My next guest sits where Wall Street meets digital assets.
Paul Howard is a senior director at Winston, a billion dollars investment fund and OTC desk where he runs institutional sales and relationships.
He's a computer scientist by training and spent more than 12 years at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, and has tracked crypto's collision with traditional finance since 2014.
Paul, welcome to FinTech TV.
Johnny, thank you so much for having me.
So, Paul, let's get started.
Let's start with the simple things.
For viewers who don't live, uh, in this part of our world, digital assets, AI, etc.
When we say market makers in digital assets, what is Winston actually doing?
And in a crowded field, What makes your liquidity different?
So Wincent, as the name might suggest, is a company who focuses not on the taking a dollar off of the table tactics that a lot of the market makers may employ.
We're a holistic firm that looks after a range of different trading strategies from high frequency to other alpha generation.
And we do that by winning 1 cent off of each trade.
And the idea being if we can keep winning 1 cent, then we'll win more than just taking that $1 off of the table at the first time.
We're fully regulated, set up by 3 founding brothers who've created a company with over 150 people in the team.
And I typically introduce us as one of the biggest names in crypto that you've never heard of.
And I mean that because what we do, we do it very discreetly, and we do it in large size as well, with all the major counterparties that you'd meet on the street.
So, we've got spot ETFs, tokenizing real-world assets, and prediction markets, so all pulling Wall Street and crypto closer together.
So, are we just wrapping old products in new cold or, or uh is this a convergence durable?
Well, I think you, you start with a good point, right?
With the ETFs, which has been a defining story for institutional crypto over the last two years.
We've got over $100 billion of inflow since these programs began back in January 2024.
And so it's more than just a lot of talk about institutions moving into this space.
We've got the Bitcoin ETF driven by BlackRock, one of the most successful ETFs of all time.
Now owning, I believe, over 1.3 million uh Bitcoin, uh, which is around 6 to 7% of the supply.
So I think we're institutionally at a space now where we've got some serious involvement from serious players over the streets, and one of the top 1% of all-time ETFs ranked globally, which is quite remarkable when you consider how far the digital asset space has come over the last 15 years.
So, let's look back at 2025.
It was the largest liquidation event in crypto history, October of 2025, and a lot of the postmortems point to thin fragmented liquidity rather than uh fundamentals as a liquidity provider.
What actually broke that day and has liquidity genuinely healed since then?
Yeah, so if you cast your mind back to October 10th, it was the day that Trump had announced the uh China rare earths policy, which led to a real pulldown, not just across digital assets over the weekend, but subsequently in the equities markets for that following week.
And what happened there was we saw probably the top 15 market makers and liquidity providers in this space withdrawing from the market completely or blowing out their spread.
Anybody who was trying to sell their Bitcoin or sell their crypto, couldn't get a bid on this, um.
The Distinction between the institutional players who were able to keep their bids alive and make markets under those conditions, versus those who pulled back and completely withdrew from the market, I, I think marked a big distinction between players like Vincent and other guys in the market.
Over the weekend, liquidity's very thin in crypto, and so having big names like Winston with our balance sheet really helps to provide stable markets for people, particularly in the retail space, wanting to get in and out of things when all of the markets are closed and react to news events as they happen.
So, let's talk about Winston's relationship with uh the UAE and the Gulf.
You guys brought nearly 300 industry leaders together at Token 2049 in Dubai.
How important is the UAE and the wider region to the company's institutional strategy right now?
We've long been looking at the UAE as a place where both sovereign nations and trade happen.
With the migration of assets moving on chain, it's a really exciting time to be in what's called the real world asset space.
So this could be, for example, moving oil commodities, gold commodities, and other traditional assets into an unchanged situation where anybody from around the world can trade these things 24/7.
The amount of trade that flows in and out of the Gulf and the Middle East area as well has led to the idea that we could also be using stablecoins as a settlement layer for trading.
And that's something that's really interesting for us as well as a company that provides liquidity and stablecoins.
No longer does it take 5 to 10 days for people to settle their trade when they're buying a container shipment of oil, but it could be done almost instantaneously with stablecoins.
And so that really fuels liquidity in the ecosystem.
People aren't losing money when their bank doesn't have their capital in there anymore.
It's getting the capital back in and out from stablecoins relatively quickly.
And I think that that's transformational, and it's something that the Gulf and the Middle East have really picked up.
Not just leading with regulations, but also with capital coming into the market there.
And I think alongside with APAC.
In New York, the Middle East has become probably the 3rd epicenter of what we would consider to be a, a real-world use case of cryptocurrency.
So, let's talk a little bit more about the regulation in the UAE, uh, in Abu Dhabi and in Dubai.
From a market maker standpoint, what is the region getting right that others aren't, and where does the digital asset industry go from here?
Yeah, they've been real leaders in the legislation and regulation of digital assets.
A lot of what I would call hot money has relocated there over the last 5 years.
They've been very front footed with their regulatory, uh, procedures, they're, they're encompassing, uh, digital asset companies over in the UAE, not just with VARA and, and, and vast platforms, but more generally just in the with the way that they've attracted exchanges to relocate there.
And that's been, I think, a real driver for the region as it tries to attract more capital, and also I think makes a statement with what they're doing for on chain assets and for moving trade globally, using stablecoins, which has become probably the 2nd biggest theme in crypto over the last two years.
Awesome, well, Paul, thank you so much for joining us today.
Definitely very interesting to see what Winston is doing, and of course its impact and how it's looking at the UAE to move forward.
Thank you so much, Paul.
