# Tokenising Luxury Assets at Scale | Sam Mudie, Savea | Future Finance Forum 2026 - Channel: [ETHSofia](https://streameth.org/ethsofia) - Date: 2026-10-06 - Duration: 17:09 - Topics: Blockchain Week Bulgaria, ERC20, F3 2026, Future Finance Forum, RWA, Sam Mudie, Savea, alternative assets, fine wine investment, luxury assets, real world assets, tokenisation, tokenization, user experience, wine index, Science & Technology - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-IxeWXLt3y4I - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxeWXLt3y4I ## Description Sam Mudie, CEO of Savea, draws on more than a decade in fine wine investment to explain how luxury assets can be tokenised at scale. He argues that real adoption comes from boring efficiencies and user experience rather than ICOs, NFTs or meme coins, and that selling wine as NFTs to people with MetaMask wallets does not work. Savea's answer borrows from ETFs: physical wine held by a custodian is tokenised and wrapped into an index product for qualified investors, with access from 1,000 dollars, half the annual fees, under a quarter of the exit fees and liquidity within three to four months. He closes on a single app holding every asset, where tokenisation stays behind the scenes. Keynote at Future Finance Forum 2026, 25 September 2026, Sofia. Part of Blockchain Week Bulgaria 2026. Speaker ▸ Sam Mudie, CEO, Savea Sam is the Founder & CEO of Savea, a FinTech company building infrastructure to tokenise real-world assets and issue institutional-grade investment products. Savea is pioneering index-style, on-chain exposure to tangible assets, starting with fine wine. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-mudie-03034030 Chapters 00:00 Introduction 00:16 Why fine wine investment is inefficient 01:47 Three blockchain cycles: ICOs, NFTs and meme coins 04:47 Bringing wine and blockchain together 05:48 Adoption comes from the boring stuff 06:46 All assets are moving on chain 08:44 Scale through index products: lessons from ETFs 09:47 How the tokenised wine index works 11:51 A B2B infrastructure provider 12:52 Products native to the next generation 15:11 All assets, for anyone, from a single app 16:56 Closing titles Blockchain Week Bulgaria: https://www.blockchainweek.bg ETHSofia: https://www.ethsofia.com Future Finance Forum: https://www.blockchainweek.bg/f3 Follow Blockchain Week Bulgaria X: https://x.com/BWBulgaria LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blockchain-week-bulgaria Follow ETHSofia X: https://x.com/EthSofiaBG LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ethsofia Telegram: https://t.me/+b-33LJUpAB5iODNk Nothing in this video is financial advice. About the organiser Blockchain Week Bulgaria, ETHSofia and the Future Finance Forum are organised by the Bithope Foundation, founded in 2014 by Vladislav Dramaliev. Inspired by Andreas Antonopoulos, it is Europe's first non-profit operating exclusively with bitcoin donations. Over more than ten years, it has supported 50+ charitable campaigns, and in January 2016 it co-founded the Sofia Crypto Meetup, now the region's longest-running monthly crypto event. https://bithope.org ## Transcript Thank you very much for having me. >> Um that's good. That saved the first minute of my introduction. Thank you very much. Um my name is Sami founder CEO of Savia. Um yes, over a decade in the traditional wine investment sector. Um the company I used to work for had around 350 million dollars worth of assets under management. Nothing compared to wealth managers and private banks, but for a single asset um in a fairly new sector uh not insignificant. Um fun market, a really fun alternative asset class, but incredibly inefficient. Um if you wanted to invest in wine today, there are high minimums, not a lot of liquidity, high fees, it's slow, uh and very importantly, there is no regulation. Um that favors some people. Um it works okay when the market's going well, but no market is always going well. And when you face a downturn, the lack of regulation often comes to bite you in the rear end. Um and that's something that's happened in the wine market um over the last four or five years. So, I I dealt with these inefficiencies firsthand um for a long time. Um in another life, uh or the other half of me, I've been active in the crypto sector since about 2015. Uh initially trading, speculating, making every mistake you possibly can. I'm sure we've all done the same thing. And I And And I think every mistake that we should make. Um it's important to to to get things wrong to really learn. There were three major cycles in the the blockchain market. I'm going to stop using the word crypto cuz it's the underlying blockchain technology that of course I'm most interested in. Um but crypto has been an incredible use case. Um the first of these was the the ICO uh boom of '16, '17, '18 which for the first time showed companies or not even companies, ideas could raise huge sums of money without going through traditional channels, without going through capital advisory, without going through VCs and banks and law firms. Um it showed that there was plumbing to raise these funds direct from the investors off the back of a good idea and a community. >> [snorts] >> ICOs didn't last a huge amount of time because people took advantage of that ease, of that simplicity. Um and we all like to make a little bit of money. If you spot there's a quick return in something, then sure, we'll have a dabble. The next was uh NFTs. Um particularly around 2020, 2021, 2022 when the the