Intro

This was completed 27.8.2024

linktr.ee/ixswapofficial - The IX Swap Linktree for all your link needs.

I am going to warn you now, if you do not like reading then go to twitter, look for $IXS, you will find more bitesize content.

Here is a good article by Ωitra on IX Swap - nitramydes.medium.com/ixswap-the-uniswap-for-rwa-33c9a5fbd7ad

This long read I have concocted is like the Peter Jackson King Kong film, you don’t get to see the title character until around the middle. This is like a mini-book.

Why? Because IXS is a part of the larger bigger picture of crypto and at the end of this read you may have a greater appreciate of things around crypto. It is a text for the curious beginner as well as the seasoned veteran.

Things are the way they are because they got that way. Then how did they get that way?

Coinbase is custodian for many Bitcoin ETFs, how so and where did its custody tech come from?

If you can have more awareness on the how you can have more insight to where it is going. Here we have one of the prime movers on the convergence of TradFi with DeFi.

Out on the internet you will read and hear this a lot, “IX Swap is the Uniswap of RWA”. That is because it is the quickest way of getting the idea across. We’ve come a long way from MtGox, now we can apply DeFi with the real world because of the team at IX Swap.

IX Swap is an RWA/STO AMM. It is regulated, therefore the illiquid capital that the elite wealth managers cannot move is now unlocked. They cannot move this through an AMM that is not regulated.

This is not financial advice; this is a long read that weaves the relevant history of crypto to IX Swap. It all links, it is all to help emphasise why I consider IX Swap one of my safest investments. If you genuinely like to read about crypto beyond the moon boys and dog coins, if you want deep alpha, then do read on.

IX Swap: Après moi, le déluge

San Gimignano. The Italian town, in Tuscany, tatted with tall towers.

Torre Grossa is the largest of the Tuscany talons from a period where the noble families decided to build up. When you are trying to squeeze on to the tip of a hill that makes sense, it makes even more sense if you have a lot of gold and want to show off. The town had a strategic position and surrounded by wine wealth and flowing in from Florence and around the Tuscany region was the tides of banking wealth.

As the tides change, some of those towers no longer exist and the banking wealth and power moved. The families that built those moved on. Some to London.

If you look across the Thames, there you will see Canary Wharf. Rather than the charm and warm of Tuscany, this has the cool stern and steely feel, these monoliths are much taller than their Italian cousins. Times have changed since those Renaissance days. Rather than one singular family to a tower, these towers deal with asset and wealth management of many families. Adorning the top you will see “Citi” and “HSBC”.

London and New York, they are the only Alpha + + ranked cities in the world, the towers may only just scrape the sky but they are also the spine to the financial world. I guess you have the Romans to thank for that.

Today, we have a confluence of events. We enter a multi-polar world; the western dominance of post-World War 2 is weakening as the BRICS organises. The dollar is weakening as it deals with the Triffin’s Dilemma and an internet ledger known as Bitcoin rises.

With extreme wealth and inheritance people are careful with their funds and the conservative amongst these financial institutions of Canary Wharf would dare not invest the family office fund into some anarchist dream called Bitcoin.

Yet, there is a two-way street here. After a decade and some of hearing how Bitcoin will go to zero and it does the opposite, some of these clients are wanting in on the action. The client wants to work with the asset manager that has become so familiar with the family’s fund for generations and the asset manager does not want to lose the client it has had the privilege of guiding and steering in such a competitive and ruthless world.

Crypto is a dirty word and only recently has BIS and its subordinates have begun to use the word. For years they used the term “digital assets”, which is fair to say, it is just amusing when people cannot say what it is they truly want. Why be so coy, we are adults here.

And this is how it works, for a few years now, the BIS in Switzerland has projects to try out siloed CBDCs and digital asset transfer to multilateral tests. They give the all clear to the private banks to start opening up their offices. You see this in Switzerland and Lichenstein, Singapore, Caymen Islands…

You may have been in a paid crypto group before, one that has tiers to it, you pay more to be in the top one. Well, the world is like that.

