Asset Allocation & the Institutional Appetite for Digital Assets | EBC11

Yeah, welcome ladies and gentlemen and and thank you very much for being here now for this distinguished panel. Um I hope everybody can hear us. It's it's quite noisy here around but but yeah is it okay? Okay, great. So um everybody knows um the the the Bitcoin ecosystem, the blockchain ecosystem that hasn't been really driven by institutions that that there are a lot of private activities and therefore we are now quite curious um how is the institutional adoption um around digital assets um going on and and we have really a number of of uh highly knowledgeable people here on uh panel and please Wolffred start introducing yourself.

Hi, how are you doing everyone? My name is Wilfred Day. Um I am the CEO for Samora Alpha Management. Uh we are a hedge fund business. We also uh do a separate manage account as well as seat managers in the space being around in the space for eight years.

Uh prior to the digital asset space, I was with uh Deutschbang, UBS, Leman Brothers in traditional finance in credit trading about 17 years. Uh so great to be here. Good to be part of the uh the panel here.

Please go on.

Hi. Um Ka, I work at Seeds Group uh on the bank side. We are a familyrun uh private bank based in Switzerland. We've been active in crypto markets since 2022 when we started offering trading and custody at the bank. We also have a sister company that runs various fund of hedge funds in the crypto space denominated both in dollars and crypto.

and I'm very excited to be talking about asset allocation for private wealth management in digital asset space.

Thank you very much Maurice.

Hi everybody. Uh my name is Maurice Moro. Um I'm uh uh leading a digital asset fund manager out of Rotterdam. Uh we were founded in 2022. We have uh funds in the Netherlands as well as in Gibraltar and we run different strategies all in digital assets uh market delta neutral uh directional and VC and um yeah we're looking forward to this discussion and see if the institutions are finally coming and allocate to our funds.

Yeah. And and Shan.

Hello. Hello everyone. I'm Shyan Hussein. I'm the CEO and founder of Blockb. We are an asset management firm specializing in the crypto space based out of America.

I personally have been involved in the space for several years and as many of you uh I started in the trenches and now it's uh nice to see the institutions coming uh after our tokens. So uh yeah, delighted to be here and uh look forward to speaking to all of you.

Okay. And last but not least, Haymon,

starting from the bottom, now you're here. Uh hello everyone. I'm Haymon Rankin. I am an associate director at Cayman Finance. Uh Cayman Finance is a nonprofit organization that represents the interests of the entire financial services industry in the Cayman Islands as well as the government's interests.

So you know all the big four accountancy firms, all the magic circle law firms, directorship shops, uh you know these are all clients of ours. Uh, you know, you could literally close your eyes, throw a dart on a wall, hit a name of a company on the top 100 in CMC. Chances are they're also one of our clients or one of our clients clients. Uh in addition to what we do locally, bridging the gap between the private and public sector, we also act as a liaison uh on the international scene to help bring contacts into the Cayman Islands to help connect you to the government or to our service providers that we that we look after. So if anyone's looking for uh links to the Cayman Islands, uh I'm your guy and I'm looking forward to this conversation as well.

Okay. Thank you very much. So a few words to my person. I'm the managing director of the German alternative investment association. We represent more than 300 members from private equity, infrastructure, private debt and the hedge fund business.

And we have a huge German institutional investor network. And I will come back later uh to the point of assets allocation of German institutional investors and crypto and digital assets. But now let's uh go to Haymon again and um from from your role um as as your Cayman Finance um how do you look on institutional adoption of digital assets? Uh the way I look at digital assets um you know I've been in the space since 2016 um and what I would say is for me personally I think the one word that you can use to describe where the industry is at right now is maturity. I think we're moving out of the stage of crypto bros and hoodies and you know Converse into a phase where you know people are wearing jackets and shirts and we're trying to really uh move into an institutional uh instead of institutional realm.

