Interviewer: Once more we're live from Definition at Token 2049 here in Singapore, and of course this is where institutions and builders in tokenized credit, yields and stablecoins meet, and it's powered by Accountable, the verification layer bringing institutional finance on chain. And joining me fresh off stage is Marco Panini, Chief Investment Officer of Pelican Investments. Thank you very much for joining us, Mark.
Marco Panini: Thank you very much.
Interviewer: So first of all, tell us more about Pelican Investments. What do you invest in and who are your clients?
Marco Panini: Yeah, so we are a semi-regulated fund and we build off-chain strategies, high-yield strategies based on the US market. So it's your traditional high-yield strategy you can find on Wall Street, and we distribute the yield on chain. So our, let's say, we have one foot in traditional finance and one foot in DeFi. What we do there is we get the capital in and then we distribute the yield, and then thanks to the composability of DeFi, we try to exploit as much as possible the possibility of catching more yield with the MOLT token.
Interviewer: And since you said you have one foot here and one foot there, does this mean that your clientele, let's say, are more expanded? Does it include more variety?
Marco Panini: Yeah, it's a bit diversified in the sense like, when we present our strategy to traditional clients, it speaks to them, but when you tell them, OK, this is how it's distributed there, they start to have questions because probably they don't understand exactly what you can do on DeFi that it's not possible today to do in traditional finance. You kind of have to introduce them to the, sorry, the finance, traditional finance 2.0, right? But instead, on the other side, it's the opposite. Like DeFi investors have the opposite. Like they look at the strategy and don't necessarily understand immediately what that means of having this type of ETFs, why you are choosing one asset instead of another, why you want to have something that, for example, has 20 years of performance rather than something that has been launched last year.
Interviewer: Mark, you have spent two decades at firms like UniCredit, Swissquote and Pictet, I have to remind you. So what drew you into digital assets after all this time?
Marco Panini: I mean, it was kind of an interesting story. So basically I managed to get introduced to digital assets from the inside out, so not really starting as an investor but as a builder. The first product that was launched was at Swissquote. I launched the first CFDs on Bitcoin from a publicly listed bank in Switzerland. And that was really the time where traditional finance was still the same, but digital assets were completely unknown for banks. So we had to build things from inside out, and that really gives me a different kind of perspective, I think, on digital assets because I had to see it in action and from the gears of the engine, so building it piece by piece and seeing how actually things are not that different from traditional finance when you look under the hood. And so that allowed me to see what really can be done, like having a vision of what the future could be. So that's where I decided, OK, I want to be exposed to this industry.
Interviewer: And since you have this kind of special vantage point, do you think there is something that people who don't have this kind of advantage do not see or do not comprehend fully?
Marco Panini: Yeah, for sure. Like I think that there's too much of this idea of there is like a Chinese wall between traditional finance and digital assets, where for the most part, if you're talking about Forex, it's digital. Like today money is digital. Banks don't trade big pallets of cash on paper. They just do it with a click, so everything is already digitalized. You're just now at the moment kind of adopting the technology. Now it's taking more and more space in anything we're doing. And so now it's just how much of this is finance and how much of this is technology? I think they're merging together, and they're merging together on the digital asset side.
Interviewer: And now I think we can safely say that Wall Street is clearly moving on chain. That's a fact, right? But where do you think we are right now in this journey?
Marco Panini: We're still at the beginning. If you think about it, what we do with the most important narrative, the narrative right now is tokenized stocks. Tokenized stocks are really the basics of traditional finance. Stocks in general are the basics of traditional finance. What we are trying to do, for example, is bringing on-chain strategies, right? So now you have an active manager that is creating a strategy based on his own mandate, his own vision, right, which is the whole gizmo of finance, is having great value that's working for you, that's...
Interviewer: Hopefully we're out of that.
Marco Panini: Yeah, yeah. You know, that's kind of the thing, is creating, is building and bringing things into the digital world that are more mature, that have a methodology, that have all the checks and balances there, and now making it accessible to everyone, right? Not having this huge entry barrier that traditional finance still has.
Interviewer: How mature are on-chain yield strategies right now compared to a couple of years ago? This is a question that, you know, a lot of people are asking. What do you think about that?
Marco Panini: I mean, things are getting better, definitely. First of all, like, you know, people like Accountable, a couple of years ago they were just starting building. And so you need to have all the components that are normal in traditional finance. Right now I think of Accountable as potentially the new Bloomberg Terminal, which for an investment manager is, you know, the basic. And the vault system is getting better and better. Still a lot of things to do in order to get that transparency out there, but compared to two years ago, I think that this industry is working at 10x speed.
Interviewer: And your panel today was about trust and yield-bearing assets, of course. As an allocator, what do you look for first?
Marco Panini: I'm looking at, so right now everything that to me has the word private, it kind of raises alarm bells, because I want to be sure that not only this I can trust and I can verify, but also what happens, for example, if, you know, markets are not like a linear line, a static thing. It's a very fluctuating environment because it's related to human societies, so everything moves. So I want to understand, OK, it's working now, but in three months I think rates are going to go this way, that way. What's going to happen? This is what I'm looking at, is how reliable this is going to be in the near future, right?
Interviewer: And, you know, we're eager to see where that journey will go, and hopefully we'll talk about it, you know, at Definition next year. Thank you very much for giving us some of your time. Appreciate it very much.
