# The Future of Finance Is Already Here | Rostislav Totev, Altcoins.bg | Future Finance Forum 2026

- Channel: [ETHSofia](https://streameth.org/ethsofia)
- Date: 2026-10-06
- Duration: 21:55
- Topics: Altcoins.bg, Blockchain Week Bulgaria, Bulgaria, F3 2026, Future Finance Forum, MiCA, MiCA license, Rostislav Totev, crypto exchange, crypto infrastructure, crypto regulation, digital assets, passporting, traditional finance, Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-e2bgwffzQQ4
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2bgwffzQQ4

## Description

Rostislav Totev, founder and CEO of Altcoins.bg, argues that the question is no longer whether digital assets join traditional finance but who builds regulated, reliable infrastructure that can scale. Behind a simple buy button sit identity checks, sanctions and wallet screening, the travel rule, custody and reconciliation, and he says trust and operational experience are the parts that cannot be copied. He tells how the company grew from one man and a laptop in 2017 to a MiCA licence in July, rebuilding most of its infrastructure in the final month because partners could not get licensed. A licence, he says, only gives the right to compete; the future is specialised regulated firms working together.

Keynote at Future Finance Forum 2026, 25 September 2026, Sofia. Part of Blockchain Week Bulgaria 2026.

Speaker

▸ Rostislav Totev, Founder and CEO, Altcoins.bg
Rostislav Totev is the Founder & CEO of Altcoins.bg, a Bulgarian crypto exchange licensed under MiCA. He is focused on bridging traditional finance and the digital asset economy and making crypto more accessible, secure and integrated into everyday financial services.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rostislav-totev

Chapters
00:00 Introduction
00:16 The buy button and the system behind it
02:46 What cannot be copied: trust and experience
04:14 From buying Bitcoin to working inside finance
05:24 Altcoins.bg: from one man and a laptop
07:46 The MiCA licence: repairing the engine while driving
09:50 The licence is not the business
12:26 Build, partner or acquire crypto infrastructure
14:02 Passporting the licence into the EU
15:07 Make crypto infrastructure boring
16:41 Specialised regulated firms working together
19:53 Q&A: Why use a regulated exchange instead of Uniswap?
21:43 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