So what does that look like? uh you know I think we're we're seeing a lot of people moving away from spot trading more into digital assets right there's a for me you know people say well you still do crypto bro it's like well no not really cuz that has a connotation of trading and that's not really you know at this phase in uh as we say in our lives now that we've made it we're not in that phase of trading crypto anymore it's more so digital assets so what is that right it's tokenized funds it's real world assets ass, you know, it's digital asset treasuries. We're seeing a lot more activity in this space. Um, as I've traveled, I' I'm hearing about a lot of that uh worldwide. I was at Token in Korea last couple weeks ago, but locally in Cayman, we're we're hearing a lot of the same things cuz these people internationally are reaching out locally to get a lot of these structures uh set up in the Cayman Islands.

Okay. Thank you very much. So, as a I always prefer to have interactive panels. One one question to the audience. Who is here an institutional allocator?

Who who is a private allocator? Okay, that that's quite interesting. But but nevertheless get involved in the discuss discussion. You are always free feel free to ask questions to us. But going back here to the panelists and and the institutional adoption, Cheyenne, what is your view?

where are we in the cycle of the institutional adoption with regard to digital assets? So yeah, I think uh Haymon said it pretty clearly and very well is that we are currently seeing a huge transition and that transition has only just started taking place maybe 18 to 20 months back and there are variety of factors that have contributed uh to this happening and of course I feel there is both positives and negatives uh for institutional capital uh flowing into the space. Of course, overall it is positive to get the space into a more uh mature state. Uh having the asset class quote unquote being more legitimate uh in the eyes of new investors and potential new institutional investors. Uh and it's it's been a rough road definitely over especially if you've uh been in the market over the last uh two years.

I think the dynamic really started to change when uh when America declared itself as wanting to become the crypto capital of the world and I think that really started to open a lot of eyes and uh we're looking forward to what's uh what's to come in the future.

Okay, thank you very much Maurice. So what are the ways or the products and structures to to access digital assets from from an institutional perspective? Um I think um and and and this this really goes with the story uh Sean explained as well. You see that the institutions are more um looking at things they know. So they look at strategies they already know in Trefy.

So they're not really looking for a directional exposure uh only but also to how can I uh profit from uh digital assets with for example a market delta neutral strategy or a VC strategy. So uh more things they can explain to their investors but also to the to their own board uh which which is kind of familiar with what they did before. I mean I think this is my fourth or fifth appearance on the stage and each year it's kind of the same. The institutions are coming uh we expect them to come but I think finally this year we can say they actually arrived. I think the ETFs which also is a traditional finance product uh kind of helped them uh open their eyes and and see what what you actually that there's actually a big demand uh and and what Sean said what we now need is is also clear regulation to be able to serve the institutions in a way they are used to in a traditional finance with the products they do and I think there's a lot to come tookenization uh one of them

yeah okay we'll dig deep or we dig deeper a little bit um later on. Um as I said um so our association we have a huge investor network in Germany and we recently have undertaken our annual investor survey among more than 110 institutional investors and when I talk about institutional investors I mean insurance companies pension fund occupational pension schemes family offices and so on and we we look at the alternative asset classes in the institutional portfolio and this year we had in the average an allocation to crypto of 0.5%. Insurance companies, pension funds zero. So there are only the family offices who have a really little minor exposure so far.

Cola, is this a surprise for you this this um this this these numbers or what do you see in Switzerland especially?

No, I'm not surprised at all. I think we've been talking about institut oh institutionalization of crypto for a number of years. Um I think we're all very hasty. We all want to get there. Uh on the panel before we were talking about all that capital that hasn't been deployed.

I think we're at a point today where over the last 18 months between the arrival of the ETFs, the new US administration, we are now seeing every institutional player thinking about crypto. Most of them are still coming to the conclusion that no, they don't want an allocation. So, they are still at zero. And I'm not surprised by that, but they are talking about it. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Remember that, you know, 24 months ago, if you were sitting at a board of a pension fund and you said, "I think we should buy Bitcoin," you would been laughed out of the room. Now, if you go and you say we should buy Bitcoin, they'll probably say, "Ah, let us work it into the risk model. let us think about it where there there is we're not there yet but so it's coming from a private wealth perspective we see clients come to us every day looking for crypto uh there is strong demand it was mentioned before especially uh in relationship to bitcoin this you know association of a store of value of an alternative to gold uh of an alternative to a dollar that could be weakened I think there's this starts resonating more more and more WIS individuals and WIS institutions. We as a private bank are starting to allocate into crypto. We've started doing it through hedge funds and now we're going to do it more directionally.

