you know the mech seven the big tech companies uh you know in your apart from Spotify uh you know SAP and uh now revolute if you want to call it so so private there's no relevant big tech company

right so so tech is seen as a negative thing and that affects directly crypto that affects stable coins that affects the whole thing uh so I I think you know we had a leg up on the ETF the ATP space especially here uh but now we're seeing the volumes you know the US are going to take over uh that happened with ATPs that you'll probably see that in other segments of crypto too so it's um I mean it's it's it's Europe's big dilemma right and uh and it's a cultural thing uh and I think we're kind of stuck so

yeah I completely agree political I think and regulatory and culturally kind last maybe what do you said the seven eight n last 15 years probably

and it's a crazy thing I think it comes from the association of tech with social media

and the thing that tech is bad

uh it's a there's a very big stigma around tech and it wasn't like that in 2000 right it's so

I think that know the relevance of you know the contribution of Europe into world technology is diminishing

and uh and that's a shame and the same happens in AI same thing you got to regulate AI before it even exists so there's things Yeah, I think Canada I'm from Canada originally right now live in the US but uh Canada is the same thing. I mean in a little earlier when Nartell Blackberry still was like a household name. There was a lot of startups, a lot of culture of innovation, a lot of risk but right now it's like Norway. Yeah,

Norway is a good example by the way from Europe, right? But uh no risk, very little capital, no startups. Uh crypto is bad. Oh, you're in crypto? Oh my god, I thought you were in the bank, you know, stay away.

And this kind of approach right to people perception right capital slowly just kind of kills the innovation.

I agree.

Okay. Well, we still have five minutes to go. Well, a little bit less than that. So, I want to shoot a rapid fire closing round of questions if you don't mind. Um, in five years, okay, all of these questions.

So if you we look ahead uh five years ahead um where will the capital of crypto world be would you say?

I I would argue that it will be in New York. I think we're going to see multiple capitals of crypto but New York by far

in Asia

I don't think so.

Okay.

Uh I think there's a lot of activity like there's just so much happening in New York. I know that also we don't get we don't give enough coverage and we don't have enough visibility into Asia as much as we've seen with token 2049 like in Singapore. Uh but I do very much think that New York is going to be playing a key role here but

guys I I live in Miami now so I wish it was Miami right and it's kind of a hot spot for crypto right now. Uh New York with the new mayor you know I doubt it. Uh even Ken Griffin yesterday was talking about Chicago. They used to own the full building in Chicago was Citadel. Right.

Right now he said we ran two floors from 13,000 from 1,300 people working at Chicago. 200 is working in Chicago now. 1,200 went to Miami. But I think it's going to be Dubai. So I mean I wish it would be Miami.

I think it's uh Dubai the positioning, you know, the political. I think it's either Dubai or Miami.

Like regulation is very easy there, right?

Regulation is easy. I mean uh a lot of expats, a lot of money, a lot of risky investment into the new frontiers of AI data centers. I think it's either Dubai or Miami.

New York.

I think it's New York just because

the size of the US capital markets is something that's hard to grasp.

Yeah.

Uh unless you start going deep into the numbers. So what we're seeing is like let's say hyper financialization of crypto. Uh so we're talking about the use cases we're talking about stable coins, tokenization stuff that's all you know connecting to capital and financial markets and and that's actually a shame and you know that that we're not seeing more developments on you know deepend some other stuff the other stuff in crypto that's not financial. Uh but while is you know the the main use cases continue being financial capital markets you know developments integrations and just sort of the merge of the stack of the old tech stack in finance becoming you know a blockchain based uh stack uh then it tends to concentrate in in in the capital. I think maybe the interesting question is like who's the biggest losers in that uh biggest losers for me is London.

Uh London's being left behind. Yeah. So the UK is, you know, is is beating Brussels in being bad at uh at policy.

So uh that's one thing. And I I think um Europe as a whole is a loser in that. And if I'd say like New York, Singapore, Dubai, it's uh I think it's obvious hubs. Miami too, but Miami, I'd see it as a subset of the US for tax purposes mostly because the e the ecosystem is more in New York.

You know that I think about New York as well. Yesterday Poly Market raised $2 billion. Yeah.

On 7 billion valuation. So 9 billion PS from ICE.

Yeah.

Right. So it's like obviously there's so much money in New York. It's hard to compete

and financialization of everything right now that happens. I agree. Yeah. It's

one more before before we wrap up as we're running out of out of time. What will the Bitcoin price be in five years?

Five years

depends on so many things.

There's lots of outrageous numbers being thrown out there. So, I mean, don't be afraid of

uh hitting your shot.

20 bucks.

7 750. I call 750.

Okay.

300 to 600. It's it's it's really hard because again, it depends on so many different moving parts. Depends on how this global debt issue is being handled. Depends on if a war a global war breaks.

We don't we don't know anything.

It's curious. If you ask one year, it's if you ask end of the year, it's hard. We're going to guess. You're going to say,

"Yeah, by the way, what's end of the year?"

Could pull up a projection in with some chart.

Five years. I mean, it's really far. Yeah. Any million bucks.

Yeah.

What about end of the year? What do you think?

Yeah. End of the more

150.

150.

Okay. What do you think?

Same.

Same.

Not investment advice. The same blah blah blah blah blah.

Okay. Well, thank you guys. It's been a pleasure having you here. You I mean, you did great. It was very interesting.

And yeah, give it up for our panelists.

Thank you guys.