TBW - Ambre Soubiran (Kaiko): "Why We Bought Cometh"
Kaiko's acquisition of Cometh caught part of the market off guard. On paper, it's hard to see where a data provider and a DeFi infrastructure specialist converge. What's the logic here?
You have to understand that Kaiko is built on three pillars. The first is data and analytics: every transaction executed on crypto exchanges — DeFi, CeFi, spot, derivatives, historical or real-time. Hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, from which we build our risk, volatility, and liquidity metrics. It's a very vanilla, very straightforward business. The second pillar is indices. That's a regulated activity: we create benchmarks and price indices that financial products can be pegged to. The third pillar — and this is where Cometh comes in — is data infrastructure. Data infra.
What does "data infra" actually mean in practice?
It's no longer about the data itself — it's the plumbing. The idea is to build pipelines that bridge the world of APIs and traditional financial data with the world of on-chain execution through smart contracts. Here's a concrete example: we announced a partnership with Bloomberg to distribute Bloomberg Data License information on-chain via our infrastructure — mainly US Treasury pricing and repo workflows on the Canton Network. We pull fixed income data, bring it privately onto the chain to feed collateral mobility contracts, repo agreements, and so on. With this infrastructure business, we're clearly positioned at the intersection of tokenized assets, data infrastructure, and DeFi applied to traditional finance.
"Cometh is becoming the core engine of our data infra"
How does Cometh fit into that picture?
Cometh is becoming the core engine of our data infra pillar. Kaiko has always been, at its heart, a data company. This infrastructure business is absolutely critical for us, but it requires smart contract expertise — managing all the on-chain logic (Solidity, Canton, etc.) — which isn't in Kaiko's DNA. With Cometh, we're reinforcing our data DNA with an extremely strong DeFi DNA.
The other dimension of this deal is MiCA. How is a crypto-asset service provider license useful for a data provider?
That's the key. Today, we're transporting private data onto the blockchain. And that data has value. When we tokenize an S&P index or transmit Bloomberg data, that data is sold under license — it's protected by intellectual property. A Bloomberg license for real-time US fixed income pricing runs around a hundred thousand euros a year. If I'm going to tokenize that information and push it onto the blockchain, I'm treating the tokens containing the data as a financial asset. So I apply MiCA to private financial data on-chain.
"No data provider has been comfortable handing private data to Chainlink"
That's your thesis, but so far no regulator explicitly requires it. Are you getting ahead of things?
Absolutely. But look at the reality: to this day, no data provider like Bloomberg or S&P has been comfortable entrusting private data to a decentralized oracle like Chainlink. Every announcement you see in the press involves public data. What I'm interested in is traditional, non-public data — everything that's real-time, everything protected by IP. People keep talking about continuous finance, 24/7 finance. That's great, but to make it happen, you need 24/7 market data. And that data is enormously valuable. Traditional market data is a $44 billion-a-year industry. To migrate capital markets onto the blockchain, you'll also need to move an entire data infrastructure along with it. And if we can't offer data owners the certainty that their IP won't be made public, they won't do it. It's as simple as that. There's no regulatory obligation, but it's the only way to give them comfort.
Was the acquisition cleared by regulators?
We received the green light from both the AMF and the ACPR. That's actually why the announcement took so long.
What about Louis Finance — the DeFi treasury management product developed by Cometh? Will it continue?
We're not discontinuing it. What interests us most about Louis Finance is the setup: the ability to handle fiat-to-crypto and crypto-to-fiat. Today, we have data clients who don't want to deal with crypto payments, even though on-chain data monetization will ultimately run on tokens. We want to provide all of those building blocks — that's why this really is a DeFi infrastructure play. Louis Finance is very powerful in terms of regulated tech building blocks for fiat-to-crypto and stablecoin-to-euro conversion. We'll keep developing it, with a slightly more data-oriented angle, but we're keeping absolutely everything that exists.
So a company currently using Louis Finance for yield can carry on as before?
Yes, we're keeping Louis Finance and we're still onboarding new clients.
What's happening with the Cometh team?
CEO Jérôme de Tychey is leaving the company, but the rest of the team stays.
And the Cometh name?
It'll most likely disappear, yes.
>> Jérôme de Tychey (Cometh): "Yields up to five times higher than those of banks"