BlackRock will then have meeting with its top enterprise clients and inform them they need to have a good percentage of BTC on their balance sheet added to that the safest way to get this is through an ETF by BlackRock themselves. Don’t worry, we will pull some strings in congress, BlackRock assures their clients.

Large capital moves slowly into position. SEC approve the ETFs and BlackRock flirt with retail to get their imagination going.

And BlackRock will go down their tiers of clients to get them positions, each tier profits the tier before it.

Then the Fed print more money, the people’s currency is devaluing and thus they have necessity to guard it against inflation. A flight to assets. A flight to Bitcoin.

As more people get acquainted with crypto, they will be exposed to a new avenue of assets called Reall World Assets (RWA) and Security Tokens (ST or STO). Greeting them will be IX Swap.

Welcome to the layer cake.

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Let’s establish the RWA with a terse history as if I was sat in Citi talking to an astute client who does not know about crypto.

Blockchain is great for record keeping and transactions, they can provide commands through smart contracts. Oracles are great for providing blockchains with data. As AI improves and so too edge technology, the efficiency of tracking assets will be quick, transparent and automated on a second-by-second basis.

When Bitcoin came along, it has opened up a whole new financial expression, a class called cryptocurrency was bestowed to the world and tokenisation beyond gift cards begins. As with any emerging market, how shall we put it, there is a lot of trial and error. This has enabled society to understand what works and what doesn’t and now we have crypto institutions such as Ethereum, Chainlink, Binance, Coinbase, Doge…

This tech allows a great flow of data and tokenisation allows to represent assets along with instructions and directions contained in the token. Therefore, this frees up a lot of capital flow and you can do it from your mobile. Mobile technology enables emerging markets to participate, a common phrase is banking the unbanked.

All in all, the infrastructure is smarter and we are going to see a generational shift in wealth and asset management.

And consider this, about 2% of the worlds GDP goes to payment processing. With distributed ledger technology (DLT), this can cut down this cost massively, that alone frees up to 2% of the worlds GDP wealth to other matters. As AI, DLT and financial services adapts, there are going to be financial products to come and business models in the ether that we do not know of today.

The tokenisation of financial assets such as bonds, ETFs, wine, art, real estate, luxury goods, equities, debt, commodities, natural capital, autonomous vehicles, and more, is known as Real World Assets – RWA.

With elite wealth, these RWA’s and Security Tokens is of their interests, this idea has been around for a while but before this wealth can come into crypto it requires the infrastructure. Sure, there is Ethereum and MetaMask wallets but what I am getting as is the need for airtight security. This is the quick story of Wences Casares.

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Casares is known as “Patient Zero” for Bitcoin in Silicon Valley and become a part of the PayPal mafia. He established Xapo Bank, which has extremely high-standard of security, for example, some of the Bitcoin needs finger print ID to access, now if you thought you could be clever and chop the owners finger off to get access, think again. It reads the pulse.

In the beginning, Casares’ home where he grew up was 100 miles from the nearest sign of civilisation as he lived on a sheep farm in beautiful Patagonia and his family is a reef of entrepreneurs.

1994, he founded Internet Argentina S.A, this was Argentina’s first internet provider. After that, Wences established Patagon in 1997, it was an online brokerage website and he sold it to Banco Santander in 2000. I’ve read a couple of differing sources, some say it was for $585 million others say $750 million, either way it was a lot of money.

He was a part of the WEF Global Leaders of Tomorrow 2001 class, he set up a few businesses, notably Lemon Wallet in 2011 and sold it in 2013 for $43mm.

A notable development for Wences is him joining Endeavor, an non-profit organisation for top entrepreneurs. This network provides great opportunities, one example, a man named Marcos Galperín set up MercadoLibre and received funding from Ebay and PayPal due to Endeavor. In turn MercadoLibre invested in PAXOS. This sort of network exposed Wences to some major connections that tend to fund and partner one another.

Peter Kellner was a co-founder of Endeavor and a part of the WEF YGL. Endeavor runs many of Aspen’s Crown Fellowship programs and this program receives money from US Security and has members of CIA and BlackRock directing it.

