AlphaTON Capital Bets on Telegram Ecosystem and AI Infrastructure Growth

J.D.: Enzo Villani is the CIO and chairman of AlphaTON Capital, and I am pleased to say the man himself joins us down here on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Great to have you.

Enzo: Thanks, J.D.

J.D.: So you are chairman and CIO of AlphaTON. Talk to me a bit about that dual role and how it really goes about shaping your capital as well as your strategy decisions.

Enzo: Yeah. So I was asked to do a third DAT. And I felt like the DAT trade was over and I was like, what is the best company right now in blockchain- that is the most mass adoption company out there? And that’s Telegram. It’s a billion users. It’s bigger than xAI. It’s bigger than X, it’s bigger than Meta. And I started to recruit people to come in. And I brought in Brittany Kaiser because she has the Own Your Own Data. Like she is really an advocate of privacy and of the confidential compute sector. And I was like, this is a great opportunity for all of us as you work together. And when I took the role, I said, you know what I’ll do, chairman, and I’ll do CIO. I manage multiple COWs and public companies. And I was the head of strategy at Nasdaq for the issuer side of the business. I actually worked at this place for a little bit. And what I realized was we needed to have someone who can manage the rails, make sure there were a good public company while Brittany and the team rock and roll. And I think that was the biggest benefit. And it’s turned out to be great.

J.D.: In that case, welcome back then I should say, to the New York Stock Exchange. Talk to me about why it’s critical for AlphaTON to really own the full Telegram stack. Obviously, you mentioned kind of that positioning for Telegram. And why was that important to you in terms of the full stack, full load and being more bullish than that in that arena?

Enzo: So, I worked on BMNR in the early stages. I invested into crypto mining, which became American Bitcoin. And I realized the DAT trade is a short term trade. But what’s really interesting is taking a company public, and Telegram never wants to go public. There’s one shareholder, that’s Pavel Durov. He never wants to sell his shares because he doesn’t want any influence. But what he’s done is, he’s decentralized with a ton of token and the foundation. And so we decided, let’s become a part of this ecosystem. Let’s become the first publicly traded company on Nasdaq to actually have TON on its balance sheet. There is a second one that’s actually larger than us, but we were like, let’s do something even more important, which is build an ecosystem play. So when we started looking at it, we were like, wow, this is a great opportunity. And then Cocoon showed up. So Pavel Durov is launching his own AI stack. It’s called Cocoon. It launched on November 30th. We were the first company that’s public that went out. Well, the first private company too, that announced that we were going to work with them in order to build their AI tech stack. And right now, we’re one of the only companies in the world that actually is integrated into Cocoon, that’s public.

I think we are the only public company. And just think about that. The OpenAI evaluation is $750 billion, and they have 400 million users, or 500 million users. Telegram has a billion users. As soon as he wants to turn AI on, on every single Telegram app in the world, and we’re running part of that back end in AI, that’s an unbelievable opportunity. On top of that, we decided to do a kind of vertical integration because we know that the cost of the AI tech stack is going up. The more people use the the AI tech stack, the costs are just increasing. So we’re like, well, if we have an application layer and we buy a company like GAMEE, which is being sold to us by our great partners at Animoca, which has 65 million monthly active users. I turn on that AI. It works on my version of Cocoon. And now I’ve created this vertically integrated company that’s in the Telegram ecosystem.

J.D.: You mentioned GAMEE and an acquisition of the Web3 gaming company.

Enzo: That’s correct.

J.D.: What does that allow you to do that you could not previously do?

Enzo: We want to become the dominant player in the public markets for Telegram ecosystem firm that has everything from gaming to fintech to health care, in Telegram mini apps. That’s the mini app sector. And right below it is the actual infrastructure. It’s the AI infra. It’s the TON staking which is helping to run that TON network. And when you combine that vertical integration – we think that’s the company of the future. Because if you just do the back end or you just do the front end, you have to deal with the cost issue of AI. We think that is a much more flexible way of doing it. And we’re earning TON right now on Cocoon. We’re the only public company in the world earning TON on Cocoon.

J.D.: In addition to that, what more informs the investment thesis for your AI and GPU infrastructure push?

Enzo: I mean, think about it. We just have to buy more servers and we have the allocations of the H200s, the B300s, because of the relationships that Brittany has, that our team has. So our team has worked for the DoD. Our team has level 1 clearances. Our team, the folks who are selling us these servers tell Nvidia that’s super micro. The guys who are selling us these servers are saying, we’re going to give you the allocation because we know that you’re tied into building the Telegram ecosystem, which is Meta, OpenAI, xAI, Telegram – and there’s no one supporting Telegram like the way we are. We see ourselves as a company that can support them, allow Pavel to run these companies the way he wants to, and just add benefit and just add more of that kind of infrastructure. The other thing is, Brittany Kaiser, has also been in mining for 15 years, or 10 years. So that means that we have somebody who actually sold, Gryphon Mining through Hut 8, and turned into kind of American Bitcoin, which is Eric Trump. And so we have experience in the mining sector. We have experienced in the crypto sector, and in the AI sector. Our CTO, who we actually recruited, is Logan Golema. Logan was the partner on Ai16z Eliza OS, one of the first AI centric crypto trading and information technologies on the planet. So when I start to recruit, I am the person- I’m like, I know what I know how to do, which is Wall Street stuff, finance, IR, proxy world, dealing with all of the the different capital markets players. And I’ve been in crypto for 12 years, but I also know that if I recruit people like Brittany Kaiser and Logan and our other marketing folks and so on and so forth – who are doing a fantastic job- we are going to create $1 billion company. Absolutely. And right now we’re calling the micro-cap world because that’s the land which we all knew was going to happen. That trade is the short term trade. In fact, I believe that every single company on the planet should hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet. I don’t know why they don’t. That’s silly.

J.D.: Yeah, it’s certainly much more of a conversation we’ve been having here over the last 8 to 12 months about the general treasury space. The ticker symbol, correct me if I’m wrong, is ATON –

Enzo: A TON of capital. AlphaTON Capital.

J.D.: What more would you want people to know if they’re considering adding it as an investment vehicle for themselves?

Enzo: You have to think of this as there’s $7 trillion has to be built in AI infrastructure by 2030. Just realize that we can be one of the biggest players in decentralized AI on the planet. And confidential compute, which every customer needs. You don’t want Google, Meta all sniffing around your AI.
We will have confidential compute: military grade. Nobody else has that, decentralized.

J.D.: Enzo Villani, the CIO and chairman of AlphaTON Capital, joining us here at the Big Board. Enzo, it’s great to have you. Congratulations on all this success. Come back anytime.

Enzo: Awesome, J.D. Thanks again.