# Tokenisation Beyond the Pilot: From Sandbox to Production | Future Finance Forum 2026 - Channel: [ETHSofia](https://streameth.org/ethsofia) - Date: 2026-10-06 - Duration: 23:15 - Topics: AI coding, Bitpanda Group, Blockchain Week Bulgaria, Diana Ilieva, F3 2026, FinDaS, Future Finance Forum, Markus Dorner, RWA, asset tokenization, crypto regulation, institutional crypto, interoperability, real world assets, tokenisation, tokenization, Science & Technology - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-Wh0h7XMG1Rk - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh0h7XMG1Rk ## Description With Diana Ilieva (FinDaS, moderator) and Markus Dorner (Bitpanda Group). In this fireside chat Diana Ilieva of FinDaS asks Markus Dorner, CTO of Bitpanda Group, how a platform built for retail serves institutional clients and what changes once tokenised assets reach mainnet. Dorner says security is the gatekeeper because a token that leaves your control cannot be recovered, that around 300 engineers cannot foresee every edge case of millions of customers, and that keeping the blockchain and traditional ledgers in sync depends on product design. He sees the technology as ready, with product design, market fit and timing as the open questions, as a Bitpanda metals token that drew curiosity but no lasting demand showed. He favours partnering with traditional finance for liquidity, letting the market rather than a central standard decide, and keeping humans in control of AI-assisted coding. Fireside Chat at Future Finance Forum 2026, 25 September 2026, Sofia. Part of Blockchain Week Bulgaria 2026. Speakers ▸ Diana Ilieva, Tokenomics Consultant, FinDaS (moderator) Diana is a tokenomics consultant at FinDaS Ltd with over 4 years of experience in creating data-driven tokenomics models for RWA, stablecoins, DeFi protocols, and P2E projects. Diana has a background in software development and holds an MSc degree in Finance and Banking from the University of York. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dillie66 ▸ Markus Dorner, CTO, Bitpanda Group Markus Dorner is CTO of Bitpanda, leading its technology, engineering, product, data, and infrastructure teams. Since joining in 2022, he has scaled the platform and shaped its engineering culture. He previously held senior roles at bank99 and Amazon and holds an MSc from TU Vienna. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dornermarkus Chapters 00:00 Introduction 00:20 What Bitpanda offers retail and B2B clients 01:55 Serving institutional clients 02:46 From sandbox to production 04:53 Security as the gatekeeper 06:45 Who wants tokenised assets: retail or institutions? 08:43 Settlement times and the source of truth 10:22 Which asset classes are ready for tokenisation 12:13 Regulation as a barrier 13:47 Partnering with traditional finance for liquidity 17:09 Should tokenisation be standardised? 19:13 One dominant chain for real-world assets? 20:45 Q&A: How much of Bitpanda's code is written by AI? 23:02 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. Welcome, Marcos. I understand this is your first time in Bulgaria. Thank you for joining us for this fireside. >> Ah, thanks for having me. [snorts] Oh, >> it's a pleasure. Before we dive into the ins and outs of tokenization, can you give us a little bit of context about what Bit Panda offers to retail and B2C B2B customers? >> Yes. Yes, I can. So, at at Bit Panda, we have two main customer segments we talk about. So, one is the B2B and one is the B2C customer segment. Initially, we came from the B2B uh B2C side. Um so over the years we developed a platform that uh encapsulated all the capabilities we offer goes from trading, hedging, payment rails and so on and so forth and we slowly developed it to also in um support B2B customers. So this is where we started our whole uh bit panda enterprise segment that also provides our capabilities to our institutional clients. So why do we do that? Um for us it's very beneficial that we are using our own tech. So everything we sell our B2B customers um we use ourselves goes from custody goes from tra goes to trading and and so on and so forth. So we also are heavily invested that we improve our systems as we go and we also see problems and other gaps we might have firsthand. >> Oh great. So actually you started from the small customer base of retail up to B2B clients which I suppose are much more demanding and have sophisticated requirements but on the basic ground level everything you develop you do it first for yourself in house to use and then you offer it also to outside clients. Is there any challenges in these in this process? Um obviously institutional clients have a completely different mindset right for retail customers it's are you available does it work how does the experience feel for institutional clients we talk a lot about SLAs SLOs's and and there's a much more formalized approach in that regard they also talk a lot about certifications we need certifications they would like to see audits how often can they audit us um so that the whole process comes with a lot of more Um, so it also took us a while to get very nifty and lightweight with that. So it's definitely a different experience to work with that customer segment. >> Yeah. Well, it's good that you first of course try the stuff out yourselves before shipping it out to all these demanding B2B clients. Uh, I know that right now you're here with me because you are working on a solution for tokenizing assets. It's not ready yet. So I'm really curious. What does it take to have a product that's in a sandbox, it probably works very well. It's tested, but we know that when the rubber hits the ground, when you ship it in production, you can meet all sorts of challenges. Uh, how do you prepare for those challenges? And what are some of them that are specific for tokenizing assets? >> So, [clears throat] for for us especially in the software process, whatever can go wrong will go wrong normally. [laughter] And once