Hi, hi everybody.
Thank you for joining us.
So today in the studio I've got Stephen Mackintosh, the CIO of Sui Group Holdings, and thank you for being with us today, Steven.
Thank you, great to be here.
Uh, so Steven, when we talk about tokenizing fund, let's launch straight into the tokenization story.
And we're talking about tokenizing funds in Abu Dhabi, especially in private equity, private credit funds.
What do those tokenized funds actually mean in practice and how does it help the fund managers that are running those strategies?
Yeah, sure, I think um the best way to answer that question is with a really, you know, clear example.
Um, so I am the CIO of Sui Group Holdings and also the co-founder of Heritage, which is a proprietary investment business, and one of our portfolio companies is registered here in Abu Dhabi.
And that company is called Kyo, and they are a uh a tokenization platform.
And they have some really great announcements recently in, in the region, so they have a partnership with uh First Abu Dhabi Bank, but most importantly, they are now tokenizing one of Mubadla's credit funds, which is a $4 billion dollar fund.
Uh, and the way it will work is that it allows users to subscribe for only $100 minimum.
And you can subscribe using stablecoins.
Um, so it's all about broadening access.
Uh, you do have to be an accredited investor, but what's interesting is that you can get, um, essentially, uh, you know, collateral against those tokenized fund units to be used elsewhere, uh, through a neobank in DeFi, and we also think that it's about, um, providing access to liquidity sooner, so by using a secondary liquidity venue such as fission.
Um, an individual who has a tokenized, uh, fund unit can get, uh, you know, redemptions before the quarterly redemption window, and then they could use that, you know, capital to potentially allocate to the SpaceX IPO, etc.
So we see it all about broadening access, uh, increasing dynamic portability of tokenized fund units, and really, really importantly, you know, expanding the reach here in the region.
You know, it's so interesting as well to sort of see sovereign linked capital really sort of chasing this innovation.
Do you think this is really positioning Abu Dhabi to be a global hub for real world asset tokenization?
Are they ahead of the curve when it comes to this technology and adopting this for traditional markets?
I think many, um, you know, exchanges, blockchains have sought out ADGM.
As a place to domicile and to partner with because it's so forward thinking as a regulatory environment, um, I think the US now is going through, you know, extremely exciting catch-up trade, uh, on crypto, but you know they're really probably squandered many years under the previous administration, whereas your regions like the UAE and specifically in ADGM they made strides ahead.
And so when you look at um the activity of exchanges like Coinbase, Purchas and Gabits, um, coming to the region.
Um, your finance has done with actually, uh, allowing spot equities to be traded in the exchange recently.
You know, there's a lot of innovation happening here, and I do think that, you know, um, a, a consecutive Abu Dhabi Finance Weeks year on year, you see that excitement manifested really in the people that turn up.
I mean, it's, it's so exciting to see all these technologies come together and ADGM sort of be a hub to house, house all this innovation.
But just talking a little bit about the SUI ETF that's listed on the NASDAQ, that's obviously a public market access vehicle for acquiring SI, but also staking SI.
So it's pretty innovative.
I think SI may be one of the lesser known mainstream crypto tokens.
Everybody knows Bitcoin, Ethereum, and maybe Solana, but I feel SI is kind of breaking through in terms of, um, positioning itself as one of the major cryptos.
So how do you see and what was the rationale behind listing that um in creating that SI ETF?
And do you see yourselves maybe listing on the ADX, bringing that ETF over to the ADX in the near future?
Yeah, so, um, SI is one of the most exciting blockchain networks.
Uh, they originally were the team from Facebook, which is now Meta, and, um, Mark Zuckerberg hired the world's best distributed systems engineers and cryptographers.
Um, prior to, you know, 2020 really, to build a blockchain network and a stablecoin initiative that will be rolled out to 3 billion users.
It was called Libre and Dion, most famously, and it was, uh, shut down by the previous administration, and there was a whole kind of story there.
But the great thing is that this team spun out and they created SuI, which is a high performance, um, low latency blockchain infrastructure that can handle, you know, millions of transactions per second because the more.
And, you know, machines you throw at the, the, the kind of validator level and the hardware level, it scales horizontally, which is really exciting.
And it also has this very unique attribute being an, an object centric blockchain architecture, which is, um, uh, designed around the Move programming language, which was invented by the CTO of SUI, Sam Blackshear at Facebook.
And this, um, this, this blockchain has really, you know, uh, been one of the most exciting to, to track.
We were an early investor through Carriage, and we have a great relationship with the foundation and the management team.
And they partnered with us to essentially take um uh, you know, hold of a public company, so the, the, the company was originally called Mill City Ventures on NASDAQ.
We anchored carriage, a $450 million pipe transaction.
Uh, to convert this business into a SI digital asset treasury vehicle, and since we launched the business, we've acquired 108 million SI tokens, which is about 2.7% of the network.
Uh, we continue to, uh, purchase SI in a, you know, a creative, uh, manner that's kind of valuable for our shareholders.
And yeah, you know, there has been a proliferation of ETFs around.
Um, the SI blockchain now with Greyscale and 21 shares, bringing public market access, uh, to the blockchain.
And, um, for us we, we think that, you know, in the future there will be a handful of high performance blockchains, um, that really matter.
Um, Solana, Sui, Ethereum, Hypeliquid, and then I think there's the rest, and we wanted to make sure that Sui was definitely in that, in that.
And and bringing those that that innovation, bringing.
The ETF to mainstream investors, right, having them listed on national stock exchanges.
Let's just finish on Agente Finance, you know, AI, I know that you're a very active investor in the AI space.
You've set up your base in Abu Dhabi to look at research and developments in that next wave of AI-driven finance.
What is the most exciting thing you're seeing in the space today?
I think, you know, clearly it's the amount of capital going into AI and this region has been, you know, uh famous for its, its sponsorship of the AI trade.
Whether it's data centers, whether it's, you know, anthropic and open AI.
You know, prior to becoming an investor, I actually ran an artificial intelligence business that was launched at the UCL AI Research Lab with DeepMind.
And we eventually I sold that company to an I listed acquirer, um, and you know back then access to capital was hard.
Now access to capital is incredible and you know it's one of the reasons why we think um in terms of Sui Group Holdings, uh to your previous question, we, we have looked at, you know, potentially agent listing here on the ADX we'd like to.
To broaden access to, you know, uh, our, our business.
But in terms of AI specifically, you know, we continue to invest in some of the most exciting companies.
We've invested recently through Suri Group Holdings in recursive, which is a discount from DeepMind and NF One, Eugenic trading, uh, platform based in open-endedness research.
Amazing.
So Steven, that was fascinating discussion.
Thank you for joining us.
We're gonna take a short break and then we'll be back soon.
Thank you.
