Wealth Platform for Digital Assets: Nexo

Nexo is an all-in-one digital wealth platform that empowers investors to buy, earn, borrow, and manage crypto assets through high-yield savings, crypto-backed credit lines, and seamless trading experiences. Trusted globally since 2018, Nexo combines security-first infrastructure, personalized wealth services, and institutional-grade financial tools to help users grow and protect their digital wealth with confidence.

In this episode, we speak with Kiril Tsenkov, Head of Business Development at Nexo, a digital assets wealth platform. We discuss the integration of traditional financial concepts with digital assets, focusing on how businesses can leverage crypto without selling their holdings. Kiril explains Nexo’s role in providing credit lines backed by cryptocurrency, allowing users to maintain liquidity without triggering tax events. The conversation covers the growing adoption of stablecoins in B2B transactions, the benefits of crypto-backed loans, and the evolving landscape of digital finance. Kiril shares insights into the practical applications of these financial tools, emphasizing their potential to streamline operations and enhance financial flexibility for businesses.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the SourceForge podcast. I am your host, Bo Hamilton, and today we're joined by Krill Senkov, head of business development at Nexo, a digital assets wealth platform focused on helping clients grow, manage, and preserve their crypto holdings. In this episode, we're going to be digging into some of the pretty fundamental financial ideas that are now being applied to crypto and digital assets in a business setting. So we'll talk about why some companies are starting to outgrow traditional banking relationships, what a modern treasury setup can look like, why borrowing against digital assets can sometimes make more sense than actually selling them. And then how businesses, owners, uh, and CFOs are approaching these decisions in practice. Uh and Kirill, um, he brings a practical, really ground level perspective to all this. He's shaped, uh, his career has been shaped by years in financial services, fintech, and uh B2B growth roles. So this should be a really interesting conversation for anyone trying to understand where digital assets fit into the broader future of business finance. So with that said, Krill, uh, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Thank you, boys. Uh I'm I'm really honored to be part of your podcast. And of course, my um greetings to all of your followers. It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

Absolutely. I'm I'm I'm honored to have you here on the show. Um, I want to get right into it. So before we get uh, you know, really too far into the weeds here, let's make sure uh all the listeners are on the same page. So I just want to give some background information on Nexo. Nexo has been around since 2018, and correct me if I'm wrong on any of these statistics, by the way. Um but when Nexo was launched, it was primarily known as a crypto lending platform, right? But the company's clearly uh evolved a lot since then, I would say. Um the the firm is now managing over $11 billion in assets. Uh you've processed something like $370 billion in transactions across 150 plus jurisdictions. So it's it's a pretty different animal. Now, for listeners who may have heard the name but don't really know what Nexo is, um, can you tell us what it is and who it's actually built for?

SPEAKER_00 2:13

What we're trying to do is we're trying to bridge the gap between traditional finance and literally the future. You know, um, when we started back in the day, we started with a very simple idea. And it was the fact that there was a growing number of people that adopted cryptocurrencies, or namely Bitcoin, early on, and they had significant unrealized profits. They held huge positions in uh in Bitcoin. And you know, when you're when you're in a situation like this, you have all of this wealth, you don't necessarily want to sell your Bitcoin, or if you do, you're going to trigger a significant tax event. You're gonna have to pay a lot of taxes. But still, every now and then you want to enjoy your wealth, you want to do something, or you want to grow, or you want to invest somewhere else. So the idea of the company was very simple. We wanted to provide people with credit lines using their um cryptocurrency as collateral. So you don't sell your cryptocurrency, you don't lose the upside if you believe that it's going to keep growing, but you are liquid. You get some cash, you get some fiat that you can use for your other projects. And this being a credit line, essentially, you don't uh trigger a tax event, so you don't have to pay taxes for this. So this is where it all started. Um, and as you as you rightfully noted, it now it has a life of its own. It's um it's a whole selection of uh wealth management products that come together in our platform, the next to platform, and it's all wrapped around an extremely handy Mastercard that uh many of our clients in uh Europe enjoy, and we're slowly rolling out everywhere else around the world.

SPEAKER_01 4:03

Oh, okay, that's exciting. Yeah, definitely gonna um uh mention the MasterCard uh tidbit here uh later on in the episode. Um but thanks for yeah, uh uh breaking down um what it is uh Nexo is is focusing on. Obviously, the platform has has grown over the years, as as do all platforms um that want to stay relevant. Um but um I want to focus a little bit more on the positioning um for a second, because I think that digital assets wealth platform, it's a phrase that can sound a little bit abstract if you're not already living and breathing this this crypto world. Um for someone who's never maybe used the platform, touched the platform, what does that actually mean for them day to day? What is a digital assets wealth platform? And then what can they do on Next that they couldn't do with a financial brokerage or maybe a regular bank?