Uh it was a great introduction. Thank you about that. Uh so hello everyone. Uh let me start with uh something simple. I would like to continue the discussion from uh before but with a little uh different uh perspective. You know uh imagine going to a web interface or an app uh and you choose the asset and you click buy. From a customer's perspective that [snorts] sounds really easy. But behind all that there is the whole financial system. Uh you know uh there is uh registration verification uh identity check sanction screenings reconciliation custody liquidity execution and so on and so on. you can uh remember all that so I I don't have to uh uh tell it in in the future of the presentation but you know the customer sees the the easy part you click buy and a few seconds later the transaction is done but we see the whole complexity of that process and you know we thought a while ago that The future of finance will be somewhere in in the future and the connection between digital assets and traditional finance will happen in the future. But you know it's already here. We are living it inside it with with the regulations and everything it became today. And the question now is not whether blockchain digital assets will become part of traditional finance. The question is who exactly will build regulated and reliable infrastructure that can scale. So as you already know my name is Rostlav Tov and I'm the founder and CEO of outcoins.bg BG and we've been living the last 9 years inside the transformation of the business. So let me get back to that to that button. you know, you press it, it's all fine. But in the backstage, there are quite a few processes that should happen and that should work. And you know, building that button is not the hard part. It's the easy part. You can build trading interface. you can build what the customer sees relatively quickly. But the important part, the hard part is that to make all that list uh you know that uh I said a bit earlier uh registration, identification, security, sanction screening, wallet screening, travel rule, uh custody infrastructure, regulation, accounting and reconciliation and everything that will click together. And that's the hard part. And you know software can be copied, futures features can be copied, trading interface can be copied, almost everything can be copied. But do you know what is the thing you cannot copy? Trust and operational experience that you cannot download from GitHub. you can't and in finance those are some of the most important things that people sometimes forget. Back in 2017 uh as we started there were there was a set of questions. The questions were can I buy Bitcoin? Can I sell it? Can I transfer it? But now in 2026 the set of questions are totally different. You know uh the questions changed from can we buy digital assets to can we make digital assets work inside the traditional financial system. Can we move value back and forth between the traditional and onchain digital assets? And the industry we solved we solved the first set of questions relatively quickly. But now with that questions that is a much harder problem to address for us that transition was never theoretical. We were on the on the first row of everything happening. Outcoins BG started in 2017 as an idea. Idea what lacked on the Bulgarian market, what I wanted to see on the Bulgarian market and what products and services I personally as a customer back then wanted to see locally. And don't don't imagine I had team resources uh in institutional financing or whatever. No, it was just an idea, me and a laptop. That's it. No back team, no financing, no rich, wealthy friends or whatever. Just the idea what I want to see. And I started building. I started building in the wild west of crypto and now we transition to the sorry to the regulated part and I've seen seen it all and for the last nine years our company became the place where many of the first steps on that market took you know we were the first one to offer more than five assets on local local market. We were the first to make stable coins easily accessible locally. We were the first to offer uh transaction on uh quite a few networks before that was uh industry standard and we definitely were the first to make a dedicated partnership with a bank with our own package for our customers. And that all wasn't because we had more resources. No, we just had to solve the issue, the problem that was right in front of us and think right away for the next one. And now in 2026, we can proudly say that we are licensed. In July, we got our Michael license. We've been preparing for this for the last two years maybe. We thought we are ready even before uh we put our papers on on the desk you know in the FSC and it's important to say that we started as oneman show uh idea oneman show small Bulgarian company and now Michael licensed the difficulties This we encountered were many. You know in the in the last month maybe of uh of the license procedure we had to change almost our whole infrastructure. All that we have been built for the last eight years, almost nine, we had to rebuild it from scratch with different partners, different infrastructure, almost everything because our partners weren't and couldn't get licensed. So, we had to replace them. And just to imagine how exactly that works. Imagine driving uh driving a car on the highway and repairing its engine while driving. You know, almost impossible. It's easier to start a new company and get it licensed. You don't have customers. You don't you don't have the business and you you don't have all that uh difficulties. But to rebuild everything while working with customers, it was really challenging. And from that point, as a licensed entity, I can now tell you the license is not the business. The license doesn't give you customers, doesn't give you business, doesn't give you brand, doesn't give you operating experience, maybe just gives you a little bit of trust. The license gives you the right to compete, that's all. And the business is what you should build, what you should have before the license. And the business where all that uh things that I explained earlier should click together. That is the business and that is what should work the day before the license, the day of the license and the morning after that and every morning after that. So the license is the visible part the headline but it doesn't make you competitive. So if not the license is the the whole part what exactly is As I said, the license is the maybe one of the most important parts because without a license, you can't be even in the conversation, you know. But to make that all work, you should be able to make all those things click together. As I said, the buy button is the easy part, but making all that work reliably is the hard part. Back in the days, the competition was who will make the most uh uh beautiful software, the fastest engine, most tokens, newest meme coins or whatever. But now as we entered the future of finance, the question is who will build reliable, regulated and scalable infrastructure? Because as digital assets become part of finance, infrastructure means more than the hype. And this creates a strategic question for banks, financial institutions, asset managers, payment providers and so on. As the future has come and you are already behind on on on the crypto infrastructure, what do you do? Do you build it from scratch? Do you partner with someone or do you acquire the whole infrastructure? Because you know you you can build everything from zero. It will take time. But you you can do it. You can partner with someone. You can you can buy the rails from here and there and make it as a complex but you still have to make everything click together. It's not just to to have it. It's just to make it click. And that's and that's where I think the strategy asset will be. So what do you do? because I don't believe the scars asset in the next 10 years will be another trading interface. We've seen that many times and the prettiest interfaces some of them no longer work. So the question is somewhere else and that whole transition uh became very real for us. uh not only because of the Michael license but last week our Michael license was passported. you know, back in uh in our history, we we proved that in Bulgaria, we can make products, we can make reliable products and services for the crypto industry that work and that can be licensed. And now we can scale our whole experience into the EU. Now the question before us is not whether we can build something. The question we have already answered that question. The new question is how far we'll be able to scale it. So the future of finance I don't think it's it's a it's a thing it's one thing it's infrastructure and we often talk about the future of finance as uh technology part it's blockchain uh it's AI it's uh digital assets it's real world assets tokenization and so on and so on But you know when you when you go to buy a coffee you don't think how payment rails work. Uh when you send an email you don't think of TCP protocols. And that's and that's where I think we are heading now with uh with crypto infrastructure. Make it boring. make it work without the customer knowing exactly how it works. And customers shouldn't care about the technology. They should just be able to use it day after day after day. Every bank doesn't need uh to become crypto exchange. Every assent manager doesn't need to solve all protocol issues and uh every fintech doesn't need to build its own custody infrastructure. I think the future of finance is regulated entities working together, specialized entities. you know when when my shoulder hurts I don't I don't sign up for bachelor's degree in medicine I just go to a doctor and that's how exactly the finance should work specialized entities with regulated infrastructure working together because the future will be the transition and the good transition between onchain and traditional finance and to make it possible. So [snorts] we get to that point that we think about the past. 9 years ago we thought [snorts] future of finance is Bitcoin. The financial system is broken or [snorts] something. will be rebos. But now we see that the future of finance it it is the infrastructure. It looks like the digital assets being tied to the traditional financial system and the customers to use it without any friction friction to be able to move value between their banks uh payment accounts on chain and back. to be able to trade different types of assets without any friction and do it quickly. The f we became the first Bulgarian crypto exchange to be mic licensed and I I have to be really precise. We're not the first Bulgarian company, but we're the first uh Bulgarian active exchange that served Bulgarian customers to pass that transition. And now we're entering a new chapter, a new chapter where we can make all that globally. And this is exactly where we want Outcoins to operate. not only be the place where customer can click that button, but also be the place where financial institutions from Bulgaria can partner with to be able to make that transformation really really reliable. Sorry. And now the question is not what the future of finance is. It it's already here. So now the future is who will build it, who will scale it and who will partner with it. Thank you. [applause] Thank you very very much. Please not escape yet because we do have a question for you. Oh, >> there's actually generally a couple of questions coming in across most panel discussions and keynotes. Thank you very very much everyone for engaging and um just remember also that you can always catch the speakers after uh their talks or if not uh many of them are also on thrilled the networking app some self-promotion. [clears throat] Okay, now to the content. Um, there were a couple of questions, but um, one that I would like to pose to you is um, one of our dear members in the audience asked, why would I really go through the hurdle and hassle of kind of like on boarding through an exchange if I can also just go uh, on unis swap for instance? >> Okay, I'll tell you right away. uh because the the the future is regulated. you know, you'll be able to go to unis swap may all those uh trades uh but then you eventually will want to come back to the regulated infrastructure because you will want to spend that money somewhere and if we can't see what you have done how you have done it uh to prove us that uh uh there is uh no risky business with your transactions, you just can't enter back in the regulated system. And it's becoming more and more of today with with every day. So you can do it, but it will be complicated then to return to regulated and buy things in the real world with all that stuff. >> [music] >> Heat. Heat.