Nasib Fathi

Saudi Arabia is putting its entire national property registry on-chain, with the government keeping control while marketplaces trade the tokens. In this episode, I sat down with Adam Popat, CEO of @SettleMintCom. We get into: - How Saudi Arabia is tokenizing its national property registry - Why compliance checks can be hardwired into transactions - How tokenized deposits affect settlement, liquidity and cost - Why private equity may tokenize later than money market funds - Why the Gulf may lead on real estate tokenization - Why blockchain could underpin AI agents & more Timestamps: 00:00 Highlights 00:35 Intro 01:20 Adam's Background 02:17 Saudi Arabia's National Property Registry 03:50 Registry-as-Truth Model Explained 05:42 Foreign Investors & Lower Minimums 07:25 OCBC's Tokenized Corporate Bonds 08:55 Hardwired Compliance Requirements 10:33 Tokenized Deposits for Treasury 12:56 Stablecoin Regulation Across Regions 14:56 Precious Metals, Gold by Gram 17:00 Is There Real Demand? 19:40 Nasib Fathi & NFK Podcast 20:09 A Tokenized 24/7 Stock Market 22:50 Tokenization of Funds 25:22 AI as Authority of Record 27:16 Partnering with large AI labs 28:50 Tokenization Market Growth Projections 31:30 What makes a real partnership 33:30 Next Government after Saudi Arabia 36:05 Real Estate Brokers and Legal Overhead in 5Y 37:23 NFTs Rebranded as Tokens 41:08 Closing Remarks 41:55 Ending All links are down below.

During our roundtable, @anna_petrenkoo (CBDO, @everstake_pool) said the Ethereum community is trying to fix staking concentration before it becomes a real problem. She mentioned that bigger staking operators, Everstake included, run validators across hundreds of locations and servers, and that their job is to keep that infrastructure as secure and diversified as possible and not concentrate it. @Oliver_Yates (Co-Founder & CEO, @Aplo_crypto) highlighted that Coinbase Custody is the custodian for most crypto ETFs, but institutional crypto is not limited to crypto ETFs. He said most banks that do not yet have a digital asset offering are focusing in 2026 on corporate banking work, such as helping customers get financing through tokenization or put some of their actual assets on-chain, and every single one he has seen so far runs the custody stack this needs in-house with one or more third-party technology providers. So, he does not see digital asset custody staying super concentrated if everything beyond pure cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, ETH and Solana is counted. Antonio Sundas (Senior Sales Manager, @CryptoFinanceAG) added that on both staking and custody, it is the responsibility of ETF providers, banks or institutions to diversify. He said Coinbase was probably the best of the few options back when the Bitcoin ETFs were allocating custody. Furthermore, he mentioned that things are now changing in the US at the Federal Reserve and around the Clarity Act, so more and more options to diversify custody are going to be available in case an even better one appears.

Family offices and wealthy individuals were among the early adopters of crypto ETPs, and some more sophisticated clients look for niche exposure. In this episode, I sat down with @Bernhard_Wenger, Head of Northern Europe at @21shares. We get into: - Who Captures the Yield Inside a Staking ETP - What Earns a Protocol Its Own ETP - Bitcoin Volatility vs Tesla, Palantir - Bitcoin Gold, Ethereum, Solana, Hyperliquid ETPs - How Professional Investors Approach Crypto ETPs & more Timestamps: 00:00 Highlights 00:41 Intro 01:40 Bernhard’s Background 03:09 Hidden Infrastructure Clients Never See 04:31 When a Protocol Earns an ETP 06:22 Strategy Yield ETP, Equity Boundary 08:33 Who Buys NEAR and ONDO 09:58 The Growing Demand 12:15 Who Captures Staking Yield 13:54 Jito Staked SOL ETP 15:46 Bitcoin Gold ETP's Portfolio Problem 18:00 Nasib Fathi & NFK Media 18:45 81% Correlation, Different Sleeves 20:32 Negative Gold vs Digital Gold Correlation 21:57 Ethereum's Rising Nasdaq Correlation 23:20 Solana as a Selective Growth Satellite 24:56 Bitcoin Volatility vs Tesla, Palantir 27:48 Patient Capital or Missing Retail 30:46 Changing Hands in the Crypto Market 33:00 Adding Ethereum to Conservative Portfolios 34:41 Conversations Around Hyperliquid 37:14 Competition Between Hyperliquid & TradFi 40:04 Nordic Investor Base 41:58 Private Banks: Early Adopters vs Skeptics 44:00 21Shares Staying Differentiated in 10Y 45:26 New ETPs 46:15 Closing Remarks 47:25 Ending All links are down below.

