One of the key events of the year took place last week in Zurich´s “Crypto Valley”. The Cryptosummit was — for me — both engaging and stimulating because the broad focus and main topic of it was the tokenization of securities, which is where — with Untitled-INC — I am more involved.
Among the high level speakers were ConsenSys Joseph Lubin in video streaming, Charles Hoskinson, CoinDesk´s Michael Casey, VC investor Jalak Jobanputra, Outlier Venture´s Jamie Burke and many other top businesspeople.
Of course, with such a packed agenda and thought-provoking panels running simultaneously on 3 stages, I had to make a choice and follow only those which were — for me at least — the most compelling. Most certainly I have missed interesting stuff, but the following were for me the key “take-aways” from the event.
Charles Hoskinson, formerly Ethereum CEO and currently at Input Output HK, gave me comfort that the global adoption path of crypto is nowadays irreversible. He captivated the audience mentioning his experiences while travelling for crypto projects in lands such as Mongolia where — perhaps not surprisingly — cryptocurrency adoption is progressing at a faster rate than in many western countries. He emphasized that Securities Token Offerings (STOs) will be the key instrument for driving the growth and capital allocation to developing countries. This is the first time in history that developing countries are not constrained in accessing capital for development. And of course this will be a radical shift for those countries which will have the unique opportunity to free themselves from the chokehold of western powers and financial institutions such as the IMF. For the first time in history those countries can now sell tokenized bonds backed up by their commodities and rare earth resources, without the need to sell them out to multinationals in exchange of “peanuts”. The first time in history that they can access a global, decentralized market of investors to fuel their growth. I find this is pretty exciting.
Juwan Lee, founder and CEO of Nexchange, presented interesting datasets to show where crypto investments stand today when compared with the hedge funds in the 90s. Crypto investments stand today where the hedge funds sector stood back in 1997, at the very beginning of its growth phase. Since then the hedge fund sector has grown in volume more than 15 times, going from the early phases, through institutionalization, consolidation and finally to the current maturity phase.
Crypto funds are also still quite minuscule in terms of managed funds. The large majority (approx. 208) have less than US$10m under management. Only the largest funds — approx. 28…