art NFT was um so um popular. Um and any cartoon animal was going to be making a lot of pe- people money. Um interesting but for the underlying technology, a non-fungible token, essentially a digital legal contract that can be exchanged peer-to-peer efficiently without a middleman for next to no money. Um I don't think in hindsight that that digital art was the best use case for the NFT, but if you contain something different in that digital legal contract then you've got the makings of an incredible trading system, an incredible trading capacity and capability. Um and the third of those cycles um is the uh the meme coin. Um craze, which I don't think anyone, you know, truly truly believes that that meme coins have tangible value. We make it ourselves that they they do eventually, but really it's it's a it's a casino floor and there's nothing wrong with that. Everyone likes to have a bit of a gamble. Is it red? Is it black? Is it 10? Is it five? What is it? We like to make a bit of money. But what has facilitated meme coin success is again the plumbing, the infrastructure. The capacity to transact millions or billions of dollars of value around the world, cross-border, peer-to-peer, circumventing traditional financial institutions. That is the envy of the traditional financial ecosystem. That efficiency, that short settlement time, that automation that comes from smart contracts. These are the things which I'm most interested in and these are the things which led to me leaving the traditional wine investment world and moving into the blockchain sector in 2022. So, Saviah was born off the back of these two, for me, wildly different worlds. The tradition and the romance of wine investment, but innovation, no. The other, blockchain, fast-moving, break things, certainly break a few rules, but innovation like is I mean, you can't keep up with it. There's no way of keeping up with it. AI is the only thing which moves faster than blockchain development. So, there's an opportunity to to bring these two together. One market, wine, is looking for efficiencies. The other, blockchain, is looking for stability, real-world value, is looking for alternatives, and it's looking for a way to be adopted. So, adoption. Adoption's a super super important word. For a long time, we in the the blockchain space got kind of frustrated that adoption didn't take off sooner, faster, better, bigger. >> [snorts] >> Um but adoption does not come from hype and speculation. It doesn't come from the ICOs and the NFTs, um nor the meme coins, not true adoption in a in a global sense. Um adoption comes from the mundane, the boring stuff, the reducing settlement times, reducing percentages in costs, um reducing your accounting teams, just making things incrementally better. It's not very sexy, um but from a commercial perspective, it's what really works. And it's that that's pulled in the the traditional um market a much larger user experience. Is what really drives adoption. So, when I started Savitar from day one, our thesis was all assets are moving on chain. Of course, they are. Why wouldn't they? All assets can be better when truly digitized. Doesn't matter doesn't mean that all assets should be, but but but but but they can be. Um but how do you digitize? How do you tokenize assets in a way that will land that people will use? User experience. The first couple of use cases and probably what most people have seen in the tokenization of art or watches or whiskey or classic cars or wine is either supply chain management, so authenticity, anti-counterfeit, how do you trace the ownership chain back to the very beginning. Um great use case for blockchain, but having sometimes 10 or more counterparties in that chain, very traditional businesses, having them adopt blockchain technology and a consistent blockchain technology across them, that's that's that's a big job. That's going to take a really long time. Um the next super popular ideas that were were around 2021 22 were tokenizing wine and you know, instead of selling cases of wine or bottles of wine, you sell NFTs representing wine. Sounds good. Like you get the buzzwords in, but take it from me, selling wine at volume is hard. Trying to sell wine that's instead an NFT and have people transact on chain and sign transactions and have MetaMask wallets, absolutely no way. Like there's no convergence between who wants to do that. So, you need to figure out abstract the technology, abstract the terms tokenization and NFTs and blockchain and crypto and come back to that user experience. How do you do this at scale? So, for that we looked at what ETFs did for equities 30-ish years ago. By enabling index investments, you lower the entry level, you reduce the need to have high capital to actually have the relationships with say private banks and wealth managers. Um you reduce your management costs because you're not having to actively manage anything, you reduce your requirement to have the the the knowledge or the the the connections and relationships with the knowledge, you improve your liquidity. Net, most passive index investor investments in the medium to long term work out better than an actively managed portfolio. Not all, most. Um so, why can't we do that for these super super inefficient asset classes like wine, watches, whiskey, art, classic cars, all things I love, all fun things. The the first ticket to that is in tokenization. Bring the physical value into the digital ecosystem. So for that we use NFTs. We don't trade NFTs. Um, we don't market them. There's