@anna_petrenkoo (CBDO, @everstake_pool) says the cost shows up differently at each layer. She points to @21shares, an issuer of exchange-traded products, which reported figures two or three weeks before this roundtable showing $48 million in redemptions in the first half of the year with 86% of its Ethereum staked and no failed or delayed redemptions. She says 21Shares keeps a sleeve of unstaked Ethereum, so redemptions never have to touch the unbonding queue, that BlackRock does the same with its ETHB fund by holding back 5 to 30%, and that this is a design rather than a flaw, although the unstaked slice earns zero while the rest earns 3 or 3.1%. At a prime broker, she says, staked Ethereum posted as collateral can be accepted only at a discount, known as a haircut, or rejected, which is exactly why liquid staking tokens exist, and in custody the client cannot sell at all during the unbonding window and carries the risk uncompensated if the market moves against them. @Oliver_Yates (CEO & Co-Founder, @Aplo_crypto) says prime brokerage is a balance sheet business, so a prime broker lends against staked Ethereum, based on how much it thinks it can recoup and how long that will take, and the price of that loan is the only thing the client sees change. He says the size of the unbonding queue is the main factor in that price, and that the cost of the loan may completely offset the staking yield, especially with recent yield numbers. For that reason, he sees liquid staking tokens as probably more interesting despite the risk of using them, and he says using staked assets such as Ethereum or Solana directly as collateral for trading is not cost-efficient at the moment. @Tony_Sundas (Senior Sales Manager, @CryptoFinanceAG) says retail clients can sometimes be harder to convince to stake, especially given the rates of recent years and the factors the panel had described. He puts this down especially to many of them lacking enough technical knowledge to take on that risk for a return such as the roughly 4% Ethereum had for many years, while institutions have no doubts and stake. In his records of demand from banks, Solana staking is among the most requested, both for its return and because its slashing mechanism, the penalty applied to staked funds when a validator breaks the network’s rules, is arguably less risky for the staker.

@anna_petrenkoo (CBDO, @everstake_pool) says institutional crypto did not unbundle because anyone planned it, but because bundling failed publicly, and more than once. With FTX, custody, trading and market making sat inside one legal entity with one set of keys, so when that entity had a bad week everything behind it went with it. She argues that when the custodian, staking provider, prime broker and ETF issuer are separately regulated and audited entities, a failure at one does not cascade into the others, and that complexity clients can audit beats simplicity they cannot verify. @Oliver_Yates (CEO & Co-Founder, @Aplo_crypto) says separating every service, from the custodian to the venue or provider for execution, technically makes a setup safer, but with what the market offers today it comes with a trade-off in liquidity, available assets and products. A big part of market liquidity sits on Binance, anyone who wants options on an order book more or less has to use Deribit, and no single custodian right now offers off-venue settlement for all of them. Crypto has no single clearing house, so things are missing that make it a trade-off, and most institutions end up choosing and keep some counterparty risk depending on the products they want access to. @Tony_Sundas (Senior Sales Manager, @CryptoFinanceAG) says the stack fragmented because clients have different needs, and someone who wants speed picks a different provider than someone who wants to stake and keep ownership. Antonio helped BBVA in Switzerland set up its first crypto custody solution, and he says regulation that lagged behind in his first years at BBVA in Switzerland also drove the split. The Swiss regulator FINMA was ready in 2017, but Europe took five more years to give clear direction, which made bringing the project to Spain very cumbersome.