So it starts step by step but unlike a lot of um other asset classes, think about venture capital, private equity that came from the largest institutional players and trickled all the way down to wealth managers and individual investors. Here we're seeing the reverse. Most people here probably own crypto. So we're having individuals that own crypto. Now we go a bit further.

We're starting having these high net worth individuals, these family offices allocating to crypto. And as it starts trickling higher and higher, we're going to see pension funds, insuranceances, and so on. So I think we're really on the way here, but there's still ways to go before we get to to that point.

Okay. Thank you very much. And now Wilfred, can you share your views on the institutional adoption? what what are strategies and what are asset classes you can access and how can you achieve um a real benefit in the portfolio by adding digital assets and how to generate alpha.

Yeah. So I think uh you know the there are a lot of flavors in uh you know digital asset allocation or in the portfolio. So one component is basically treating the the beta or directionality of it. So in at least in US there's a large presence of ETF. So there's I bit of the world there's also equivalent of uh Ethereum ETF and there lever ETFs out there.

So a lot of institutions already participate in this type of asset form. So forms do matter. The the reason it matters is because a lot of institution are not familiar with the c custodian uh crypto custody there in US there only few qualified custodians for institution institution to get in uh they have to go with someone who is qualified custodian. So having the uh the right form i.e.

the ETF will help them a lot to get into the the liquid asset. Uh that's one component of it. So basically being directional uh allocating um allocating uh capital into uh forms as a more compliant and tax friendly. And the second component I see is uh you know obviously you know eight years ago uh there are very very few crypto institutions. There are a lot of more crypto institutions now nowadays they're growing they grow up over last eight years.

Now they become institutional very very large and they are allocating into the cryptocurrency space and they're more savvy right so they are getting into a defi they're getting into market neutral strategies options trading and so on so forth so those are the alpha players in the uh in the marketplace they're looking for uncorrelated alpha away from uh you know traditional credit products and so on so forth so we see a lot more folks getting into uh D5 for instance over last 16 uh 16 months uh and then you know We'll talk about a little bit later um you know today about you know what happened last Friday and and you know the the sort of the interesting interesting observation I can tell you today is that that uh you know defi strategies themselves are so is on impact in general uh so it's a very interesting uh set of strategies that coming coming into the cryptocurrency space in last 16 months that's unique uh even from uh even from from alpha generation perspective. Yeah.

Okay. Anybody wants to comment?

Well, I think it's a good thing. I still think a lot of institutions see digital assets in their alternative investment basket. So, if you look at waitings, uh, how much do you allocate to digital assets? Um, it's it's still very small numbers because it's still part of an uh part of their portfolio which is probably only 15% normally alternative assets and they're a percentage of. So it will take a while before it uh it it picks up but I think definitely um uh like u said as well um people are thinking about it and talking about it and and that's the the first step to get there.

Yeah, but yeah,

I was going to say maybe one comment on you you talked about last Friday. You know, we're seeing it.

We come back later to to to last Friday. Maybe I'm I'm currently view the challenges for institutional adoption. Um so everybody knows you you have to do a token due diligence to have to proper risk management and so on. So from from your practitioner view, what are the the biggest challenges for for the institutional adoption? Who wants to start?

I believe uh just getting more clarity with regulations, getting a stronger framework uh getting those regulations starting to be implemented for America, especially getting uh getting all the tax regulations sorted, especially uh when we're dealing with the digital asset space. Uh you know, we've had we've had uh discussions in America now about getting tax reforms specifically on capital gains tax with the digital asset space. And I think when we start to see some positive reforms over there, then for sure we will start to see a lot more institutional flow coming in not just to Bitcoin, not just into ETFs, but more for the tokens that were previously only providing theoretical value, but are now also on their way to providing real utility.

Yeah. Hey, for you here at financial center, what are the most relevant topics to give here also a regulatory frame here for the industry?

Well, well, just to go back on the question that you just asked, um I think one of the key barriers, uh it's really not performance, right? It's not really performance of the asset. It's it's all of the processes that you mentioned, right? You have to have that auditor. You need to have key things in place, KYC, AML, all these different things.