certainly nowhere on our website is any mention of NFTs cuz it doesn't matter. It's just what goes on behind the scenes. Um, we store physical wines with a custodian. The the custodian tokenizes the wines. We get the token. It acts a little bit like a digital receipt or for those in in in finance a little bit like a perpetual call option. So it means we have the right to the wine, but we don't own it. But with that digital right, that's what we can do clever stuff with. The digital assets go into smart contracts. The smart contract is retokenized. Uh, for our our initial product, straightforward ERC-20. Um, and the ERC-20 is distributed um, to qualified investors. So we are regulated. Retail is still not on the cards, but that's something we would ultimately like to get to. All of a sudden, you have changed what used to be investing 50 to 100,000 pounds or dollars at 3% per year with a 5 to 10% exit and 6 to 12 months liquidity and no regulation, no protection, no compliance to I can invest in the benchmark wine index, which has average annualized 7, 7 and 1/2% over the last 20 years. Not not amazing, but low correlation to equities and low volatility, so good diversification. You get access to this index from $1,000. You pay half the fees uh, per annum. You pay less than a quarter of exit fees and you have guaranteed liquidity within 3 to 4 months. It's still not instant liquidity because the underlying asset itself is a liquid, but it's programmable. It's smart contract based liquidity. So, when you say there's liquidity, it's there. You can see it in the code. >> [snorts] >> Now, we are not asset managers, we're not distributors, we're not even marketing the product. We're a B2B infrastructure company. So, we launched this index really as a very expensive pilot. So, it's fully accessible, it's regulated. You can log in to our app now and you can buy a thousand dollars worth. You go through KYC. Um but that's not what we're doing. We're we're we're the B2B infrastructure provider. So, we go to the existing asset managers, the wine investment companies, the art platforms, the the whiskey investment companies, um who have the assets, the relationships, the investment strategy, the brand, the track record, but they do not have the tech. They do not have the compliance. Um that's where we come in. We provide that for them to launch open-ended on-chain investment products. So, what's what's what's what's next? My my my vision for the future is partly stemmed from my oldest nephew's experience. My oldest nephew, about 24 years old now, >> [snorts] >> he and his friends started investing when they were 19 years old. Earlier than I did, but they were investing in crypto. [clears throat] Like they were trading Solana. They were like the first ones I knew getting into swee. He told me about hyper liquid before any of my industry friends did because in the early 20s they are plugged into this. This is like this is cool to them. They had exposure to 50 different currencies or tokens long before they had any equity in Apple or Tesla or space X or anything like that and that meant that their platforms were by default coinbase or Kraken or choose your choose your platform. Not the traditional ones. Hargreaves Lansdown is very British. That may not land here but you know the traditional wealth management platforms for your country. So how do you get how do you get to them? Well you have to have investment products that are native to the next generation. You have to be building whether it's crypto assets or tokens or wine investment or tokenized real estate or tokenized gold or tokenized equities and bonds and other you know mainstream investments. They have to be available within their ecosystem. We have to go to them. So my vision is how do we bring all of these assets at scale to them? It's through index style products. It's tokenization. It's on chain by default but don't make tokenization the product. Super super important. The product is we can give you an investment in asset A that gives you return B for fees C and by the way it's going to cost you nothing to transfer your money from here to here. They don't care what's going on behind the scenes. So we need to kind of get over ourselves and how clever and cool we think the technology is and just focus on user experience. User experience. User experience. >> [snorts] >> I I firmly believe that there's a possibility for all assets for anyone anywhere at any time and from a single app. Technically, that's possible now, right? Like everyone in this room, I think, knows how to connect all of those dots. Integration, regulation, these are the big These are the big things to solve. Um but I think we're going to get there. Like I think it's super super cool that in 3, 5, 10 years, I will open up what would be my regular banking app, and as well as seeing my euros, my US dollar, my sterling, I see my tokenized exposure to SpaceX. That would be nice. My tokenized um S&P 500 tracker, my tokenized gold, my tokenized wine, art, watches, whiskey. I'll also see my tokenized Taylor Swift concerts, uh concert tickets. Everything can be in that one place, but go one further. I don't need to sell my tokenized gold back into fiat to go and buy my F1 tickets. I can trade directly 1 and 1/2 thousand dollars worth of my tokenized art index exposure for the F1 tickets. Interoperable, fully exchangeable. That's the promise. That's possible. But the key is user user experience. User experience. User experience. Thank you very much. >> [applause] [music]