once you are on in mainet then there is no hiding right. So every mistake is plainly visible and you have to basically be able to correct it in some shape or form. So it's not enough to just think about how can I launch it. It's you have to think about the whole endto-end process uh a customer or a transaction operation runs through. So that spans not just tech it spans also the other departments goes from finance to operations and so on. that basically enables the whole product success when it's hitting production and when you start with an MVP right is a very small subset of the functionality you want to deliver um often you are aware of some corner cases but other corner cases you realize once it's getting adopted by more and more customers so just to put it in relation um we're like 300 engineers in in Bit Panda but we have millions of customers So all the engineers never will be thinking of every corner case or edge case a customer will create intentionally or unintentionally. So we we got very [sighs] uh nimble and and fast in in regards of reacting on that and fixing things going forward. So we regularly book quite a significant amount of capacity of the post launch because we know this is where we really have to make sure everything works as expected and especially satisfy the customer expectations >> especially in something that is so high risk as uh secure like tokenized assets which may be securities which may be under certain licenses and so on. It seems like it's especially important to figure out the security and the compliance side of it. I wonder now in this AI age where we see so many attempts for cyber attacks, is it more challenging to get that done and to have the security in place? >> It's definitely the biggest challenge we we face, right? Um once the token leaves your ownership, there is often no way back. So there was also last night another big hack in the scene. So it's definitely something that is our number one concern. So for us it's definitely we have this move fast uh moto or um but security is definitely the gatekeeper here. So nothing goes out when we're not certain that the security holds and especially in crypto trust is everything and if you can if you have a security breach or any other problems with your software then you lose the trust. With the trust, you lose the customers and then it goes quickly. That >> Yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, the very popular Silicon Valley adage that we can move fast and break things really falls apart a little bit when you're dealing with financial institutions. A lot of their businesses in the end of it a reputational business. So, you don't have that much space to break things and especially on the blockchain to fix them after. >> Yeah. especially with with Dora when we break something we might get an audit on top. So there's a high incentive as well that we don't break things too often. Um [snorts] but this is basically also for a reason, right? Because the stakes are very high and losing customer funds would just just be acceptable. >> Yeah. Well, you said customer funds. I'm curious when you're building these tools and um these capabilities for tokenized assets who is actually the target audience of your product is it more institutions or retail customers? >> Um currently it comes from two different angles uh the retail customers are often curious. They want to try things out. They approach approach things with uh a healthy curiosity. So we had uh a token launch that was basically tokenizing metals um and they tried it out a bit and but it didn't really move further but it you could see the curiosity drove some interest in. So but the market fit was not exactly there so it basically ended there. Um with B2B it's more like um can we add some value with the tokenization this is more what they are asking if there's something that makes it easier for them removes some hurdles um it's not about and then they want still to provide a very clean experience for their customers so the customer they serve often still expect a very nice UX interacting with them so the blockchain is the tech behind but not really facing to the customer so for them it's more like do I solve a problem they have in the execution or not by tokenizing. >> Okay, so they do want to eat the sausage. They just don't want to know how it's made, which I completely understand. Not everybody wants to interact with the blockchain very directly and to sign uh transactions. Um for me, it's interesting that they they have the curiosity. Perhaps it's a product design that is good, but it's too early. um if there's not a strong enough retail interest uh for it. Occasionally in finance, you know very well that you can be right and you can still lose money if you're in it too early. So maybe we just need to iterate upon that and try again. Um so there's something very boring in finance that often gets overlooked when we talk about tokenizing assets and this is the settlement time and the source of truth. The blockchain is very fast. It can settle in milliseconds while actually in traditional finance it can take one two days maybe more depending on what the underlying asset is. How do you reconcile the truth between the blockchain and the ledgers and the traditional finance? >> Yeah. So this highly depends on the product itself, right? How it's designed. So the blockchain could be just an audit ledger in the whole product design. It could be the source of truth for all participating parties. So this is this this also depends for for us techies to know how we have to kind of build it. Um but in the end this is like a long problem in software engineering to keep multiple sources of data in in sync. So and also here you need to factor in how do I correct if there is a discrepancy how do I detect it. So all this comes back into very solid uh software foundations that you have to monitor what's going on actually. So if you write the wrong things on the blockchain, you have to detect