And to a large extent, I think one of the key beneic the uh key benefits of using a jurisdiction like the Cayman Islands is you're operating in a jurisdiction that is has high trust, right? Not only does it has high trust because of legal clarity, right, in the laws that we have in the guidance that is provided by our regulator, which is SEMA, the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority. You also have very seasoned experts in the field that can effectively act as a service provider to conduct a lot of these processes that you mentioned earlier which in turn has been breaking down a lot of barriers over the past couple of years. So much so to the point now where we have you know a lot of hedge funds in the Cayman Islands uh and globally uh that are doiciled in the Cayman Islands uh that are that have exposure to virtual assets. There was actually a report done by AMA and PWC who were also members of of our network that looked at the numbers.

So they did a survey and from that survey uh they did they looked and saw how many hedge funds out there had exposure to virtual assets and I think you said it was 01 something in Germany. Uh can you guess what that number is in the Cayman Islands?

Yeah. Can anyone guess?

Maurice, you wanted to comment as well or

No, I want to I want to take a guess. 80%.

80. Oh, that's a great guess. No, it's 49%.

Right. So, nearly 50% of hedge funds are doiciled in the Cayman Islands and over 67% of them have exposure to digital assets. And this report was done last year. So, imagine what it is today, right? Um, so I just wanted to comment on on a little bit of those those barriers you were mentioning

and maybe it's it's of interest for for you as well in in Germany for example uh so-called special funds are um allowed also to invest into crypto directly. So not via any u um um ETPs whatever um there is a specific quot for those funds to directly invest in in in cryptos. We even have crypto hedge funds in Germany. Not as many as in in Cayman of course, but just to demonstrate you that things are changing. They are changing slowly and there is interest there.

But but it will take a while till this changes and one thing and now we come back to

Cola in terms of institutional hurdles. Something that I keep saying over and over again institutionals like to invest passively. you know, they they like to invest in an index. They like to have a benchmark. I think we're still in an industry that's looking to figure out what the benchmark is.

Is the benchmark Bitcoin? Is it a market cap weighted index? I think that's something where uh everyone's trying to do their part. You know, there's hashtags with NASDAQ doing one, there's MCI doing one, but we still don't have this kind of confidence. If you have a client, whether it's a pension fund or an individual who comes to you and says, "Frank, I want to buy the space.

I want to buy the ecosystem. What do you buy? How do you allocate that capital? I think for a lot of uh again institutions not on the fast money, smart money side who they got onto the rails really well, but for all these kind of slower passive people, they're really struggling to understand how to allocate that.

Yeah. Cola mention, you just mentioned confidence. Um and then then we step back a few days. So everybody knows there was the big big Bitcoin short. There was the the biggest uh liquidation we have seen so far in history and um that that was really um mixing up markets at at least temporarily and it it seemed also it was mixing up systems and um with regards to the institutional adoption I think this is or this has been a bad sign.

Yeah. or maybe it was a good sign and and now Cola what do you think how do you evaluate it what what what are your the lessons learned

I'm going to be a bit controversial but in the big picture I think it's a good thing I think that's how the whole space has evolved we need to go through these events we need to clean them out we need to get better I think the there there's two issues around what happened one question is around whether there was some form of insider information to that person who had that massive Bitcoin short that That's that can be treated in court. That can be figured out. It's independent of the system. That could happen on the stock market. That could happen anywhere.

And then on the sell-off, it doesn't really matter about the price. I think the key issue we had is the latency issues at Binance. And that's something that was scary for a lot of, you know, market neutral, high frequency traders. But as a whole for the market, it's going to push institutions become better. Binance are going to review what went wrong.

when you have I don't know if you remember a couple of years ago when you had festivals you try to buy a ticket online and the website would crash they don't crash anymore that's how you get to progress so I think in the short term it creates a little bit of stress but every one of these events in the end uh helps build the industry better and stronger so I think it's going to help institutional adoption over the medium term

Wilfred what are your views on that topic

uh I think it's you know fairly healthy you know if you go back to history you Coinbase has a flash crash here and there. exchanges do get go down. uh you know um so you know the bear in mind that the cryptocurrency exchanges are not equity exchanges right they're not really there are no you know circuit break and so on so forth there are no you know there are no consortium or regulators behind them this is all private markets so by definition they are peer-to-peer network uh so this is very important to remember and differentiates from the traditional or equity uh equity markets so you know if you go back to history you back in 2016 2017 uh compared to today It's day and night differences. So we're much much better compared to even two years ago, right? Uh and then we only see you know we saw Binance made a decision themselves.