SPEAKER_00 4:57

Once again, that's an excellent question. Well, imagine it like this. You know, in the early days, one way or another, you would acquire uh some cryptocurrency, right? What you'd need in order to own cryptocurrencurrency is you would need a wallet, a wallet of some sort. So you find yourself a wallet, you either register somewhere um on you know on some service provider's website or you use a hardware wallet, whatever you know you like, you receive your uh cryptocurrency, and that's it. Now you have digital assets. And the question was now that you do have uh these cryptocurrencies or Bitcoin or whatever it is, what can you do with it? So in the early days, people would acquire Bitcoin and they would either spend it for something or they would uh hold on to it, um, essentially hoping that it will grow in value and that they would see um, you know, uh gains, capital gains. They would realize a profit from this investment. Um what the digital platform, digital wealth management platform, does is it allows you to use this crypto. It allows you to use it to operationalize it, so to speak. It's not only about holding it and keeping it safe and sending it to someone else as you know, as a payment, whatever. It is about being able to use it in the more traditional sense of money, which is, for example, to earn a yield on on top of your digital assets, or to borrow against it, or to trade it against other cryptocurrencies. So these things, right, they sound like separate uh services. And you know, back in the day, um when the world wasn't so digitalized, maybe there would have been even separate companies, you know, with separate brick and mortar offices, right? But what the digital wealth platform does is it brings all of this together in one wallet, right? In one um software wallet, let's say, in one um online service, um, that allows you the convenience of keeping your crypto safe while at the same time uh getting a yield on it, while at the same time having the flexibility whenever you need to to borrow against it, you know, make a different investment, make a payment, um, or just spend it directly using uh your cart.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

Fantastic explanation. I really appreciate that. Yeah, because it's uh it's really about bridging that gap between the the traditional like fiat currency, um, the you know, the dollars or whichever currency we've we've we're all used to in our uh country of origin, um, and bridging that gap between this kind of new digital currency that's um, you know, making it in a lot of cases uh much easier to conduct business with, which we'll we'll we'll get into. Yeah. So a lot has changed. I just also think of the the pizza, like people were buying pizzas for hundreds of bitcoins, you know, back in the day. And it's just quite wild to think, think about uh how much those are worth now. But um I I want to also talk a little bit about your role specifically, um, because business development, you know, I think that means a little bit uh that means different things at different companies. At a SaaS startup, it might mean, you know, partnerships and integrations. Um at a bank, it might mean focusing on on like institutional sales at a uh a global digital assets platform operating in 150 jurisdictions. I imagine it's a whole separate thing entirely. So can you walk us through a little bit of what you're doing day to day? Uh, who is Krill Senkov, head of business development in Nexo?

