From Wall Street to Blockchain | Viktor Uzunov, UEB3 Ventures | ETHSofia 2026

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Hey everyone. Good morning and welcome to eat Sofia and Blockchain Week Bulgaria. Uh as you found out, my name is Victor Uzenoff and I'm the co-founder and CEO of uh Web3 Ventures and subsequently of Arid Capital. Uh I stood here exactly 1 year ago and it was my first big stage speaking engagement. Um I felt This morning I thought I'm not going to be as nervous as I was in next last year, sorry.

I'm going to tell you I'm a little bit less nervous, but a little bit more excited. Um I can see that eat Sofia naturally and fortunately for us tomorrow we have the first Balkan-based day for institutional capital when it comes to digital assets and and cryptocurrency. Uh first I want to thank the organizers, Vlad, Stephy, uh Tina, everybody on their team. It's a phenomenal event. I don't think anyone does it better when it comes to Eastern Europe.

So, guys, let's go for for number four and well done.

[applause]

So, Blockchain Week Bulgaria, right? Eat Sofia. Two very different events. Um one focusing on more the builder side, the tech side. Where we all come from?

From the trenches, from the builder side. The other one focusing on institutional money, on where institutions are and what the future of um digital assets and blockchain is. But they come together in a very nice way, which is what I would like to talk to you about for a minute. Name of the presentation is From Wall Street to Blockchain, which is kind of my journey. Um I worked at a traditional finance institution for almost a decade.

I spent majority of my career there and back like six or seven years ago talking about crypto, blockchain, digital assets, on-chain finance didn't exist actually. Digital assets and on-chain finance weren't an actual term within the investment field a few years ago. And now what are we seeing? Every single large institution on the planet, every maybe not every country, but at least the ones that are smart are getting into the digital finance and digital assets area. And to me all the talk about is are digital assets here to stay?

Are digital assets just a fluke? It is the same like the dot-com era and the internet. It's the same as e-commerce what Amazon did. It's same as electric cars. It's just a phase that very quickly transitions from a niche just a conversation to the reality of a certain industry.

In our case, the financial industry. So, it's just not just a side story anymore. It's what the actual financial infrastructure looks like. It is what big banks, big funds, big institutions are adopting, but it's also something that really affects everyday finance and everyday retail investors um in a very positive way. So, first issues of every single asset gets smarter.

Tokenization, uh on-chain finance just generally make access to everything phenomenally easier. I'll give you an example. Uh many, many years ago when you wanted to invest into a stock or you wanted to invest into real estate or just about any asset that has some sort of appreciation. Entry barriers were very high. Gatekeeping by legacy brokers, banks, etc.

And again, very high fees. Um I I'm pretty sure that everybody here has a retail bank account and everybody complains on a monthly basis and on a transactional basis of how high the fees are. Well, on-chain finance and digital assets generally fix all of that. Access is easier. It's quicker.

It's cheaper. It's more effective and very important, it's more transparent. So, it's in a very interesting way is the same old financial sector. It nothing has changed. Banks are doing the same thing.

The market is doing the same thing. Um it's all still very related to microeconomics and it's all still very related to, you know, um what the global powers are doing. I'll my main example is a few years ago the US market hours did not affect the crypto market at all. They were irrelevant. The US were a non-factor.

Um we're moving to present times now in 2026. Me as a trader, as an investor, I care mainly about the US market. Which again shows you that the evolution and the transition in finance is very slowly and gradually. Maybe actually not that slowly and gradually. Um moving into a more digital and more on-chain type.

So, as you can see on the um presentation behind me, the current system or the one that existed until very recently has a variety of moving of you know, moving factors and variety of participants until you actually manage to get a transaction done. From the investor, you got to go through a broker, through an exchange. Then it has to clear through somebody. Then, you know, it has to go through custody and then finally it will eventually go into a bank. Digital assets and on-chain finance completely change this.

I'll give you an example. We as a fund we manage about 140 million. 140 140 something depending on the day. Our access to liquidity and our clients' access to liquidity has vastly changed. Wherein traditional funds your lockup period and you know, your um withdrawal terms and exit fees and all that nonsense that big investment companies use in order to lock people's liquidity for longer, that all gets solved through on-chain finance and digital assets.

How? We have immediate access to everything. We have immediate access to liquidity, to withdrawals, to deposits, to transparency where things went, how they were um settled, where were they settled. There's nothing you can hide anymore. Still, we can see access being gated very heavily in certain locations, but as you as we progress within the industry and on a monthly basis, you can see the improvements moving.