Back in 2011, Wences says he wanted to transfer money from California to Argentina, that is when someone introduced him to Bitcoin. A man who could see which way the wind was blow, in 2013 he is proselytising the Bitcoin meaning at a conferences such at a Globant conference and Chicago Gold conference, around this time Bitcoin had 7 million users. He was calling it an experiment in meta-currency and betting that when 5bn people use BTC it will value one coin at $1mm.

He wanted to store his own BTC and set up Xapo, a Gibraltar-based company with physical vaults in Switzerland. In 2014, he had two Series A rounds, combined they generated $40mm in funding. It included PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, then-head of PayPal David Marcus (he went on to be head of Libra/Diem, which Wences also participated in), Vinklevoss, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang, Matt Cohler who is a founding member of Facebook as well as LinkedIn and early investor of Ebay. Cohler at the time was a partner at Benchmark Capital, which was the sole seed investor of Microsoft.

Xapo’s initial advisory board was Dee Hock (Founder of Visa), John Reed (Former CEO of CitiBank), and Lawrence Summers (Former Secretary of Treasury). This is during a time where most people either did not hear about BTC or if they did it was derided as Tulipmania.

Reed had a cosy relationship with CIA when he was at CitiBank, he hired John M. Deutch to the board when Deutch resigned as Director of CIA, Nora Slatkin is another example. The Citi Foundation are key donors to Endeavor.

And this is the bedrock of the US custodial system for BTC. 2019, Coinbase paid Xapo for their clients and system, most of Xapo’s clients transferred over to Coinbase leading to Coinbase control over 514,000 BTC. Xapo still kept 346,000. These clients are High Net-Worth individuals, family offices, sovereign wealth funds, and hedge funds.

Xapo have encouraged dollar stablecoin usage as a way to dollarize the world. In 2023, Xapo was the first fully licensed private bank for BTC to USDT rail – an alternative to SWIFT. Today in 2024, CB is custodian for the majority of the BTC ETFS, most importantly they keep guard of BlackRock’s ETF.

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“He is a genius, he is probably in the top three smartest people I’ve ever met in the whole world. IQ wise he is off the charts… Now, you know, at those levels of IQ things get quirky so you got to take the good with the bad… Occasionally, he will call me and say something where I am like, ‘dude, you’re completely nuts’

“… I would say a good percentage of the time he turns out to be right, whether it is a year or five years later. My one line on Balaji is, I think he is a genius, he is usually early but right.

“I am so glad we have him on team human… and I love him to death. Keep listening to his ideas as it is glimpse into the future.” – Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO, August 2024.

The big three in the asset management world is BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. They have $trillions worth of AUM.

Coinbase went from being a crypto wallet ran by two people in 2012 to BlackRock’s partner as an access point for institutional adoption. Coinbase Prime and Blackrock Aladdin paired together. Here are just some of the institutional clients that use Aladdin:

·        AXA Investment Managers

·        The Central Bank of Canada

·        Merrill Lynch Wealth Management

·        Zurich Insurance

·        Vanguard Group

·        Apple

·        Microsoft

·        Alphabet

In 2013, Balaji was at Y-Combinator to give a speech about his start-up experience with Counsyl, which he started in 2007. This business was later sold to Myriad Genetics for $375mm. Balaji has great insight to many topics and at his 2013 speech he was saying that Silicon Valley is an exit for many from the centralised state world.

People in a garage can provide an alternative and peaceful exit to the institutions such as the US Gov, who will engage with violence if approached head on. These ideas have evolved into Balaji’s thesis, “The Network State” - thenetworkstate.com/ - which will be the successor to the nation state and he has the Network School - x.com/balajis/status/1824533037780201580 - he is passionate about pushing the frontiers of societies imagination through the use of tech.

He was a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a Stanford professor, how he ended up at Coinbase was via Earn.com. Balaji co-founded Earn and was its CEO, it was originally called 21e6 but later the name was changed to Earn after it failed as a bitcoin mining business. It pivoted to a model where people ear cryptocurrency through completing tasks and reading emails.