SPEAKER_00 8:39

Well, thank you very much for that uh question. It's quite humbling, really. What does business development mean in uh Nexo? And you are quite right. In many companies it it means outright sales, right? Um, in other companies it can mean something else entirely. In Nexo, it's all about innovation. What really is business development for us? Business development for us is looking for use cases, talking to other businesses, talking to innovators around the world, and seeing where this might lead us as the company who, as I said, is trying to bridge traditional finance with the future. You know, there are um there are two types of innovations. There is every now and then you get a brilliant idea and you push it to the market, and you need to create demand for it. Other times, the market just pulls you in the direction and people kind of show you what they need. For me, to be honest with you, this happened um about eight years ago. About eight years ago, I had an online business and uh I worked a lot, I invested a lot in this. And I remember my very first, it was an e-commerce business, my very first customer, halfway around the world, his bank card declined on my website. And uh the customer support guy, the head of customer support, he was one desk away from it, it was a very small startup, and and he said, Kiryu, this guy says he has Bitcoin and he wants to pay. And I was like, what is man? That's too much hassle. What's no, you know, let's not do that. And and uh the head of support he said, listen, it's $800 worth of Bitcoin, it's our first sale. Take it or leave it, man. That's it. And it took me literally a few minutes to open the wallet online. I registered on a on an exchange website, I opened the wallet and I was like, okay, let's let's uh let him send that. Let's see what we can do with it. And that's where it all started for me. Very quickly, it solved a huge business problem for me, which was I had a uh I had a decent product, I wanted to sell it online, and there were people all over the world that could be my clients, but I couldn't get the payments. For some reason, it wasn't working out very, you know, it wasn't working out correctly, or when it was working with the traditional Rails, it was quite expensive. So I started accepting cryptocurrencies in my startup eight years ago. And then when I started doing that, very quickly I realized that you know, but part, a portion of my cash flow is in uh cryptocurrencies now. It was Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin back in the day. And I need to do something with that. What can I do with it, right? I I want to pay bills. Um, I didn't want personally, it was a personal business decision, I didn't want uh to carry any uh exchange rate risk. So I was immediately exchanging the currencies I received into stable coins, and then I figured out, you know, part of my treasury obviously it's it's in stable coins. I need to do something with it. And this is how, by the way, me personally, I discovered Nexo. Uh all those years, a few years ago, it was still a very young company. Uh, and I discovered that I can keep my stable coins there and generate uh an yield on them until the time comes for me to pay a bill. And uh, next step, the next thing I did is I convinced a few of my software vendors. Uh, I was using a few white label platforms from different providers, so on and so forth. I convinced them to accept payments in stablecoins from me. And I didn't know back in the day, but it kind of you know developed into a whole career. Uh, and this is pretty much what I do right now. I I help many businesses around the world, uh, and I talk to many businesses around the world about solving different day-to-day problems, operational problems, using uh stable coins and using crypto-backed credits and uh essentially everything that uh that Nexo can do uh in combination with that. And and turning literally digital assets into nothing to a hot from a hot potato back in the day, right? You you get a payment in Bitcoin, you rush to get rid of the Bitcoin immediately, liquidate, turn it into cash, you know, into fiat. Um but right now I'm trying to do something different. I'm trying to turn this into convenience. Your company, you know, you started a business, you get some payment from one of your uh clients in stablecoin. You don't need to liquidate it immediately. You know, you could have a bank card that you could use and just spend it directly if you need to spend it, or you can keep the this part of your treasury in stablecoin and get a yield on it. The initial users of this type of services were uh crypto evangelists, they were um investors and entrepreneurs that really saw the potential, like early adopters, right? They really saw the potential in this innovation. Things started changing recently a little bit, in my personal um opinion. Um things started changing. We see more and more people and businesses who are adopting crypto and particularly stable coins into their day-to-day operations for convenience. Not because, not for investment purposes, which I'm not saying it's it's not there. There are plenty of investors and plenty of investment interest, you know, into Bitcoin and the other um all the other tokens out there. But there is also a lot of utility, there's also a lot of uh convenience in using um stable coins day to day in your operations, um, simply because it saves time. International wire transfers are slow thing. Sometimes they get blocked. You know, many people on your channel who work in or own uh any type of business online. I'm sure they've experienced this a thousand times, you're waiting for a big invoice, and all of a sudden it's blocked by some bank on the chain, and and they demand documents from your client, and it turns into a very bad user experience for everyone. No, so um, we see a huge growth in uh B2B stablecoin payments. And I think that's here to stay, and I think it's only going to grow because it's very quick, almost instant, and you avoid all of this uh, you know, operational difficulties of friction points.

SPEAKER_01 15:13

Absolutely. I mean, yeah, you just think of the fundamentals of, you know, like you said, you were you were working at an e-commerce startup. Um, when you when you work online and in the digital economy, it just makes sense that you need some sort of uh digital currency, uh, what whatever it might be, whether it's a a stable coin, you know, um backed by the US dollar. I mean, you we have countries focusing on trying to digitize their their currency. I mean, this is it's all just about making transactions easier to process. And it's the fundamental way to think about it is just from the paper money to something online, it's easier to move and translate accordingly. But I think the, yeah, your story is really fascinating. I appreciate you sharing that with us. You were, I want to say you were an early pioneer in uh in terms of your adoption and your company. And um I think that's really interesting to hear how you, you know, you didn't just uh turn this this client away. You you found a solution, you looked into it, found out how you can actually uh adopt and and accept this form of payment, accept the Bitcoin, and then you know, one thing led to another, and and now you're um you've really found a passion for it, and now you're here working for Nexo. So I think I think that's great. That's really that's really neat. That's like a great trajectory. And um I think you're we're still, I mean, in the grand scheme of things, still in the early, early days, and it's exciting to see where this is all going. And so I think you're at a really good place. So again, appreciate you sharing that with us. And um, I want to focus in a little bit on the branding standpoint now. Um, I know Nexo launched uh as a crypto lending company, and you've got this MasterCard-backed card. You have uh institutional custody of OTC services, you have, you know, as with most businesses nowadays, AI-powered uh portfolio tools. Um, but at some point, the the labeled crypto company, I think kind of stops covering all these different offerings you guys are are now uh capable of. But fintech has its own sort of baggage at the same time, right? So you're you're not a bank, at least not in the traditional sense. I'm just curious, like when you're in a room with maybe a potential broker or a partner, a regulator, a CFO, um, how do you describe what Nexo is? Do you kind of tailor your wording and your branding and your conversation accordingly?