Uh one of the main points that I normally give and it's a very recent one is the Nasdaq is moving to a 23-hour trading day from probably the first week of December. Where traditional markets used to operate as everybody most of you probably know, the US stock market works 9:30 in the morning until 4:00 in the afternoon Eastern time. Which pretty nice short day for traders. Pretty nice. All changing.

Moving to 23 hours with the idea to move to 24 hours. Another example that the um kind of the framework that the traditional markets were neglecting and they were completely declining, oh you know, 24/7 markets are crazy, um it's too risky, you know, a variety of reasons. They're now adopting it. Why are they not adopting it? First, the demand is there.

Second, they found out that they can make more money. And third and foremost, it's the natural evolution of things. Nobody and no one can stand in the way of evolution regardless of what field of uh development it is. It can be finance, it can be uh health care, it can be aerospace, anything. Evolution happens.

Tokenization, one of my favorite topics. Um tokenization to me isn't something new and something mythical and mysterious. What it does is it just provides easier access. To me, investments and this is how we started the company as well. Our lower uh barrier like our entry barrier to investors is and will continue to always be exceptionally low.

Why? Is the access. You cannot restrict an investor in going into you know in any investment, any field to better their financial circumstances, to improve their lifestyle in in any way by telling them you don't have enough money for us. You know, at the end of the day to make money you need to do something. This is where tokenization also comes in.

Um let's say you don't want to have a exposure to trading, you don't want to have exposure to more volatile riskier markets. But you want to have exposure to the Dubai real estate market. Why? Real estate market, apart from the last 6 months for obvious reasons, has been pretty solid. It's uh produced quite substantial yields.

And the entry-level for that real estate market has always been somewhat unattainable for the regular real estate investor. Not everyone has a hundred to three four hundred thousand dollars laying around to be invested in a single asset. What tokenization does for us, and this is primarily due to digital assets and on-chain markets, is it lets people have access to just about any asset on the planet that can be tokenized at some fraction that you can as an investor afford. You're still participating in the same yield process. You're still making 7 12 15 20 whatever amount of percentage the investment does, but you're participating at a level and at a um size that feels comfortable to you and not comfortable to the big brokers and banks.

Another thing that tokenization really fixes, legal claims. Very easily through tokenization you can prove your right, your ownership, just about anything to do with owning an asset. Solve a lot of problems most of us don't think in the early stages of our life. Passing down assets through generations. Um also you know, when it comes to wheel sharing and just about anything about asset distribution, legal claims and tokenization and transparency that it provides really fixes this.

The transferability of digital assets on its own is unbeaten. I'm pretty sure that everyone here has sold, bought a car, an apartment, just about any sort of sizeable asset. How hard is it to buy or sell an apartment um in like IRL without the help of uh tokens? Sometimes it can take weeks, months. It's you know, it's it's phenomenally expensive.

There's a bunch of uh institutions you have to go to. Again, another legacy way of uh delaying things, making fees off a thousand things, and just making the industry work the way bigger uh institutions want it to work. With digital assets, transferability, simple, seamless, quick, and cheap. As easy as that. So, yes, access is the real unlock.

Access to digital assets being as easy as this at the moment is the key to the next phase in even in Bitcoin, in Ethereum, Solana, any digital asset, in RWAs, in just about anything when it comes to digital assets, access is the key. Also supplemented by knowledge, but I'll I'll I'll get to this a little bit later. You can, as I said, own portions of any asset you want in the world at the moment at a size that you feel comfortable with. So, on-chain stocks, again, something I worked on a Wall Street type of bank. On-chain stocks were non-existent.

It was a dirty word. You cannot talk about Bitcoin on the trading floor. I spent 9 years on the trading floor. A certain stage of my career, talking about crypto openly on the trading floor uh used to come with an HR notice. We used to get penalized for talking about crypto.

What happens now? Biggest banks in the world, they're creating ETFs, they're launching ETFs, they own digital assets on their balance sheets. They're getting into stable coins, they're getting into DeFi like there's no tomorrow. Again, massive shift in the paradigm. Ondo on its own, a company we work with, you know, we we've created we have deposits there, we use them on a daily basis through our DeFi strategy.

So, they have 2.5 billion dollars value of stocks locked onto their platform alone. 500 million plus TVL and over 7 billion cumulative stock volume. Um Hyperliquid, which everybody that knows me knows how big of an affinity I have towards Hyperliquid. To me, Hyperliquid are revolutionizing the way finance works.

