Why Onchain Exposure is No Longer Optional

Speakers

Onchain Exposure: Why Institutions Can't Wait Anymore

• Benoit Boudier, France Lead at Boerse Stuttgart Digital‍
• Paul Adrien Hyppolite, Cofounder & CEO at Spiko‍
• Lukas Helminger, Cofounder & CEO at TACEO
• ​​Sheraz Ahmed, Managing Partner at STORM Partners

Products and Opportunities on the New Onchain Rails

• Max Heinzle, Founder & CEO at 21x
• ​Myles Harrison, Chief Product Officer at AMINA Bank‍
• Raphael Bloch, Cofounder & CEO at The Big Whale

The transition is no longer theoretical, it is happening now

The debate has shifted from "if" to "how." Institutions that were still running pilots two or three years ago are now deploying at scale. When conversations move from millions to billions, the experimental phase is over.

Boerse Stuttgart Digital launched a retail crypto offering in 2019, years ahead of peers, and is now building a pan-European on-chain settlement network expected to cut settlement costs by up to 90%.

Spiko launched the first regulated tokenized money market fund in Europe in mid-2024 and is now managing close to €500m in a fund structured with Amundi, growing 20–25% month-on-month.

Settlement is where on-chain changes everything

Of all the components of the financial value chain (issuance, trading, settlement, custody), settlement is where on-chain infrastructure delivers the clearest and most immediate efficiency gains.

On-chain settlement eliminates counterparty risk, enables atomic transactions (matching and settlement in one step, no clearing required), and operates 24/7 including weekends, ending the era of single daily cut-off times and lost weekend yield.

For European markets specifically, on-chain settlement is also a competitiveness play: Europe's fragmented settlement infrastructure is a structural disadvantage versus the US, and blockchain can close that gap.

Native tokenization ≠ digital twins

A critical distinction is emerging between products that are merely digital representations of existing instruments (digital twins, tracker certificates) and products that are natively tokenized from the ground up.

Only natively tokenized assets unlock the real efficiency gains: automated back-office processing, stablecoin settlement, programmable subscriptions and redemptions, and true composability with DeFi infrastructure.

21x operates a fully on-chain central limit order book (CLOB) where matching, trading and settlement happen in smart contracts, with zero settlement failure risk. It has a pipeline of over 1,000 products to list in 2026.

Privacy at scale remains an unsolved problem for public chains

As institutions move beyond POCs into real volume, the lack of confidentiality on public blockchains becomes a structural blocker. Pseudo-anonymity via wallet addresses is no longer sufficient, LLM-powered chain analysis now makes on-chain activity transparent to anyone.

TACEO's answer is a private execution layer for public chains, enabling confidential on-chain payments with the properties of a private virtual account, without migrating to a permissioned chain.

The right architecture separates concerns: assets and their lifecycle live on-chain; governance, controls and permissions stay off-chain where they cannot be observed.

Stablecoins are the gateway and AI agents are the next unlock

Stablecoins are the practical entry point for institutional on-chain deployment: dollars moving on-chain for efficiency, payment or treasury reasons need investment products, and that demand is driving vault and tokenization adoption.

The next frontier is agentic finance: AI agents operating autonomously on-chain raise entirely new questions around identity, delegation and compliance. "Know Your Agent" is becoming as relevant as KYC and a greenfield opportunity to redesign onboarding from scratch.

21x's partnership with SAP, which has embedded stablecoin payments for nearly 500,000 corporate clients, is a concrete example of how stablecoin-holding corporates will naturally seek on-chain yield products as a next step.

Regulation is the real bottleneck and the US is pulling ahead

Technology is no longer the constraint. The EU's DLT Pilot Regime, active since March 2023, has been too restrictive and time-limited to attract meaningful institutional commitment. Europe's duopoly of CSDs (Euroclear/Clearstream) has also slowed structural change.

The US has taken a fundamentally different approach: exemptive reliefs, no caps, and a regulator actively inviting innovation. 21x was approached directly by the SEC to open US offices.

The pressure is now on Europe: as the US accelerates, European institutions and regulators will face a choice between catching up or falling structurally behind, a dynamic that mirrors the e-banking transition of 20 years ago.

Institutions that wait are already behind

The top global asset managers have made up their minds. Blackrock, Franklin Templeton, Wisdom Tree and others are already building natively tokenized products. The dominos have fallen.

For banks and asset managers still assessing whether to enter: the risk of being off-chain in five years is equivalent to not having e-banking in 2010. The parallel financial system, one traditional, one on-chain, will run simultaneously for 5–6 years, then converge. Those not positioned on the on-chain side will struggle to catch up.

Internal readiness matters as much as product strategy: compliance, operations and finance functions all need a consolidated view across on-chain and off-chain activity. The organisational challenge is as significant as the technical one.

Conclusion

On-chain finance has crossed the inflection point. The infrastructure is proven, the products are live, and institutional capital is moving at scale. What separates leaders from laggards is now speed of execution, regulatory positioning, and the ability to build organisations that can operate natively across both worlds. Europe still has a window — but it is closing.