SPEAKER_00 17:31

That that's an amazing question, boy. That's an amazing question. Um, and you're right, a crypto company does create certain um, you know, certain associations, let me put it like this. A fintech creates other considerations, and we do believe that we are a bridge between all of those things. When I'm in a room with I wouldn't say a CFO, to be to be honest with you, because um if I'm in a room with a CFO, they will humble me very quickly. I can tell you, I can tell you that much. But there's so many entrepreneurs out there, there's so many people now starting their own um online business or software business. Uh, you know, uh I'm sure you get spammed by many, many advertisements about um coding AIs nowadays. So literally anyone can create an app. And if the idea is good enough, I guess anyone can start a business online. And um these people, they don't need to be intimidated by the concept of treasury operations, right? They don't need to be intimidated by how am I going to handle payments from different countries? Um and I'm not talking about the tax aspects or the legal aspects, right? Everyone needs to consult a qualified professional with regards to that, right? We're not here to give that kind of advice. I'm talking about strictly operationally, right? Day to day. How am I going to handle receiving payments from people all over the world? What where am I going to keep this money? You know, do I want to go through the hassle and the cost of opening bank accounts in different countries? Do I want more control over my assets? These kind of things, these these are the things that really um are interesting for uh entrepreneurs and and for um people with uh small and and and uh mid-cap companies. It's really the the company that doesn't want to or doesn't have the resources to invest in a huge um treasury uh team. Let me put it like this, or huge payments team. Um so as with everything else in the world, um services such as what uh what Nexo can do for you are here to help you achieve better efficiency, you know, better automation, um, and basically the the business achieve the business of tomorrow. So back to your question, when I'm in a room with with a person like that, how do I introduce Nexo? Very, very simple, right? If as a company you have or you know, or as or as an individual, you have any part of your assets in digital currencies, in cryptocurrencies, nexo is the platform that can help you earn yield on on top of your digital assets, will pay that on top of your balance daily, and you retain full flexibility, you can withdraw or send your funds or payments whenever you want. Or if you need to, you we can give you a credit line backed by your crypto so you don't have to sell it, you don't have to trigger um tax events. So, very simply put, we're a company that you can store your digital assets in our uh wallets, you can get a yield on that, or you can get the credit from us. Which sounds very, very familiar to a bank, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:06

Yeah, it does. It should shouldn't be too forward. Yeah, I mean, some of these these the what you're helping clients set up and and um reassure them with, it does sound very similar to a bank, so there shouldn't be too much of a a learning curve.

SPEAKER_00 21:20

You know, it's uh simplicity is the um is the ultimate complication, as I believe Leonardo da Vinci said. And at the end of the day, the most brilliant innovations are always um simple. So really, it is as um it is as simple as that. We can turn the ownership of um cryptocurrency into a convenience.

SPEAKER_01 21:44

So I want to get into the the B2B side of things here a little bit because I know that's clearly becoming a bigger focus, a bigger part of what Nexo does. Um, and I think it's also, of course, particularly relevant here um on the SourceForge podcast. Um I'm curious about. About the maybe the entry point and what's actually sort of driving businesses to show up at your front door in the first place? What is the maybe the most common frustration you hear from digital business owners when they first come to Nexo?

SPEAKER_00 22:15

Well, there is no single answer to that question. Every business, depending on their context, their location specifically, and then the you know local tax and uh and legal um situation, has its own use cases and they have their own needs and they need to solve a different set of um business challenges. When we're talking about, for example, e-commerce businesses, right? The first thing you do is you set up a good, let's call it a platform, right? You set up a good e-commerce platform, you figure out a way to get um paid, and then you reach in a you you you arrive at a situation where you want to settle your funds from your um, let's say payment service provider or you know, payment gateway, whatever you're using, you want to settle that funds into your own account. Back in the day, that was problematic. Many banks frowned upon receiving transfers from companies that were known to um exchange cryptocurrencies, and that was creating problems. So, you know, you're a business, you don't want to miss out on clients that are in different locations around the world. You do want to accept their preferred payment method, which is increasingly uh becoming uh stable coins. Um, but at the same time, you know that you're gonna have some friction with the bank that you use. Usually that that's that was the uh the usual case why someone would arrive at our uh doorstep seeking a uh an account, let me put it like this, where you can settle to uh from your um payment gateways, payment service providers, again, whatever you're using, you want to settle your uh cryptocurrency into your Nexo account, then you want to maybe take out a um maybe make a few internal transfers, you know, to your uh other employees so that they can use the funds with their um uh cart, with their crypto-backed cart. Um, maybe you want to pay a few invoices. Many, many software vendors nowadays are perfectly happy to accept stablecoin payments. That as I said, that that market particularly is growing uh massively.

SPEAKER_01 24:31

Yeah, there there is actually a um that kind of gets me into the the this recent report. I I found that there's uh B2B stablecoin payments um are at we're at $226 billion in in 2025. Um and that works out to actually a 730% jump year over year. So they're absolutely being more adopted and incorporated into the the digital economy. So that's you're absolutely right there. And I I think what's what's interesting about that profile is is who is adopting it, you know, and it's not just the crypto nature, it's it's the the auto part manufacturers, it's the maybe the textile importers, the renewable energy suppliers. Um, there's all sorts of businesses using stable coins because the correspondent banking is is perhaps slower and and more expensive. Um, does that does that match what you're seeing on your end?