They're one of the prime examples of how a very small team with a very big idea can forge something that's astronomical. Hyperliquid is just about to hit $100. It was not in existence a couple of years ago. It is to me the greatest decentralized exchange we've ever seen. They do 7.

2 billion dollars of volume over every 24 hours. This, few years ago, again, unattainable. Which regular broker, not on chain, can go on stage and say, "Hey, by the way, we do an average of 7 billion a day. It's we do it with 10 people." Their team is 10 people.

24/7 access to everything. Long gone are the days where you wake up and you structure your day as an investor, as a trader, as an asset manager, you structure your day around the market. You structure your day around however the hell you want to structure it now. Market's 24/7, there's movement, there's liquidity at all times. What What What it tell us?

Users want simpler access. I'll give you an example. My parents, in their early 60s, use crypto on a weekly basis. Why? Because it's so simple now.

Accepting payments, sending payments, um transferring tokens, we all use digital assets on a daily basis. Every one of you has a Visa or a MasterCard. Your everyday settlement is on the blockchain for quite a while. Uh government institutions are moving towards blockchain access again because it's safe, transparent, and a lot easier and secure to use. Um users users actually do not care where, you know, where it started.

The people don't care where the process started and where it went through and how it's going. They care only about one thing, the end result. User, retail, and institutional, whatever user, as an end user, you care about the final result. The transparency, the risk, and to get whatever you want done. Brings me to DeFi.

Um DeFi is really strongly moving from just a narrative and a part of the digital asset space to a very key element of institutional finance. One of the biggest companies and one of the biggest funds and banks in the world are very actively investing in DeFi. Um they're very actively getting into stablecoins into on-chain collateral into tokenized treasuries. Um they use it as a settlement rails. Um and again, lending and liquidity, which is one of the main thing that banks do.

So, just in general, again, it supplements to what I said earlier. End user doesn't care about the process itself. So, big banks and institutions, they don't necessarily have to explain to you where your money sits and how it generates yield, but that these same products that they, a few years ago, neglected and they were, you know, claiming as, you know, just a fluke, are now a major part of what they do. Uh through my personal relationship with one of the other speakers that uh is going to be on stage uh I believe tomorrow in a panel with me tomorrow. I know that Société Générale, biggest French bank, they have the largest trading floor in Europe, I believe, are moving into uh stablecoins.

They're issuing stablecoins. They're moving into DeFi aggressively. Why? Because it makes sense and makes money. So, back to, you know, what I just said.

Best product is the one that you do not understand you're using. Same as what I said about uh you using blockchain on a daily basis. Blockchain is no longer a subject that is questionable. It's no longer will it last. It's no longer um you know, how is it going to work?

You use it, you're going to continue to use it, and it's going to continue to make your life easier, uh your access better. The only thing that you guys need to and us us as investors, user retail and users, you we have to improve on is risk management and also knowledge. Two main key elements uh when it comes to understanding assets is knowing exactly what it is and what we're investing in and what the product is, but also to understand not only the upside, but also the downside. Cuz downside, in my opinion as an investor, is phenomenally more important than upside. This is where AI, the hot word, the sexiest word on the planet of the moment, comes in, and what AI does is present us with a few major key improvements.

Productivity, uh transparency, ease of access of information. I'm a thousand percent sure that every single one of you here uses AI on a daily basis, the way the same way you used to use Google a couple of years ago. Only difference, you actually ask way more absurd things. You know, the running joke is I'd give you my my phone's password, but I would never give you access to my ChatGPT history is is pretty accurate. I'm pretty sure that all of us uh use it for phenomenally creative things.

But apart from asking it to structure a date with your significant other or to plan your vacation, um it to me as an investor and as a fund manager, what it has done is it's optimized my productivity massively. And it's also very interconnected to digital finance and on-chain assets. Um Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, again one of the men on the frontier of AI, said something very important. Um AI is the future and its payment currency is digital and it's crypto. So, this again shows you how things interconnect together.

So, just to summarize everything about AI again, onboarding phenomenally easier. We use AI to onboard our customers. It's improved our productivity by 90%. Risk monitoring, I used to get a report I used to make, sorry, not get. I used to make a report on the watches that I have every single morning.

It used to take me a good couple of hours. I usually keep about 20 assets on my watch list as a fund manager. Used to take me about 2 hours to get the information, to read it, to summarize it, to actually get my head around it. I wake up at a very similar time every morning now. This particular brief is waiting for me every morning done in the exactly the way I like to read it in the exact way that my brain consumes it easier, waits for me, I have my coffee for 15 minutes in the morning with the report, and I have another hour 45 minutes already freed up.

