Welcome, I'm Anastasia Kinsky, and we are at Money 2020 Europe in Amsterdam.
I had the pleasure of being joined by Val Gui.
He is the general manager at X Stocks, which is part of Paywood, which is part of Kraken.
That's right.
Thank you for joining me.
Tell me a little bit.
You've just arrived at Money 2020.
What are the buzzwords that you're hearing?
What is the top topic?
I mean, it's, it's been exciting walking through.
I literally just walked in, maybe a couple hours ago.
And what I'm seeing is that the, the real focus seems to be on the intersection of Dei and Tratfi, which is something that has been building towards this and with maybe I've seen some of this before in, in, you know, in previous years, but this year seems exceptional.
And that's very exciting.
I, it's really interesting to see that because, you know, as you say, we've been talking about it a lot, but we're seeing some real value, um, moving around now.
Tell us a little bit about um what you do at X Stocks.
Yeah, absolutely.
So X Stocks actually a really simple product, um, it's a tokenized equity.
It is, um, a, a, a token that is on chain.
Um, composable on chain, transport on chain, permissionless, that is backed 1 to 1 by a traditional equity.
So every token has one share of the underlying equity that's pledged to it.
I think what I want to jump straight into exactly that point because it's a really confusing topic lately.
There's been so much excitement around tokenized equities.
Um, there's also been a lot of excitement on, you know, other versions of a tokenized asset that is meant to in some way represent a, a company or a share of a company that's public, a share of a company that is not yet public.
Um, it gets mixed in with the conversation around prediction markets and and IPOs.
Tease it out for us a little bit so that we understand the landscape and, and what that actually means to an investor.
Yeah, absolutely.
Like you mentioned, there's a lot of excitement around RWAs, real world assets being on chain, and a lot of that is happening within the financial space, within equities.
They're kind of the natural product to bring on chain because of what bringing on chain supports, things like composability and um 24/7 secondary trading and things like that.
The challenge is that you have many different flavors or iterations of these products now and within sort of the, you know, the the sort of startup space, you're you're looking at companies that are trying to bring products, financial products on chain, and they're trying to see what are the products that consumer retailers really want.
The challenge being that sometimes these products are complicated and it's not well explained to that end retail consumer.
And so you have this proliferation of products where maybe someone's not fully understanding the risk that they're taking on or it's fragmenting liquidity in some way, um, and that is making definitely a little bit of a potentially confusing world for that end retail customer especially.
Um, generally we think that more products is, is better.
You give people the ability to have options, which is generally very good, but it has to go hand in hand with that person understanding what it is that they're purchasing.
And I think that's where the space is just still so young.
It's just not being done very well yet.
You look at something like X docs, we try and keep it as absolutely simple as possible.
One token is backed by one equity.
In all cases, very simple.
That's not the case for some of these products like some of the pre-IPO products.
Unclear if the underlying actually exists or whether or not they can actually be transferred.
There's an inherent risk there.
Some of the other tokenized equity products, they're not, you know, they're not sort of backed in a sort of official manner by having that sort of underlying equity and working with the, the, the right institutions to have that right backing.
And so that's where things can get confusing.
And as per usual, I think it's fascinating how much this topic comes up.
Regulatory and legal clarity is one thing, and industry standard is a completely different question.
And the industry rallying together and building that so that we all know what it looks like and we all know what to expect, what to look out for, even if you are, I mean, a sophisticated but a retail investor, you have that option.
And at least within, within the regulatory world, it does.
Like X stocks are highly regulated.
We're, we're here in Amsterdam today.
Uh, in Europe, they're offered under MiFID 2.
We had to go through a full regulatory review with the regulators so that they both understand the product, but then also make sure that we're presenting the product to the end retail clients the right way.
And so regulation does have a large role to play in this, a huge role, huge role.
Um, you're a year in, it was launched June 2025, so you know, happy birthday.
Thank you.
Huge numbers, $31 billion in total transaction volume, 100 tokenized stocks and ETFs, $130,000 plus on chain holders.
What does one year tell you about the demand that you've seen across?