SPEAKER_00 25:27

Absolutely. Absolutely. That's a fact. Um, and as I said, it's here to stay. You know, the definition of a um um of disruptive innovation is something that starts out, first off, it's cheaper, significantly cheaper. And second of, it starts off being more inconvenient than the incumbent solution, but then it very quickly it overtakes it. So you arrive in a situation where this new, initially inconvenient but significantly cheaper solution slowly, slowly improves, and now you have something that is cheaper and significantly better. And this is where we are with um cryptocurrencies, with stable coins. They they truly were a disruptive innovation, they truly are disrupting the traditional um banking scene and uh in the sense of uh payment services, of course. Um, but yes, I I can agree with you absolutely. It is cheaper, it is less problematic, and in many, many cases it's um giving a better user experience to to your um to your customers. What we do see as well on our side here in Nexo, uh we do have this annual um report, we publish this annual report that is essentially studying how people use crypto-backed cards, what they use them for, who are who are the people that are using these cards. And what I can tell you is that the data there also uh is backing my personal opinion. It's no longer strictly crypto evangelists, uh Web3 entrepreneurs and um investors. It's increasingly becoming the uh the average Joe, let me put it like this: someone working in an innovative company that wants to spend, usually, by the way, stable coins using a crypto-backed card for their day-to-day needs, like you know, getting a coffee.

SPEAKER_01 27:31

Yeah, they're really it's starting to get that kind of mass adoption phase, you know. Um it makes me think like just when there's there's all some new technology that comes along, um, obviously there's a little bit of a learning curve. Um, people are comfortable doing what they've, you know, conducting business the way they have for for years and decades. Um and so there's a little bit of a upheaval in terms of the everyday, you know, like you gotta you gotta spend some time to learn and figure out how to adopt it. But but like you were saying, it's like once you get through that initial, you know, adoption phase, that learning curve, it's it's gonna end up saving you, um, saving you money. It's gonna end up actually working better for you in the long run, it sounds like. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 28:12

Absolutely. And it's um it's excellent that you mentioned the uh the learning curve, uh, by the way. Uh what I can tell you is that um one of the big challenges, one of the big tasks that we have in front of us is to minimize that learning curve. We need to make these services easy to understand and easy to use, and of course, keep them as safe as possible, which is uh which is something we've always taken great pride in as a company. So um one of the things that uh makes people come to me, to go back to your previous question and to our company, is the fact that we've reduced this process to a simple few-click operation. Getting a crypto-backed loan could be an entirely automated few-click uh process. As long as you know you open an account, as long as you provide the um cryptocollateral, it could be as simple as that, and it could be extremely fast.

SPEAKER_01 29:15

Yeah, do you have um any maybe real-world uh B2B specific use cases or or examples you can think of? Maybe something you've seen clients uh do at Nexo or or a hypothetical that kind of captures how it actually works.

SPEAKER_00 29:32

Imagine the following, of course, strictly hypothetical scenario. You're running an online business. Um, part of your clients, for one reason or another, are transacting with you um in cryptocurrency. They're sending cryptocurrency payments to you. These payments arrive, you know, you have the receivable side, you want to get the money you're owed as a business as soon as possible. Um, and you have the payable side. Essentially, you need to pay your use, you want to do that as late as possible. That's a very, very simple principle in treasury operations. You want to keep funds inside your company as long as possible so that you can get some uh yield on that. But imagine on top of this, right, that you're in a situation where you have some seasonality. Let's say a huge holiday is approaching, and you know for a fact that that's a very strong period for your company. And you have this cryptocurrency, this digital uh currency balance on your books. It's sitting there, it's gonna be there for a few months. What we could do in an exo account is we can give you a credit backed by your crypto balance so that you can actually um, let's say, double or triple your marketing acquisition budget during, let's say, Christmas, which might be a very strong period for you.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

Is there a um uh an industry that you were surprised to see was was um that maybe maybe listeners wouldn't expect to to have come to you to to to work with you and adopt some of your stablecoin um crypto services, or um is there any like surprise? I know you can't name a specific client, but is there a surprise industry you can think of that adopted this technology?

SPEAKER_00 31:23

To be honest with you, we've pretty much seen everything, uh everything by now. Um, we were originally uh very, very surprised by uh real estate. You know, a few years ago, not a lot of people would have imagined it, but uh there were there was a moment in time where people showed up and they wanted credit line against their significant uh Bitcoin holdings so that they can buy um real estate. So this uh it was earlier, obviously, in the in the day. I was uh back in my consulting days, but I was keeping very close. Um I was in touch with the with the founders of of Next, so we're discussing things regularly, and uh it you know it attracted attention where uh when word got around that people are actually buying real estate without selling their uh Bitcoin. Before that point in time, people were buying real estate with Bitcoin, of course, you know, that wouldn't surprise anyone. Many people became very, very rich when they um invested in Bitcoin early on. But when people started using it to essentially get a crypto-backed mortgage, that that was uh very interesting for us. It was and it was very inspiring as well.