As a fund manager, time is money and AI gives me a lot more time. Risk monitoring, especially with AGI now, it actively tracks stuff for all of us. It actively adapts to the needs of you as an investor, you as a client, you as an end user, whatever it is. Portfolio intelligence is also super important. It AI can tell you a lot more than you think it can.

I personally use AI to I I give it at the end of every week I give it my trading performance and my entire portfolio and it very easily tells me interesting stuff about my style and my strategy. Give an example. Turns out that every single time where I've traded over the weekends, my win rate drops from my win rate is about 75% on trades, it drops to 33. What does that tell me? On the weekends hands in pockets don't touch.

Another thing it told me is I am a phenomenally better short trader. So how do I react to this? Without changing anything in my strategy, I just allocate more capital to shorts than I allocate to longs. Profit factor moved by one. Anyone that does trading here, moving your profit factor by one is a exceptional improvement.

And reporting, again just to get reporting done is a reporting admin everyday mundane tasks when it comes to running a business phenomenally and exceptionally boring to me. I couldn't be asked if it's up to me I want to sit in my office, I'll trade, I'll manage my investment strategy and that'll be it. AI actually helps me with this. My team I have a team of about 200 people spread around our offices globally. I get reports from all of them, all feeds into my AI, again same brief 15 minutes I read everything that I need to read, I don't bother with the rest.

Something I said earlier. Upside and downside. Technology and progress as good as they are, they come at a price. Very often in our desire to progress and to you know improve stuff, we neglect risk. It doesn't kill Technology doesn't kill risk, but it makes it easier for us to understand it and to manage it.

Stuff that all of us need to ask ourselves. What exactly do you own? I always tell investors, before you invest with us, understand what it is we do. Be more comfortable with what we do. Even if you want invest $100 just to check how it works.

There's no rush. Market's still going to be here in a month, in a year, in 10 years. Still going to be here. Um it understand the assets. I was having a conversation what with someone that's right in front of me here.

He asked me yesterday, what do I invest as an asset right now? My first answer to him was, here's a list of five, read through, see what fits with you, and see what you believe in. Me a person as investor, I believe in stuff that I believe in. I invest in stuff that I believe in. Which again, AI, digital assets, on-chain finance make phenomenal easier.

I can I can very easily research, I can very easily find the right asset for me, and I can very easily move on to investing within the a matter of minutes. Um apparently I have 1 minute. As always, I have spoken a little bit longer than I intended to. So, uh these other questions you can use AI to answer yourself. The final thing that I will say, oh my god, I I got so much uncovered.

Anyway, the final thing that I want to say to all of you um is digital assets, on-chain finance, dear friend, learn to understand them. Use AI to control your risk, to understand your upside, to understand your downside, and do not be afraid to experiment with with investments. Obviously, within the means of your risk comfort. Digital assets are here to stay. They're the next evolutionary step of finance, and you we we either embrace them and we profit from them, or we get left behind and we become a thing of the past.

Thank you very much, everyone. I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference.

[applause]

Victor, please stay. We have one question for you.

Sure.

Uh can we look at stock tokenization as layer two of New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ?

I read them because there's echo?

Thank you.

And this is my last one.

at stock tokenization as layer two NASDAQ. I personally think that it wouldn't even be a layer two. I personally think that it it So, we're transitioning into a digital era. I wouldn't even say that it's transition that that tokenization is going to be a layer two. I firmly believe that um on-chain assets and on-chain finance is just the next step and very soon the entire financial sector, the entire investment market is going to be uh on-chain and it's going to be digital.

As simple as that. Yeah. Second question? When are we going to see on-chain mortgages and deeper integration of RWAs and lending markets? Uh from what I understand, it's already happening.

We are also looking into as from in Web3, we're also looking into launching um digital mortgages based on crypto assets and digital assets and uh tokenized property. We're in the middle of a process to obtain a license to issue tokenized uh real estate and RWAs in general cuz believe it or not, I'm more interested in tokenizing Hermes bags and watches than real estate. An Hermes bag appreciates 20-30% a year. I'll take it. But when it comes to mortgages and generally loans on-chain, they're very much available.

You can use your digital assets as collateral for quite a while. Um you can use your tokenized real estate as a collateral as well. So, just to answer the question, it's already happening not at the scale of traditional mortgages and traditional finance, but it's uh very close to to getting there. So, yeah. I hope that answered the question.

Thank you very much, everyone. Have a great day.