Uh and whereas other other crypto exchanges are doing okay. They're relatively okay. So only the problem was the price of oracle from binance and in the crypto world there's also uh like I mentioned defi which is unrelated to a certain degree central exchanges those are unimpacted at all right so so the crypto ecosystem is actually become more healthy uh through this set of events people have more emphasis on decentralized finance uh you know unis swap and and and and uh you know you know other other taxes out there rather than centralized exchanges.

Okay.

Well, I I think the whole event was really bad for the institutional adoption in a way that it kind of showed that um there's a lot of insecurity. I mean, um it was a combination of things, probably an insider trading in combination with an exchange that is not regulated that nobody knows in this audience here where their headquarters is. Um and that doesn't give a lot of confidence in the space from an institutional perspective cuz you want to invest in an environment that you know is regulated, trustworthy and these things cannot happen. And I agree we needed the need to shake out to improve the technology and make sure it cannot happen in the future. But if you were in this boardroom discussing with your compliance team, your risk manager that we yes you need to allocate it to digital assets and this happens overnight.

Well, on Monday you probably get a different feedback that if it didn't happen. So I think um the a regulatory framework is is absolutely necessary. Either we stay where crypto began as a sort of within the cyber punks and uh let's go against the system and and we have our own system and we don't have anything to do with the government or we embrace the technology which has proven itself and is really really solid that really really good and make sure the environment around this is good enough that the institutions indeed say okay yes we need to we we don't need to allocate we cannot go around it anymore it's just part of our business and I think what happened last week was a bit of a well setback in the in the process.

Okay. Thank you. So um I would be interested here to look a little bit here in the portfolios here you have and and also what do you you advise here for clients and maybe we start with with Cheyenne. Um how does your portfolio look like and and and what does your what what are the relevant digital assets you're looking at? So we have a we have a core basket of assets that we accumulate for our clients.

Of course, everyone knows about Bitcoin, Ethereum, uh but we also look at other tokens that are now starting to provide utility uh not only uh via DeFi but also through uh real world asset tokenization. So uh we we like to keep our assets diversified and uh we are uh we are diversifying in the altcoin market as well. uh tokens like Avac, uh Solana of course, Ethereum, Bitcoin and um so on. But um yeah, I think there is a lot of opportunity right now for uh the mid to lower market cap tokens. And once uh we kind of see the attention deviate away from Bitcoin and into other tokens that are offering utility instead of just being a store of value is uh you know it's always good to be ahead of the herd in that regard.

Okay. and and h how important is it for an instit in institutional investor to have bitcoin in the portfolio? I think that depends on the institution. Uh I personally believe it's very important. uh and uh I think over time more and more institutions will want to gain exposure but like uh like our colleagues just now said uh events like 1010 will cause a hindrance uh in uh with the overall space.

uh but at the same time uh these kinds of events are also needed to show the institutions that are waiting on the sidelines that yes uh you know we can go through troubles but it's not like previous years where it's just collapsed and collapsed and collapsed but we had a mean reversion right back uh to almost at the levels that we uh broke down from. So I think kind of seeing that kind of strength and uh seeing uh seeing this kind of dominance from Bitcoin over financial markets is definitely going to continue to be important.

Okay, thank you very much Maurice. How does your portfolio look like and and how why do we need digital assets for portfolio optimization?

Um well the the last part is easy. That's because it correlates differently than all other assets on the long long run. and short

but but there is sometimes a problem with volatility.

Yes. But uh volatility is also uh an opportunity. So it depends on your strategy. Um but strategy has changed. When we began we we offered our clients uh access to the digital asset space was in 2020 it wasn't easy and user friendly to have a whole basket of uh of digital assets of cryptos if you will call it.