Along came Coinbase and acquired Earn in 2018 for $100mm. This made Balaji Coinbase CTO and in his one year at the company, he oversaw a large expansion of the company as well as the roll-out of USDC. Coinbase and Circle started USDC and set up the CENTRE consortium that oversaw the governance of the stablecoin.

Balaji has since left Coinbase but is still close with Brian Armstrong and the two often work closely together in funding. Balaji invests in A/R, genomics, robotics, frontier tech, as well as crypto. His web 3 investments include:

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Chainlink, NEAR, Polygon, XMTP, and Zcash plus:

·        Alchemy

·        Anduril

·        Benchling

·        Celestia

·        CoinTracker

·        Culdesac

·        Dapper Labs

·        Deel

·        Digital Ocean

·        Espresso Systems

·        Farcaster

·        Hadrian

·        Instadapp

·        Luma

·        Minicircle

·        Mirror

·        Nucleus Genomics

·        Omada Health

·        OpenGov

·        OpenSea

·        Orchid Health

·        Paradigm

·        Perplexity

·        Polymarket

·        Prospera

·        Replit

·        Republic

·        Roam Research

·        Starkware

·        Stedi

·        Superhuman

·        Synthesis

·        Varda

·        Vitalia

·        VoteAgora

·        Zora

Coinbase set up Coinbase Ventures and this has an arsenal of capital to finance endeavours and start-ups in web3 and beyond. You see, Coinbase wants to get into securities but the legalities in USA are an issue. Institutions, such as BlackRock and their clients, want into digital assets but regulation in much of the world is still being ironed out. Balaji has espoused his want to exit the US Government.

So, what shores do these characters look toward?

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Singapore, east to west is 50 kilometres from east to west and only 27 kilometres north to south.

It is not much bigger than the Isle of Wight, UK. An isle that people cycle around in less than a few hours.

There is a saying that the UK had such poor food and all its beautiful women stolen by the Vikings that they conquered the world as an excuse to get away from the British isles.

Regardless of your opinion is of the imperial age, we do live in a post-British world. Aforementioned, London is an Alpha ++ city, it was the centre of the world for a good period of time and English Contract Law, to quote Balaji, is the code base to a lot of the world.

Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) recognised this. He was the first Prime Minister of Singapore and famously dyslexic. Singapore was expelled from Malaysia in 1965 and how was this tiny city-state to survive in the competitive South East Asia realm, let alone the world?

Firstly, LKY established English as the de facto language. Mandarin, Malay and Tamil are also taught in schools, having a multi-lingual populace is brilliant for neural power but having English as the dominant language was to recognise the business power of the lingua franca of the age.

He had strict anti-corruption laws whilst providing the best pay for politicians. Furthermore, he was open to migration policies that helped Singapore capture the best intellectual capital in the world.

The legacy of LKY is Singapore is a financial centre of the world, it has a great education system, strategic influence on the world, the living standards are high along with a successful public housing programme. A nation that went from underdeveloped and ostracised to integral, integrated and in fact exports intellectual capital. Charlie Munger held LKY in high regards, so high in fact the only two busts he had of other people in his house was of Benjamin Franklin and LKY. Balaji calls LKY the greatest leader of the 21st century and even moved to Singapore in 2020.

Here is the Yuxi Circle:

Half of the world’s population lives in this circle, the South East Asia sea is the busiest in the world and Singapore finds itself right in the middle of the cross-roads with many from India and China looking to Singapore as an example for success.

Just compare that to this:

Much of the capital in the above circle of 2.29bn comes from the Blue Banana zone in Europe.

Whilst we are here, these are some more circles for comparison:

Whilst Balaji was at Y-Combinator in 2013 giving a speech of the digital means to escape the grip of governments, Singapore’s government were cautiously investigating digital assets.  Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) works closely with the BIS, it is a BIS Innovation Hub, which was established after Project Ubin.