I mean, the demand is, is, is pretty incredible.
We're extremely excited about just the number of unique token holders that we that we have.
Over 130,000 like you mentioned, $31 billion in transaction volume is also very exciting when you think about we started from zero.
And that number has just been compounding.
It's been accelerating the growth from 0 to 10 billion.
It took us maybe 6 months.
From 10 to 30 billion took us maybe 2.5 months.
And so it's just, it's just getting faster and faster and that part is extremely exciting for us, um, especially because what this product really does is it provides access to equities, US equities today, um, where access might be more challenging or to populations that don't go through more traditional brokerages to get access to them.
And so that sort of adoption has been incredible.
It's fascinating the original point of digitalizing something and making it more accessible.
You like to that point about, about, you know, different populations, different areas, European investors are certainly engaging.
What does that look like across Europe?
Yeah, it's interesting to look at because we have sort of Three distinct populations of people that engage.
We have Europe, we have AIPAC, and then we have Latin America.
AIPAC and Latin America are maybe. behaviorally much more similar where you have very active trading and sort of the whole spectrum of the population wants to get access to these equities.
Within Europe, what we find is that because you don't have equity ownership, the penetration is not quite as deep here.
What we're finding is that it's actually the younger generations that are the ones that want to get access.
And so instead of going to, you know, their mom or dad's brokerage, it's easier to do in, you know, maybe a crypto app that they already have available to them.
And so what it's doing is just allowing them to get access to these equities that they might read about Nvidia, Tesla, um, Microsoft, Google, Alphabet, I guess, um, and they can actually just buy from the same place that they've looked together.
So we see a slightly younger population.
I think that's fascinating to see because it means that there are different languages across these generations and you know, as you say, so long as we're regulated and everyone understands the risks, these are just the new ways of of expressing that financial activity.
In this one year of of your company, you've also acquired.
Um, backed, December 2025.
And then you launched Exchange in March.
Um, what, how are these two work together?
How does that work for your business model?
What's the role?
Yeah, totally.
When we first launched X Docs, it was a JV with Backed.
Backed was a startup based out of Switzerland.
Um, really incredible team, incredible technology as, as a, as a tokenization product, but they're still a startup.
And so when we were like, how do we accelerate this?
We have so many things that we want to do from a product standpoint.
Um, how do we make this go faster?
The natural solution was to bring back in as the issuer, you know, acquire them and use the resources that we have at Payward Kraken to to help support the growth that we, you know, that we wanted to have, especially from a product standpoint, and that's what led to things like exchange, which is an RFQ model that is tapping into the inherent liquidity of the underlying asset so that.
It actually helps solidify and combine liquidity as opposed to fragmented, and that's very important for any sort of healthy market like this to actually work.
And that's, that's what led to to exchange.
I mean, it sounds like an absolutely brilliant um product.
And in terms of that uh move to acquire rather than just have a joint venture, I think we're seeing a lot of shifting where it was an era of kind of unbundling.
And now actually people are kind of coming together, consolidating, working out what works best when the marriage is strong.
Yes.
What do you think that means, you know, going forward the next few years, whether it's appetite for token equities or if it's this sort of changes what's happening in acquisitions, what do you think the next 2 to 3 years looks like for the fintech landscape?
Well, I certainly think that tokenized equities are likely to become maybe not the standard, but a standard that Both institutionals and retail investors start to adopt.
I mean, everyone has some.
Energy going to tokenization.
Nicey certainly does, um, and we can see that.
Across the world, um, multiple companies and organizations are sort of building towards tokenization.
It, it seems like we're at a place where it's become inevitable, and, and not because of Um, uh, anything outside of, you know, the, the space like the tokenization as a technology itself is just a better technology.
It allows for things like atomic settlement.
It allows for things like interoperability across multiple chains in multiple places.
It helps create certain types of standards that can be adopted more easily.
And so I think it's just, just even just the base technology lends itself well to equities.
I think that's really, really nicely put, and may that remain exponential as you say, the progress in adoption, and I really hope that Money 2020 is a great conference for you.
Thank you for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