it fairly quickly to kind of limit the blast radius. Um, and then it also depends on the asset how correctable it is. So [snorts] I don't know if if you design a product where the truck leaves the warehouse, right, when you move the ownership on the blockchain, then it's hard to kind of correct that because then you have to call the driver and get them back. And you know, there's various crazy ideas you could kind of cook up with tokenization. So it really depends on the details of the product. [snorts] >> Yeah, I suppose it does because we talk about real world assets as if it's one big homogeneous group while actually it's uh it contains a lot of very diverse subcategories from equities to various commodities like metals that you mentioned to real estate and all of these might actually need a different approach. They might have different markets and enthusiasm. uh do you see maybe some of these subcategories as ready for the market and others are still in the experimentation phase? Do you think maybe some asset classes are a little bit ahead in terms of tokenization? >> Yeah, for me it's also hard to forecast right what really will have success. Um it's more like there are already a couple of um promising concepts especially about metals handling and so on. So if you have use cases where you have to transfer last amount vast amounts of of of tonnage around and you can save that with the tokenization step. That's definitely something. Um and when you look at something with real estate that's a complex topic by itself. So real estate is not real estate. This is like country very country specific region specific. Um just because it failed before it doesn't mean that there isn't a use case out there for it for example. So it's the tech is is ready. It's more like about product design, market fit, timing, and this is more for me what's interesting at this point. >> You know, [snorts] it's kind of reassuring that the tech side of it actually seems to fall back on legacy experience that it's problems that we've already met and problems that we can solve. It's it appears to me that the product design actually the legalities of the assets those are the questions that we have to actually figure out. Uh is there maybe something else that can be a barrier for the widescale adoption of tokenized assets? >> I mean barrier is normally always compliance risk and so on. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you're allowed to do it. Um and >> I don't like to hear that as a crypto person but yes of course >> I understand but you know uh also crypto is moving into a highly regulated field because there's also vast uh stakes in play right. So crypto is not a small niche thing anymore. So regulations are unavoidable going forward. We have to deal with them. We have to welcome them as well uh when we build the products. Um, and I can say from experience, it's not always the most fun thing to do as a technician, but it is what it is. Um, [panting and snorts] so and not every barrier is uh unreasonable, right? There's like things against money laundering, terrorism, and so on. And so there's a lot of things why they are in place. So I would say challenging those that are in place. Yes. um expecting that everything we build just because we want to build it that way and can build it that way um is not possible. So we really have to see especially um with regulators what is allowed. We have to work with traditional finance how liquidity and and everything is provided in the first steps at least. Um so there's a long value chain that also incorporates the state and banks. Yeah. You said you have to work with uh traditional finance with regulators. Initially crypto was supposed to challenge and disrupt the traditional systems with the tokenization of assets. It seems to me more and more like crypto is marrying into the industry. But perhaps it is for good because we can achieve scale. we can achieve a lot of new opportunities for retail customers in crypto to actually gain exposure to assets. Maybe not real estate. Real estate was one of the initial pitches for tokenized assets that I heard. But you're right, there are so many legal challenges. There are laws all over the world about who can own what. There are restrictions for owning real estate if you're outside the country. And it's not clear how these can be overcome. >> Mhm. Uh but in order to reach uh real scale with tokenization, do we need interoperability with traditional finance necessarily? Is there maybe a way around it or no? You mentioned liquidity. >> Yeah, I would say >> it's hard to see it coming if institutions are not on board. >> Exactly. And you need also a strong partnership to scale out. This is simply also uh a source of truth, right? that the world runs currently on fiat and also there's a lot of power that traditional finance institutions have a lot of reach they have so why would we not leverage that if we can so we also see them from the bit panda side we see them as partners and not as the old guys so for us it's like we work together a lot with various maturity levels of financial institutions and it's definitely a good cooperation in that regard >> okay So we've moved away from the phase where crypto is claiming to be the killer of banks and into you know this is a very good partnership for us actually. Yeah, but it doesn't mean banks stay as they are, right? It's like it's part of the evolution going forward and I think we bring a very good concept into the whole discussion. So it it's depends on the next years where the development really leads but I'm quite positive that it's >> also traditional finance has a lot of good aspects as well, right? We only talk about the negatives often. So I think a a good combination is definitely the way forward. Liquidity is a big plus for me specifically because they can bring this liquidity that's lacking in these markets and a lot of the pitch for tokenizing assets initially did revolve around liquidity for typically