SPEAKER_01 32:42

Yeah, that's thanks for sharing that. That's um, I can imagine. I mean, crypto or uh the real estate industry is is uh a huge market and it just makes uh perfect sense dealing with um, you know, buying real estate. But also I think of two when you're dealing with with landlords and tenants and the the processing of transactions there um also seems like a natural use case or of uh for adopting a staple coin, let's say, um, to facilitate those transactions. Um I know that um so the earlier days for Nexo, it's my understanding that the company's built a real reputation in the high net worth and the ultra high net worth space, but you're also clearly going after corporate clients that are at a much earlier stage. Maybe it's a SaaS company, a digital agency, a founder who's got some crypto on the balance sheet and wants to do something smarter with it. How does the product and the experience translate for those specific clients? And are these the the same tools or are they sort of a different offering for them?

SPEAKER_00 33:43

Um, excellent question. Thank you very much for that. Uh no, it's not a different um offering. We're committed to providing the same level of service and the same level of excellence, of course, to everyone of our um clients. Why founders, why entrepreneurs, why managers in uh you know in growing companies? Because these are the innovators, these are the people that are going to disrupt the market tomorrow, and we really believe in them. What we are doing essentially is providing a credit against uh an asset, right? Against an asset that's used as collateral. That's not a very new concept, to be honest with you. We were one of the innovators in the context of doing it against cryptocurrency collateral, but it pre-existed in in the traditional finance world. And the people that made this concept famous were specifically founders of big uh of big companies. If you go online and you and you Google it, you're going to find a very, very interesting, uh, many, many actually very interesting stories about founders of huge companies who never sold the shares that they were um awarded via stock options or other means for their performance. They never sold them, they never paid huge taxes in some cases. But what they did instead is they uh used them as collateral and they got uh credit, sometimes billions of dollars worth of credit, and they spent many, many years using that credit line in their day-to-day life and business and in and other new investments instead of selling their uh actual wealth. So these founders, right, these innovators, they're the people who actually made this use case interesting.

SPEAKER_01 35:45

Yeah, I mean, they're these these are the people that are these are changemakers. These are these have these guys have real you know, ripple effects with the policies they implement and technology they adopt. So that makes total sense. Um one interesting um, you know, uh idea that you you shared with us, and um you mentioned it um earlier on as well, but it's it's just the idea of using crypto as collateral for a loan instead of selling it. You know, I think it's a concept that a lot of people have maybe perhaps heard about, but haven't really uh internalized, um, and especially on the business side. Um so I'm curious, maybe you could walk us through um the case for it, especially from the perspective of a business owner making a capital allocation decision.

SPEAKER_00 36:29

Um absolutely, it would be my pleasure. Of course, let's clearly specify that we're not advising anyone here. Um this is not tax advice, it's not investment advice. Um, anyone listening to this should really consult a qualified professional in their specific location, depending where they are in the world. So it's let's say this is mostly um opinion. You mentioned CFOs a little bit early. Um corporate finance, right? It's a fascinating subject. Fascinating, really. It is um in its core, corporate finance is about achieving the optimal capital structure for your business. Treasury operations, by the way, is part of that discipline, and it's all about having the um having flexibility, having liquidity when you need it and where you need it, and you know, obviously managing your funds and your payments. One of the core principles of um corporate finance is this um optimal capital structure. And what it says is that as a business, uh you might be profitable and hopefully, obviously, and uh as such you will need to pay taxes. If your business loans part of the capital uh uh it it uses, the interest payments are uh deductibles. So basically you are uh reducing your uh tax expense. Um this is a concept that that's widely known as a tax shield. So essentially borrowing funds creates a tax shield for your company. It reduces part of the the taxes that you're going to pay. So every company essentially has an optimal point between equity and uh borrowed funds, equity and credit. An optimal point where the cost of equity equals essentially the cost of uh credit. This allows you as a business to grow uh again optimally. The bottom line here is that if your business is successful, you will generate uh an operating profit, you end up paying taxes. Whether you pay taxes or interest, arguably it's the same thing. You still end up paying, right? You end up suffering uh an expense. In one case, in the borrow case, you will suffer the same expense, but you will have more capital to operate with. Now, this is a terrible oversimplification, I'm sure. And as I said, uh a CFO sitting in this room will probably humble me immediately. But I'm I'm pretty confident that as as far as an oversimplification goes, it's it's a pretty accurate one.

SPEAKER_01 39:21

Yeah, no, I think oversimplification is great, especially when you're you're speaking to someone like myself who you know has a has a uh a surface level understanding, let's say, of of this industry. So I appreciate the the simplicity. Um and you know, the the CFOs, they they live and breed this stuff, so of course they're gonna they're gonna humble you a little bit. But um, you know, okay. Speaking of CFOs, though, that's one thing, you know, I didn't ask you specifically. It was just, you know, you you when you sit down and talk with a CF CFO and start mapping out, you know, what a what a modern treasury setup could look like with with digital assets in the mix. Um, you know, does that conversation differ from some of the other conversations you have with with other um maybe SaaS founders, uh, maybe a more uh kind of a more broader um audience, let's say?

