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You've just closed a $90 million Series B led by NEA. What do your investors see in Spiko that a traditional asset manager can't offer? Our products are cash funds: money market funds, or equivalents like the fund we launched with Amundi six months ago, where
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Steakhouse describes itself as the largest independent vault curator. What does a curator actually do, for a reader who comes from traditional finance and has never touched DeFi? Fundamentally, we connect stablecoin savers to stablecoin borrowers, in a non-custodial and risk-transparent way. That's the whole thing.
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BitGo started as a multi-sig wallet pioneer. When did you realize that custody on its own wasn't enough as a standalone product? There wasn't a specific moment. It was an evolution. Mike Belshe built the company from the ground up as a wallet infrastructure play,
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Custody was Fireblocks' original wedge. When did you realize it wasn't defensible on its own? From day one, actually. Custody was always a means to an end. Our mission is to enable every enterprise to support digital assets, and when we started, custody was simply the biggest
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Germany is often cited as one of the most advanced markets in Europe for digital assets. How do you view the German ecosystem today? It's a very healthy market, and that's down to several factors. First, there was a dynamic retail crypto market well before the
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You have been working in the infrastructure sector for nearly thirty years. You seem to harbour a certain frustration with the pace at which technology standards penetrate the world of finance. How do you view this evolution? My frustration is real and it goes back to 1994. At the time,
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Privy was acquired by Stripe in June 2025. What does this acquisition let you do that you couldn't as an independent startup? Three things, essentially. The first — and probably the most important — is that we're entering an era where stablecoins and digital assets are becoming a
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Everyone's talking about AI. Where does BNP Paribas actually stand? The hype dates back to ChatGPT in late 2022, but the bank started around fifteen years ago, with credit scoring and fraud detection. Today three families of projects coexist: classic, generative, and now agentic. The Evident AI Index,
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Standard Chartered just announced the acquisition of Zodia Custody. We hear about Zodia Custody, Zodia Markets, Zodia Solutions. Can you walk us through what each of these entities actually does? Zodia Custody was the first entity created by SC Ventures. Zodia Markets is a separate business with different shareholders, focused
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The U.S. is advancing two major pieces of legislation — the CLARITY Act and the GENIUS Act. What should we take away from them? Two big themes stand out from the CLARITY Act. First, yield: everything points to some form of remuneration being authorized in the U.S., though not
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The Big Whale: What's the difference between an agentic workflow and regular AI? Ferdinand : Where you want to go with AI inside a financial institution is to make processes either faster or less error-prone, and to take over the manual work humans used to do, executing it
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Standard Chartered opened its Luxembourg office in December 2024. Why did you pick this country as your gateway into Europe for digital assets? We received our VASP registration on December 16, 2024 — the very same day I started my role and we officially launched the entity. Several factors guided the