illlquid assets and compartmentalizing them into smaller more accessible parts for retail to purchase and to trade. So traditional finance can bring that volume in but if the natural market isn't there even with their support maybe it will still take some time and a few iterations a few fails until we get >> yeah it would definitely need a strong push in the beginning whenever you introduce something new right um but in the end if it cannot carry itself forward there won't be a success. So this applies for any product, right? First you do some marketing. You try to get the flywheel going, but if the market doesn't pick it up, then it was maybe not the right time or you missed something. So [snorts] we're talking about natural selection by the market. This is a very good opportunity for me to ask about standards. I've been hearing some pitches about should we standardize uh the tokenization process or have a sta a standard for the various tokenized assets. Um, do you think this should be done at all? And if it should be done, would it should it happen centrally? The European Union loves its regulations or should the market decide how things should look? >> I mean, they can tell us what we're allowed to do, what is the framework we can move in and so on. But from a tech perspective, the whole market is super decentralized, right? new chains popping out left and right and new projects get spun off. I have a a very hard time to believe that a central technical standard will a be fast enough to be defined, >> hit the market in the right time and then basically bring a lot of positives after those two points. So for me it's more like uh we need to build build and the market will show us what will have success. This is how I would see it. This is what we do at Bit Panda actually. >> Yeah. Also, having a centralized authority define a standard takes a very long time. I'm not sure how long Mika took, but it didn't come fast enough in my opinion. And also, you run the chance that um a government or a bureaucratic structure is picking winners and losers in a scenario because they can choose the standard of a company they like and this will put other companies at a disadvantage. So perhaps >> a market decision and just see where the customers go is the best solution in this case >> and also the only viable one if you look at the crypto developments there is not a big push towards can you give us the standard then we start building crypto just wants to build right so >> of course yeah >> so we [snorts] still do move fast and break things at least a little bit >> a little bit control and with calculated risk I would say >> u do you think maybe not in terms of standardization, but do you think that we will be moving to perhaps a very dominant blockchain for real world assets or do you think the market will shape itself to just have a lot of middleman that serve interoperability for institutions and retail to just move crypto between various blockchains? >> Hard to say. So [clears throat] if you do settlement and and the whole operation around the asset on chain on the same chain that would definitely be a big advantage. [sighs] Then it would need a really really good use case to basically bring one chain ahead and into the spotlight very heavily that all the other ones are also moving on that then it would basically have a small number of winners. um hard to predict to be honest >> because the majority of the interesting stuff is happening in protocols not necessarily on the blockchain itself. It's more like a warehouse for the tokenization process, the trading, the leverage, all the things that you do. So >> yeah, it's very true. Also, if one blockchain is technically better than the other, it doesn't mean the market sees it the same way, right? It's like >> That's true. That's true. Some some don't have mo maybe the cheapest and fastest technology but they have so much TV they become dominant somehow >> or better marketing you never know. [snorts] [laughter] >> Absolutely. Thank you very much for this chat. Do we have any questions from the audience for Marcus or myself? Although I prefer that you have questions for Marcus of course. We actually Yeah. Fantastic. So we actually do have a question. Um I suppose it's for you Marcus. How much of your code is written by AI and is really the code review now the bottleneck for you? >> So judgment is the bottleneck. So basically um we have a 100% AI adoption the company. I assume I I don't measure what code is not generated how because that doesn't matter to me. For me it's more like what get we built in what time frame what are the costs of people token costs and everything else and how is the quality. Um we definitely see that code generation is super fast and the tooling is already very mature. Um so definitely yes the reviews are one bottleneck but also the software development life cycle is not just code generation. So end to end basically get more AI support and agent support is something we're heavily looking into with a small asterisk that the human has to be in control. Um because we also have to have a very deterministic outcome. Uh whatever we do in regards of um I cannot just let agents do um decisions in production and then if I'm asked why did the agent decide that way and I cannot explain it. This would be a very bad thing in front of the regulator. But yes, judgment and and the human factor is definitely the pivot point in in software release in bit panda. Heavily I support it, but it's a tool for us. The human is still the one who builds the software. >> Clear. So it's a tool. Humans still in the loop for judgment and decision making. >> We didn't replace nobody yet. [laughter] >> Thank you. I think we're more or less out of time. Um in that case, if it's all right, I would like to ask the audience to give you a big round of applause. Thank you. Thank you for your time and for making it for this final fireside chat before lunch because indeed it is lunch time. [music] >> [music]