The Big Talk
The Big Whale: Players like BlackRock and soon Amundi in Europe now dominate the crypto ETF landscape. How can a specialist player like Bitwise compete against their distribution power and operational efficiency? Matt Hougan: It's a legitimate question, but experience tells us that BlackRock's entry has
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The Big Whale: Qivalis arrives with a lot of ambition. Can you simply summarise the project's objective and explain why it is emerging now rather than two or three years ago? Jan-Oliver Sell: The objective is pretty clear: we are building a euro stablecoin issuer backed by an
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The Big Whale: 2025 has been a pivotal year for EtherFi. How would you sum up the last twelve months? Mike Silagadze: It's been a year of profound transformation. We started it as a staking protocol linked to the EigenLayer ecosystem, driven by a points and rewards dynamic.
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The Big Whale: What is your assessment since the launch of Spiko? Paul-Adrien Hyppolite: We officially launched mid-2024, in June. Our flagship metric, the one that everyone looks at, is assets under management. Today, we have just over $815 million spread across our various products. Our structuring products remain those
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The Big Whale. Today, stablecoins are at the heart of all the tensions: regulatory tug-of-war in the United States, acceleration in Asia, persistent scepticism from the European Central Bank. Against this explosive backdrop, why does Abu Dhabi believe that now is the right time to launch a sovereign stablecoin? Precisely
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The Big Whale: You have just obtained your MiCA approval from the French market authority. Why is this so important? Jérôme de Tychey: More and more companies want to get a foothold in the world of onchain finance and they want to work with regulated players. So it's
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The Big Whale: You're in Abu Dhabi for Abu Dhabi Finance Week. What brings you here and what specific opportunities do you see in the UAE? Brian Armstrong: We're very excited about investing more in the UAE. The country has become a global hub, both for
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The Big Whale: A year after raising €5 million, you're capping a $15 million Series A round. What is your objective? Alexandre Roubaud: There are three priorities behind this round. Firstly, international expansion. Until now, Bitstack was only present in France. With MiCA approval, we're going
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The Big Whale: We're seeing gold really take off at the end of 2025. How would you describe the state of the market today? Benjamin Louvet: The market is in turmoil: since January, gold has gained more than 50% and is trading at historic levels. Geopolitics is often
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The Big Whale: It's been a big week for Deblock. You announced a €30 million fundraising round on 19 November, followed by the launch of your token the next day. Let's start with the first piece of information: what are you going to do with this
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The Big Whale: Ledger has just presented a new Nano model. What does this product actually change? Charles Guillemet: The idea behind the new Nano is to continue developing our range while making our products more accessible. We've kept the concept of the e-ink touch screen, which significantly
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The Big Whale: You've just launched your stablecoin, EUROD, a project that ODDO BHF has been working on for over two years. Why this launch now? Have the announcements of other projects, in particular European consortia, prompted you to accelerate? Guy de Leusse: As you know, we'