It has seen billions raised from ICOs and in 2023 it was viewed as the most competitive fintech hub and a crypto regulatory leader in the Asia Pacific region according to Global Financial Centres Index. According to the Henley’s Crypto Adoption Index 2023, Singapore is the top crypto hub with a score of 50.2 out of 60, whilst Switzerland is second and UAE are third, Hong Kong fourth and my home, the UK, is seventh. The six parameters of the score are public adoption, infrastructure adoption, regulatory environment, innovation and tech, economic factors, and tax-friendliness.

Allow me to show you this:

What is this, Psilocybe? Other than the obvious that this is the share of digital bond issuance in terms of issuance amount by issuer domicile whereby you can see Singapore clearly dominate the chart, this is from a paper by the Tokenised Asset Coalition (TAC).

This is the report from the beginning of 2024 follow this link if you want to read it - www.linkedin.com/posts/juliankwan_2024-state-of-tokenization-activity-7173520997424324608-bH_0/

I will be quick here, the founding members are Aave Companies, Base, Centrifuge, Circle, Coinbase, Credix, Goldfinch and RWA.xyz. New members were added to the coalition, those being Ava Labs, Backed, Chainlink Labs, Fireblocks, Keyrock, Maple, Obligate, Ondo, ParaFi, Polygon Labs, Provenance Blockchain, Republic, Securitize, Solana Foundation, and Steakhouse Financial.

The news of this extended membership also coincided with the announcement that Chainlink’s CCIP integrated Circle’s USDC CCTP. Here is a picture of LINKs Sergey Nazarov and I want you to think who is that next to him, schmoozing:

That man on the right with the glasses is this gentleman:

Joseph Chalom has also been appointed to Securitize’s Board of Directors who tokenised the BUIDL fund. In 2022, Coinbase’s Greg Tusar, Head of Institutional Product, announced a partnership with BlackRock. This allows BlackRock clients use the Aladdin investment management system to buy, sell and monitor their cryptocurrency holdings via Coinbase’s exchange, centring on Bitcoin initially.

A year later, Chalom is on stage with Tusar, this is on YouTube – “#StateOfCrypto Summit 2023 - Powering The Future Of Financial Services” - www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gznd0MvbRFw

5 months ago, this announcement came out:

See - international.coinbase.com/?tab=derivatives The benefit of having a forward thinking, pro-active enthusiasm towards digital assets as well as providing regulatory framework is effective boundaries. When business, lawyers and accountants have certainties they can then go forth with business models and stimulate ideas. Singapore provides this environment and acts as a conduit for many financial institutions across the world to guinea pig ideas and embellish the positives from these experiments. UOB and ADDX are both from Singapore, UOB – the third largest bank in Southeast Asia - is an issuer of bonds and ADDX is a digital securities exchange. SingTel is a massive Asian telecoms company and in 2022, they partnered with UOB and ADDX to issue the Sustainability-Linked Bond (SLB). This is an example of a productive environment in action. The key to on-chain asset tokenisation is:

• Have a large ecosystem of bespoke solutions, for example, have AML provider, legal framework, marketers, tax advisors, accountants, custody, and so on.

• With service providers in place, assets can be registered and issued for tokenisation in an intuitive manner.

• Set compliance rules, these rules can be encoded into the smart contract. This lowers protocol fees and allows for faster processing and scaling.

• Store, manage and distribute tokens.

• Execute corporate actions. The engine can determine entitlements, schedules the communications, distributes capital, update records. This greatly reduces the cost of corporate actions. I took those words from the top of the consultancy pyramid.

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See and read this screenshot:

This is from the 22-page paper, “Relevance of on-chain asset tokenisation in crypto winter”. Read here if you are interested - www.linkedin.com/posts/rajaramsuresh_bcg-on-chain-asset-tokenization-in-crypto-activity-7016168980478328832-NUtI/

In the report, it says how much capital is illiquid and tokenisation is an unprecedented market opportunity. A $16tn opportunity they say because the end goal is, as Citi state, “digitally native financial asset infrastructure, globally accessible, operating 24x7x365 and optimized with smart contract and DLT-enabled automation capabilities, which enable use cases impractical with traditional infrastructure”.