Now we see uh it tends to go more to the large coins where there's more liquidity with high conviction bets where there's utility. Uh but again the strategy uh makes a lot of difference because if you're you are in a market neutral strategy there's still a lot to gain in the inefficiencies of the market without having exposure. So that so you can be involved uh without the exposure of the direction and even last Friday showed that you could actually make money with inefficiencies in the market because prices on exchanges differed a lot. Uh we we we've seen on the spot $5,000 differences between a decentralized exchange and a centralized exchange which we could um uh play out with our uh our derivatives. So that means that's very interesting and I think looking at the traditional finance where it's all kind of the same doesn't matter which exchange you are.

Yeah. in in the digital asset landscape. There's a lot to win and a lot to gain and the niche players the early adopters probably all that are here in the in the audience and on the stage uh know how to benefit from it and I think the institutions want to have a pick of that and and and yeah I think they the worst allocation you can have is no allocation.

Good point Kola as you mentioned also wealth management. So what what does it means means from the wealth management perspective to to to invest into digital assets and what what are here the ways to invest and and what kind of digital assets do you advise or recommend for clients?

Yeah. So I'll start by echoing what Maurice just said. I think uh volatility is an opportunity especially when you're allocating a long only portfolio. Uh it's free to reduce your allocation to fit your target volatility. So if something is too volatile, you can size it accordingly.

Uh if something is not volatile enough, you need to take on leverage to make it match your targets and that's costly. So we see this as a question of sizing. We there is no one shoe fits all. Uh we spend a lot of time understanding our clients needs, their perspective, their time horizons. uh our clients are have an inherent bias towards maybe it's because we're based in Switzerland but towards Bitcoin because they like this idea of having a digital store value um an alternative to gold or to other commodities.

Um once you start going through the rest of the stack it becomes a technology question and you mentioned it earlier about how we need to think about due diligencing uh the ideas behind what is the investment case. So this is something we do on a case by case basis. We would typically recommend let's say up to 5% allocation within that space for someone that is not natively exposed to it and that will as of today mostly be through Bitcoin Ethereum although we definitely feel a lot of push to expand that down to the Solana the BNBs uh and so on. That's also why I was mentioning earlier for us we're we haven't cracked the question yet but we're really looking for this you know basket passive solution what fits us best to advise clients because there's a difference between taking a conviction on a token and wanting to gain exposure to to the space.

Uh we are we're a little bit different. uh we don't really care cryptocurrency fundamentals itself. So we're pure market neutral uh discretion sorry quantitative strategies. Uh just give you a little bit more like a context. So if you're trading long shore equity uh in the traditional world you get a 7 uh sharp ratio in cryptocurrency same strategy you'll get two.

So the alpha is quite significant compared to the traditional world. Uh so we think about when we talk to our client we think about where the alpha came from. Uh if the alpha is you know purely uncorrelated unique alpha from an investor's portfolio they can take us as much as they want. Right? So when we start when we started our business we had US dollar USD market mutual fund.

Then we realized a lot of our clients are interested in bitcoin economy. So bitcoin focused fund. So we started where probably the world of first bitcoin denominated market mutual fund and that's a 100% uh beta to bitcoin obviously but we add alpha on top of it. So we're generating uh return on top of bitcoin itself. So that's quite that has been very successful product uh in general.

So you know really depends on how the investor uh think about uh his his or her own own portfolio. if there's a debasement trade involved here. So, gold and bitcoin, oh well, definitely those are the those are in consideration. Uh, you know, we we do see a lot of folks are are coming to you to us say, how do we generate more yield on Bitcoin and most of Bitcoin holders are long-term holders. They're not tourists in in your industry, right?

So,

thank you very much. And of course, I would like to give you the audience the opportunity to pose questions. So, are there any question to the panelists? Yeah. I I don't know.

You have a mic? Yeah.

Here o over here, please.

Hi. Um I'm just curious if uh the members of the panel see.

We can't hear you. Sorry. I am just curious if the members of the panel see a trend for institutional investment to shift in terms of center of gravity more towards Asia and the Middle East and less in Europe. Um it seems to be a trend that has built up over the past few months and seems to be accelerating. I mean, I'm just curious, you know, because even if I look at the composition of the panel, there's I would say 6040 at this stage, you know, like I mean, is Europe losing this game?

Do we need to change stack?

