Host: Corporate treasury holding digital assets facing major shakeout earlier this year, but one company is carving out a very different playbook. The Standard Corporation trading under ticker BNC holds over half a million BNB tokens worth nearly $400 million, and following a board restructuring as well as rebranding, the company is moving beyond passive holding by becoming an active validator on the BNB Chain to generate rewards directly on-chain. Well, joining us this morning is Alex Sardeshu, who is the newly appointed CEO of BNB Standard. Alex, welcome. Great to have you on the show.
Alex Sardeshu: Good morning. Great to be here.
Host: Well, first and foremost, you are here in New York City, and you and I were at Money 20/20 in Vegas last week announcing your new title as well as your role at BNB. But for our viewing audience who may not be familiar, tell us what BNB does.
Alex Sardeshu: Of course. So BNB is the fourth largest digital asset by market cap. BNB Chain, which is the underlying blockchain where BNB lives, is the third largest blockchain by market cap. What that means is essentially it's a network of participants that transact every day. By activity, actually, BNB Chain is the largest by far, and we are very proud of that and we want to bring that story here.
Host: And you recently assumed a new role, and that is the CEO of the company. So tell us what this means and what your vision is moving forward.
Alex Sardeshu: Of course. So BNB Standard Corporation is a digital asset treasury company focused on BNB. Until recently, we sat mostly on the balance sheet side with our BNB holdings. As of recent, we've announced a plan to launch a validator, which means that that will put us on the operating side of the chain network. So that's coming up soon. We'll launch it in stages, and I'll be very excited to share more.
Host: And of course, when people think of digital asset treasury firms, they might not have the most positive of perceptions. But what would you say to them, and what are you doing differently?
Alex Sardeshu: Sure. So first and foremost, we launched a new dashboard which sets the standard in terms of disclosure and what we think a digital asset treasury should be communicating to the market. Second, besides just holding, we are also planning to operate, starting with the announced validator. I think that's very important for a digital asset treasury company to be an active participant in the network itself. What that means is that we'll be part of that core set of validators that secure the network and make it function day to day. And then third is we plan to bring more of the BNB story and communicate in a way that institutional investors resonate with. And I think that's very important because BNB and BNB Chain have not been very well covered, especially here in Western capital markets.
Host: And you mentioned institutional adoption, and that is something that we have been watching not just on Wall Street but also on Main Street. So when it comes to what you're doing at BNB, tell us what we can expect as we move forward.
Alex Sardeshu: Of course. So digital assets as a whole have seen a tremendous amount of adoption lately. It comes in different shapes and forms. So starting with payments, which we've been discussing at Money 20/20 last year, I think that's a very big avenue for adoption, primarily for Main Street, as you mentioned. I think common usage of blockchains for payments is a very big use case. In fact, we're seeing a lot of adoption in emerging markets. As of late, we're also seeing non-human adoption of payments, and that's a very novel, very nascent area. We have agentic finance finally coming on-chain as well, and blockchains are best positioned to cater for that specific use case. And then third, I think tokenization is a major trend. BNB has been at the forefront of that with significant adoption in the past quarter. We're seeing a lot of stocks being tokenized and made accessible to the wider market, especially outside the US, where people still want to trade those stocks but they don't have access to traditional brokerage accounts.
Host: And finally, before I let you go, you were in the presence of CZ yesterday, not just for the bell ceremony, but also for a media briefing, and I understand that he highlighted payments as well as autonomous AI. So where do you see the next wave of user as well as developer traffic actually coming from when it comes to the chain?
Alex Sardeshu: Yes, so indeed CZ is an exceptional entrepreneur, and he sees some of these trends way before the wider market, and he shared those thoughts. And I think in terms of agentic and autonomous payments, I think that's specifically the case, that area we should keep a very close eye on because the growth is spectacular. We'll have billions of agents making payments at subsecond scales that will only grow from here on.
Host: Well, Alex, it was great having you on the show this morning. Come back soon, and I look forward to continuing this conversation when it comes to agentic AI as well as payments.
Alex Sardeshu: Thank you very much. A pleasure.