Boston Consultancy Group (BCG) have BCG Platinion / BCG X to help implement the deep tech for their initiatives. BCG have a network of over 50+ national presidents. The wealth of data and cross-sector experts they have access to is the elite level.

They have an idea called Theory of Change; they believe the private sector can be a force for positive change to the world’s challenges.

“These challenges can be addressed successfully through appropriately regulated private sector approaches,” Rich Hutchinson of BCG, “When you can make social impact solutions profitable, you can make them scale.”

In 2021, Larry Fink did an interview with BCG to bring ESG to the world.

“We need to have a just transition. The best way to create a just transition is to be working with the traditional companies and helping them move faster and more productively,” said Fink. He goes on to say, paraphrased, that we can have a tracking portfolio like an S&P tracker but take off the worst offending companies.

There was a big move by BlackRock at the start of 2024 whereby they announced the acquisition of one of the largest infrastructure fund managers in the world, Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP).

As Fink said himself, “We believe the next step going forward will be the tokenization of all assets and that means every stock and every bond will have its own, basically, CUSIP [i.e. the system used to identify most financial products in North America]. It will be on one general ledger. Every investor, you and I, will have our own number, our own identification. We can rid ourselves of all issues around illicit activities around bonds and stocks and digital by having tokenization…. We would have instantaneous settlement. Think of all the costs of settling bonds and stocks, but if you had a tokenization, everything would be immediate because it is just a line item. We believe this is a technology transformation for financial assets.”

One of the mistakes El Salvador did was to airdrop BTC to its citizens without providing enough education, practical reasoning and context. Therefore, once people received their wallet with the $30 of BTC, they immediately sold it and never touched the wallet again. At the time, that was around $130mm worth of BTC and it was gone just like that. Now, El Salvador are going to train 80,000 government employees on Bitcoin and provide a certificate for their qualification. In Argentina, they are introducing Ethereum education to schools. Positions of authority need to send a clear message that cryptocurrencies will be integral to driving the economy.

Therefore, Larry Fink coming out months ago and then repeating himself that Bitcoin is an asset and people should have it on their portfolio is a massive step in legitimising crypto for many people.

BSG X have opened up jobs and a campus in Singapore in order to build digitally native products and to implement the initiatives and goals of BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard. BSG X and EDB Singapore have set up a $20mm fund to help Singapore ventures

See:

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As Singapore has demonstrated throughout its history for prioritising intellectual capital and financial markets, it was the ideal place for Project Guardian to occur. Project Guardian is the MAS and BIS collaborating together. If you do not know, BIS stands for Bank for International Settlements, the oldest international financial institution, it is the central bank to central banks, enjoy that rabbit hole.

In the official paper, Project Guardian had these institutions has contributors -

That is downplaying it a little. These are the policy-making participants other than MAS, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), and the Japanese Financial Services Agency (FSA), Deutsche Bundesbank, Finacial Services Agency (JP), IMF, Banque de France.

It had other participants such as Citi, SGX, S&P Global, Euroclear, Franklin Templeton, and more, check out here - www.mas.gov.sg/schemes-and-initiatives/project-guardian

This initiative started in 2022, test risk-management in blockchain asset tokenization and decentralized finance (DeFi) initiatives. The project had four pillars:

• Open, Interoperable Networks

• Trust Anchors

• Assets Tokenisation

• Institutional Grade DeFi Protocols.

These contributors provided roles in tests, for example, HSBC, Market Node and UOB trialled an Asset and Wealth Management (AWM) token factory, with the intention of it being used across multiple products and participants in the future.

This can be located on p.38 of the Project Guardian report - www.mas.gov.sg/-/media/mas-media-library/development/fintech/project-guardian/project-guardian-open-interoperable-network.pdf

To quote the report, “To achieve the scale and potential of the solution, the project team is contributing to industry-wide efforts to establish a set of common industry standards for asset issuance and exchange. Future integration to capabilities provided by the broader asset ecosystem will also be necessary to unlock the maximum potential of tokenisation, such as enhancing distribution via connecting to platforms such as ADDX or HSBC Orion.”