SPEAKER_00 40:09

No, not not particularly, to be honest with you. Uh uh Software as a service company founder uh is uh you know by necessity a walking CFO, CEO, COO, and head of product. Right? So um usually this type of person will have even more questions for me. CFOs, they know exactly what they want, they know exactly what they're trying to achieve. So um, you know, it's we we use we use up less time in exploration, I can say. But at the end of the day, it it comes again, it comes down to the same concept. It is, I have some crypto running through my company, what can I do with it? Or I'm already doing something with it, can I do it in a better way? Can I simplify it? Can I make it more secure? Can I make it cheaper?

SPEAKER_01 41:02

So it's really it's really focused in on the specific as opposed to the the kind of more broad-based, uh say generic questions that you might receive.

SPEAKER_00 41:12

Yeah. Well, to be honest with you, yes, it is uh related, really related to the specific use case of each company and each individual. Um, one huge benefit that I have um on my side is the amazing private client uh services, private client desk at Nexo, which is a um a team of um incredible professionals um who can help and advise our private clients. So when it comes down to the learning curve, you know, it's always better to have someone to talk to that can actually uh help you set up. That's one of the huge benefits, right? We live in the world of uh AI, we live in the world of automation. But one thing I can tell you is when we're talking about about high network services, high network individuals, the white glove approach, right, the real professional that you can speed dial on your phone, that's still very highly valued.

SPEAKER_01 42:14

Absolutely. And having those, those, those person-to-persons, you know, in in some cases face-to-face uh conversations are really valuable, especially when you're dealing with, like you're saying, the high, high net worth individuals, the you know, so much currency and um digital tools and software. A lot of times, I mean, you're gonna have questions, you're gonna have concerns, um, and but having a person to really talk to and weed out the the details and the concerns is very valuable. Um I I want to um throw this recent survey I found at you. Um so Deloitte actually put out a survey uh uh from mid-2025 that I thought was pretty it was pretty jarring. Um they they pulled 200 North American CFOs at companies with at least a billion in revenue. And the overall number planning to use digital currency for treasury within two years was about 23%. But for companies with $10 billion or more in revenue, that number jumped up to nearly 40%. Um, but what really stood out to me was that only 1% of the respondents in that survey said they had no long-term vision for stablecoin at all. So there's very little um outright no, it's mostly when and how. From where you sit, does that sort of match the conversation you're having with with CFOs?

SPEAKER_00 43:31

Absolutely. Absolutely. As I said, when it comes to innovation, you are either push it to the market, if you're the one who came up with it, or uh the market pulls you in that direction. If you're smart, you will listen. A company with billions of dollars of revenue, I promise you, Bo, the CFO is a very smart person and very data driven. And they appreciate already the benefits of using uh stable coins as part of their treasury operations.

SPEAKER_01 44:00

Now um I want to pivot and get back to the the crypto backed lending market some more because I think there's there's also an interesting backstory here. The the crypto lending market, as as many of us are aware, got pretty badly burned in 2022 and 2023. Several firms went under Celsius block fee, uh Genesis. Um that whole sector pretty pretty much, you know, it contracted pretty hard. Um but you know, compared to today, things are turning around. You know, a report from uh a company called Galaxy Research, they found that the market has actually rebounded 157% from its quarter three, 2023 low. And it's actually reaching something like $36 billion. Uh, it actually reached $36 billion by the year 2024. So those numbers have really turned around. They've continued to climb ever since. Um, and I think the recovery is definitely very much underway. But uh again, things are different now. Things are still in flux, I would say. Um, there's more concentration, there's fewer players, and presumably I would say a more cautious borrower base. Who are you actually seeing on the borrowing side at Nexo today? What are they what are they using it for?