In this roundtable, I sat down with @anna_petrenkoo (CBDO at @everstake_pool), @Oliver_Yates (CEO at @Aplo_crypto), and @Tony_Sundas (Senior Sales Manager at @CryptoFinanceAG). We get into: - Why Larger Institutions Split the Crypto Stack - What Happens to Liquidity in the Unbonding Queue - Why Staked ETH Is Costly as Collateral - Will Custody Stay Concentrated? - Why the Family Office Gap Isn't About Infrastructure & more Timestamps: 00:00 Highlights 00:44 Intro 01:50 Speaker Introductions 04:45 Infrastructure Unbundling 11:02 The Liquidity Promise 18:48 Ethereum's Concentration Risk 25:52 The Allocation Gap: Family Offices, Zero Exposure 30:27 Future Outlook: 12-18 Months 36:17 Q&A: One Question First-time Clients Should Ask 38:12 Q&A: Biggest Improvement Coming Next Year 40:48 Q&A: Timeline From First Conversation to Active Account 43:29 Q&A: Where Clients Go If a Competitor Shuts Down 47:00 Closing Remarks & Ending All links are down below.

Many traditional finance firms are looking at digital assets but are still wary of the word crypto. @BCBcrypto is building for that gap with reliability first. In this episode, I interview Jérôme Prigent, Managing Director of BCB Europe at @BCBcrypto. We get into: - Why Two Separate Legal Entities in France - Products Across Two Regulatory Perimeters - Who Makes It Onto the BLINC Network - Lending and Tokenisation as the Next Steps - BCB’s Commercial Focus for the Next 12 Months - What Family Offices Need From BCB & more Timestamps: 00:00 Highlights 00:40 Intro 01:26 Jérôme’s Background 03:11 Why Two Separate Legal Entities in France 06:08 Products Across Two Regulatory Perimeters 08:01 France vs the DACH Region 09:56 The Cost of Staying Outside BLINC 12:30 Who Makes It Onto the BLINC Network 14:28 Nasib Fathi & NFK Podcast 14:57 Where the BCB Product Stack Runs Out 16:49 Euro Stablecoins and Remittance Costs 18:22 The Bank Consortium Euro Stablecoin 20:50 Enterprise Stablecoin Use Cases 23:00 Stablecoin Earn and the Legal Opinion 25:10 Who Needs Stablecoin Earn Today 28:04 Lending as the Next Step 29:24 MiCA 2 Expectations 32:06 Tokenization as the Logical Next Step 34:49 The Ideal Tokenization Partnership 35:48 What Happens to Client Assets if Something Goes Wrong 37:42 What Institutional Clients Ask First 41:40 BCB’s Commercial Focus for the Next 12 Months 44:00 What Family Offices Need From BCB 47:39 Treasury Platform Integration Costs 51:08 Closing Remarks 52:15 Ending All links are down below.

"With the digital euro you are not going to expand the reach and the depth and the liquidity of euro as a global currency." (C) Thomas Brand @Coinmotion. In his view, the US dominance of the stablecoin industry leaves the digital euro as a local tool. Many of his institutional clients see it as a sign of Europe’s decline, and he notes that its justifications have changed so much over the years that nobody seems to know what it is meant to achieve. He contrasts it with Bitcoin as nonsovereign digital money with fixed monetary rules, although his clients do not see the digital euro as a reason to sell their Bitcoin. Turning to the EU DLT Pilot Regime, he sees a gap between regulatory experimentation and real market adoption. Coinmotion has no direct exposure to the pilot, but he points to an open letter from banks and other players involved in it, which cited a lack of critical mass, a heavy regulatory burden and no business case. He adds that tokenized securities also need a full network of issuers, investors, custodians, settlement venues and liquidity providers. For many Nordic institutions, though, tokenized securities remain secondary to basic needs such as secure Bitcoin access, reporting on holdings, safe custody and a clear execution policy.