Sorry, I didn't get the question entirely, but you were asking the 6040. No, he's asking if um Europe is losing pace in correct me if I'm wrong. If we're not in Europe losing pace towards Asia and the US in the context of the US administration and maybe to some way or form me and overregulation in Europe, I'm extrapolating a bit here. Uh if

if I can share my point of view, we have spent countless hours with FINMA, you know, the Swiss financial regulator to be able to do what we're doing. the the pain and the the level of intensity that it requires for us to offer these services is definitely a hurdle. Um I think overall a couple of years ago Switzerland was very advanced and we've just got we got caught up by everyone else. So I tend to say yes. Unfortunately I I do think we're losing pace.

I don't think the race is lost, but we do need significant change for things to to flourish more on on the European side.

Yeah. And definitely the same in the EU.

Definitely same in the EU. We also lost base and I think the only way to get it back is to get clear regulation that is actually also uh usable. Um two panels ago there was a whole regulation uh panel and they highlighted the difference between or at least when you have mR but you also have your your your PSD your payments etc and it's different regulations it's very difficult for it to innovate within this landscape in Europe but looking back on what happened uh last Friday I think if we can get the regulation um in a play in a in a workable way we could definitely take take something back that we lost to the us over the last years.

I think that's a very interesting question that you asked and uh while I can't speak personally on uh Europe's progress, I can speak about uh the US and Asia and the Middle East. So in the US, it's been obvious uh you know since President Trump came into office and that whole dynamic kind of shifted in favor of uh cryptocurrency adoption and tokenization of assets and ETFs and everything. Um what we are waiting for on the US now is just more regulatory clarity. We've had uh you know the genius act pass and uh now going towards uh Asia and the Middle East is where it starts to get uh very interesting. I personally uh manage uh most of our client base is based in Pakistan and uh we just recently got given the green light by the government to go ahead and uh you know having uh Pakistani citizens are able to now invest into the digital asset space and for a long time it was a very uh high volume widely used P2P market uh which is unsafe and also completely unregulated.

So there were people making tons of losses as well and everyone wanted a vehicle to invest uh to invest with. So I think if we take a look at just the subcontinent region, there is so much uh advancements going on there in terms of regulation and framework and implementation of that regulation now and there's a lot of liquid there waiting on the sidelines to enter the space uh institutionally as well as uh uh personally um and now uh the Middle East is also a very interesting market just purely because I feel a lot of the Middle east opportunity will come into play once we have more clarity on Sharia compliant funds and I think that will be a big big gamecher for that region especially and and I I would like also to give you a a brief answer. Um I I talked to a lot of politicians I I talked to the EU Commission and so on and and and I know they are quite conservative on with their views on on crypto. they are think there's a lot of speculation. They uh say that's short termism.

They want long-termism. They want long-term investing and they want to to have an uh um effect on the um economy and so on. And so they they don't understand the technology. They think that it's an intransparent market. And things like happened last week also don't help really to to to make them more trustful in this.

And that's what we as lobbyists have to do and to talk to to the to politicians to the ministries and so on and to explain and to see that to explain that the markets work and that it's beneficial. So I think we have really only a few seconds left. Is there another question here from the audience otherwise?

Yes, from my side.

Okay. Yes.

Thank you so much. A really great panel. Uh two simple questions to the panel. Do you think uh Donald Trump uh crypto politics empowers the institutional interest in crypto assets? And at the same time, do you think Donald Trump can also destroy the interest of the institutional perspective in crypto assets in long term?

Yes. Okay.

For me, yes and yes.

Yes. And yes, definitely.

We have not uh reached a new maturity or something like this.

Oh, yeah. I I think the administration has done a lot for the space. Um now they also have the potential to destroy a lot. So far, I think they've done um a lot of positive, but we still have three more years to go.

You know, I I'll I'll finish off with this. Uh there's a saying, I don't know if you know about it, but um with great power comes great responsibility. Have you heard that one?

I think That summarizes where Trump stands in terms of the crypto space. He can go on to continue to do great things in the space, but just like my colleague said, he also has the power to do some serious serious damage. So, I would say keep an eye on the space and let's see how it goes.

And and this gives also a chance to Europe to succeed.

That's a good note to end on. Thank you guys very much. Yeah, thank you very much to the panelists. Big applause for everybody. Thank you.