SPEAKER_00 45:14

The market did go through a bit of a Wild West phase, and many people lost a lot of money. Many companies went out of business, and now what you see on the market is that both the um users and the service providers are more cautious, and they're being more careful, and you have significantly more regulation, of course, than than back in the day. What I'm seeing on the uh borrower side is we're seeing adoption is growing. Um this is what I can tell you for sure. It's um many, many more people now own cryptocurrency than uh uh than what uh what the numbers were back in the day. Um the the total number of cryptocurrency adopters globally is is uh rising every year, more and more. I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but we can Google them and we'll be amazed. I can promise that much. And um these people were finding use cases for their uh for their crypto, uh, especially when it's a lot of it, especially when you've invested early on and when you have uh you know significant digital asset holding. Then the idea of not wanting to trigger tax events, the idea of not wanting to sell your wealth, but wanting the liquidity to buy something, you know, to invest in a real estate, to buy an airplane, if you will, right? Um the idea is there and you want to do it. And uh that's when a crypto-backed credit starts to appeal. There are other um interesting use cases as well. For example, especially with the younger generation, many, many, uh, many people have um part of their savings in cryptocurrency for one reason or another. For example, maybe they live in a country with where there is an inflation problem. So they want to keep their money in a stable coin that's let's say US dollar backed or something else, because they don't want to risk that the whatever their income is being paid into, whatever fiat currency they're getting, they don't want to risk uh the devaluation of their savings. Maybe it is because they just like cryptocurrency and they get or they work remotely, let's say, and they get paid with um uh cryptocurrency stablecoin transfers. This is by the way, this is something we're seeing more and more. So many um uh software companies specifically hire people remotely in different regions around the world, and it's actually significantly easier just to pay them in stablecoin, many people are opting for that. And one way or another, you end up with part of your savings being in uh cryptocurrencies. And let's say you want to buy something, you want to buy an apartment, you want to buy a car, it doesn't matter. For one reason or another, it becomes easier for you just to get a loan backed by your uh cryptocurrencies. There are locations around the world where you know let's say the the investor, the proprietor would not be interested in paying in uh in selling you real estate uh against a crypto payment. You know, this this can solve that problem for you without triggering a tax event. So you won't sell your Bitcoin, let's say, you won't have to pay taxes, and then you go and you buy the apartment you liked, you know, in a holiday destination. Um instead, you get a loan, you skip the paying the taxes, right? And you will pay you buying that uh that holiday property. So many things you can do, uh again, we're not giving advice here, but imagine it like this: you you get a crypto backed loan, you buy a holiday property, a few months down the line. Maybe you wanna uh get a second mortgage on it from a traditional banking institution and just liquidate, just uh just um terminate your uh crypto backed loan. Maybe you want to go back and forth, you know, it's all about the flexibility that this uh service can give you, the extra flexibility that wasn't there a few years ago.

SPEAKER_01 49:26

Absolutely. Yeah, there's so many different use cases, like you mentioned, yeah, and each and the what the example there that um you offered is a very sort of practical uh use case. And it just it's it's fascinating to see how it's it's in everyday conversation too, the uh crypto um has changed and it's become more widely um discussed. But there's like you're saying, there's some really useful practical cases, a lot of which are in the B2B space. Um the real estate market's really exciting. You know, I think it'll be a good place to end on um is that lending section and that use case because I think it it, I'll be honest, it sounds a little bit exotic when you first hear it, um, but it's it's really real. So I heard that there's this story about a guy who financed a converted church in Amsterdam using crypto as collateral rather than selling his holdings. Um and I understand that Nexo was actually involved in you know a lot of the real estate deals, including some pretty, pretty large ones. Um is that a a niche thing, that that Amsterdam example, like is that a curiosity for a lot of these crypto billionaires out there, or is or is crypto-backed real estate financing becoming a genuine option for people?

SPEAKER_00 50:40

Uh well, we turned a lot of heads when it happened back in the day, but to be honest with you, as of right now, it's it's more of a typical use case. It's not it's not that uncommon anymore.

SPEAKER_01 50:53

Is there a um a way listeners can get in contact with you um or or a place to go to learn more about Nexo and some of the specifics we talked about?

SPEAKER_00 51:02

Well, when it comes down to Nexo, it's Nexo.com. That's that's the best source of information about uh the the amazing world of uh the digital wealth platform. If anyone there they're out there, if anyone has any interesting ideas, especially about you know crypto-backed loans or uh using um stable coins into in your day-to-day operations, I'm on LinkedIn. I would love to connect. I'm not a salesperson, so I'm not here to sell anything, but you know, if uh if you're one of those innovators we just spoke about, you know, I would love to talk to you.

SPEAKER_01 51:43

Krill, I think this has been a really great conversation, and I just really appreciate all the time you've you've taken to break all these these concepts down and what it is Nexo is working um to do for for clients, especially um with what they're what they're doing in the B2B space. Um I think it's really really useful to hear about it, and especially from someone actually on the inside like yourself.

SPEAKER_00 52:04

Thank you very much, but it's been a pleasure. I'm a big fan, um, a big fan of your uh channel. And um to be honest with you, I can't believe I'm actually on it. So, you know, I I I hope uh this um session would be interesting.

SPEAKER_01 52:20

Yeah. I appreciate all the kind words and well, we'd love to connect with you. Uh Kirill Senkov, thank you so much again for everything you shared with us and and thanks for being on the show.

SPEAKER_00 52:28

Thank you, Bo. Thanks. Have a good one.

SPEAKER_01 52:31

Thank you all for listening to the SourceForge podcast. I'm your host, Bo Hamilton. Make sure to subscribe to stay up to date with all of our upcoming B2B software related podcasts. I will talk to you in the next one.