The Big Talk
The Big Whale: What was the starting point for your strategic pivot toward digital assets? Arnaud Dubreuil: Our mission within Ingenico Labs is to analyze market friction and design solutions that will become industry standards within the next three to five years. We operate as a highly practical laboratory: we
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The Big Whale: You raised €25 million in September 2025, with PayPal among the investors In concrete terms, what has this enabled you to do? Mounir Laggoune: Initially, we really asked ourselves the question: are we building a bootstrap, self-sufficient company, or are we getting into a fundraising rationale? Our
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The Big Whale: To begin with, could you remind us how the Digital Asset adventure came about? We're talking about a company that's already a decade old, which is an eternity in this ecosystem. Simon Letort: That's right, Digital Asset has been around for
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The Big Whale: You obtained your licence last October. The market is now waiting for execution. When will we see the first IPOs on Lise? Mark Kepeneghian: The aim is to launch the first operation around the middle of the first half of 2026. The choice of the first company
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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