Key progress was made it seems towards asset tokenisation and “Institutional Grade DeFi Protocols”.

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Recently, Alice Chan of IX Swap had a call with Inveniam with the company of Bob Yostpille of Oasis Pro.

Allow me to skim Inveniam and Oasis Pro (OP) first.

Inveniam provide software to help access data for private markets and utilise it for digital means. They were established in 2017, after InvestaX/IX Swap was formed, and Inveniam has worked with LSE, Archax, our friend ADDX, Capgemini, Cushman & Wakefield, Ownera, Coinbase, Anchorage Digital, BNY Mellon, Provenance Blockchain, Mercer, Apex Group and more. “Aut viam inveniam aut faciam”

OP is essentially an API service bridging Web2 and Web3 infrastructures primarily towards the digital securities market. Bob there has a wealth of experience with Credit Suisse, Bank of America and Royal Bank of Canada. OP is a full-service broker deal that received FINRA-approval in 2021 to be a digital securities alternative trading system. OP has an API management tool to connect to the legacy infrastructure of large financial institutions. During the Project Guardian test, OP worked with JP Morgan and Apollo. Here we have a bit of parallel evolution, IX Swap formed before OP, OP can be thought of as the North American equivalent of IXS.

Private Markets do not have the same benefits as stocks do in terms of public data. Private markets data is an intensive and costly exercise. Touched on before, through oracles and smart contracts, DLT can provide trusted data, minute-by-minute with transparent record keep.

Daniel Baron points out that the automation of administration is everything. Defi markets have not developed at full speed in the US due to concerns about transparency yet blockchain is the ultimate tool for transparency including a data layer with all the info on the asset. You do not have to rely on a third-party assessment.

A typical regulated fund in, say, Luxembourg, there are numerous providers who need to access the same set of information, for example, a management company, appraiser, depository, custodian, administrator. Each one of them has to reinvent the wheel to access the info their own way, then replicate the results. It costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time. They are all asking the same question

A lawyer has to connect dots and get the evidence, as much as they can, together. If it is all in one place, just imagine. Imagine a stock certificate could talk to you and provide you all the information relating to it. Additionally, a layer in administrative and ai tools can be applied. THIS IS REVOLUTIONARY!

You have private markets able to find price discovery due to trusted data and the markets run 24/7/365. You need to “trust the data in order to clear the trade” - www.inveniam.io/company

And where can this trade occur?

IX Swap.

Important distinctions here. InvestaX and IX Swap are sister companies, first they were partner companies then InvestaX acquired IX Swap. InvestaX is a centralised platform InvestaX is a centralised system, these are assets only available for institutional and accredited investors.

Remember Project Guardian institutional grade DeFi protocols? Well, IX Swap is the RWA/Security Token (ST) Automated- Market Maker (AMM) that has institutional standards and institutional backing. Do not take that information for granted.

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InvestaX was originally called InvestaCrowd and founded in Singapore by Alice Chen and Julian Kwan, who are married. The couple were looking at the US crowd funding scene in 2014 and wanted to bring this to Asia, 2015 not only saw the founding of InvestaCrowd, which they self funded, but also the birth of their daughter. InvestaCrowd was a real-estate crowdfunding platform, here is an early clip of the two pitching InvestaCrowd - www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATBsilGh6bU Alice Chen was born in Shanghai, during the era of one-child policy, to parents who were professors. Her and her sister were moved to the US when Alice was 6, their parents left them with the grandparents. Her parents went back to China and came back to the US three years later. She studied hard, earning a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree in International Relations and Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then a Doctor of Law (J.D.) degree from USC Gould School of Law. She was interested in contract law and worked at DLA Piper, Skadden Arps, and Dewey Ballentine, an experience she thoroughly enjoyed. In Asia, she did a range of different projects and had to move around a lot rather than staying with a firm for an extended period of time. This was predominantly involved with real estate. Chen will admit she does not see herself entrepreneurial, however, her methodical, strategic and critical thinking from her lawyer days is suited for start-ups as there is a lot of contractual and legislative revision required. Julian Kwan is from Sydney, Australia. He definitely does have the entrepreneurial spirit and certainly is not shy of moving around. He has 18 years of experience traveling, living and working in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and USA. Backing him up are degrees in real estate development/construction management from the University of New South Wales Australia. He has a degree in Mandarin from the Beijing Language and Cultural University Aside from yoga and ocean swimming, he, with the information I could find:

• Co-founded the Mailman Group

• In 2006, co-founded Space Development, expanded into the Space Group, a real estate investment and development business.

• In 2007, he built, operated and then sold China’s leading boutique property and China/Asia’s 1st Carbon Neutral hotel, URBN hotels.

• Signed hotel deals with Wanda, Wanke and Chengtou, the largest real estate developers in the world.

• An early investor in Element Fresh a leading food group in China.

• Invests his own family capital

• Maintains advisory roles with multi-family offices investing into real estate

• Co-founder of "Blockchain & Digital Securities - The Future of Capital Markets"

Both are confident, articulate, smart hard-working people who are applying their acumen to blockchain. The crowd funding space was one innovation of the internet to allow fundraising for assets but it had its limitations. Chen mentions at Singapore FinTech Festival 2022 that she first heard of Bitcoin in 2012, it was not until the ICO craze in 2017 that the couple’s ears pricked up and their neurons started to whirl. They travelled to conferences across the globe, Chen says that she looked at everything to do with blockchain and how it could be applied. This was an improvement on the crowdfunding tech they were using originally. Get to 2019 and they become fully blockchain focussed and moved toward security tokens rather than just real estate. The aim now is to be a one-stop shop to help digitisation. “The companies and the people who invest in this space now early will capture the most value. This is technology and the marriage of technology with capital markets.” – Julian Kwan, Digital Securities Forum Singapore 2019. They change their name to InvestaX and gained the appropriate licences. They received the Capital Market Services Licenses (Dealing in Securities) from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). In 2020, they obtained the Digital ESOP (DESOP) certification from InvestaX. Most recently, in 2021, they acquired the Regulatory Sandbox for Recognized Market Operator certification from MAS. All highly encouraging, none more so than the fact InvestaX received the MAS FinTech grant to tokenise the new Singapore fund structure – this project was called the e-VCC. This is a start-up that is chartering unprecedented territory. All these milestones are positive affirmations that the tricky and arduous path the two trod was worth it. And it signifies strength and resilience to anyone that is investing in the project. This is a nascent industry and Singapore has been wise to provide legislation to protect customers whilst allow the token industry space to expand and experiment. By doing this, Singapore’s regulators can then make amendments. The e-VCC experiment was conducted with State Street and UBS, plus circling this project was PwC, CMS, STACS, Algorand, Hedera, and Tezos. It was a success to say the least, it helped determine the lifecycle and workflow processes for efficiencies gained using e-VCC - www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHDXzxTcwnw InvestaX today is compatible with the majority of blockchains and they connect with the Web 2 world.

InvestaX have been at the first Singapore Fintech Festival as well as the first Hong Kong version. In 2017 when they pivoted to blockchain there was not token custodian out there. Fast forward to November 2022, Alice Chen wins a spot as one of the top 10 FinTech Leaders at the Singapore FinTech Festival.

In attendance at this festival was none other than Brian Armstrong and Balaji Srinivasan.

Now, that award was not the reason those two invested in InvestaX, they had in fact invested in a Series A round in March earlier in the year.  Balaji and Coinbase Ventures invested along with Gate Ventures, Token Bay Capital, Sustainability Exchange Group (SEG), Global Blockchain Ventures (GBV), Startup-O, JST Capital, Baksh Capital, Thakral Corporation Ltd, and Woodside Holdings Investment Management.

The IX Swap arm was co-founded by Chen, Kwan and Aaron Ong.

Aaron Ong has experience at DBS Bank and went to the Bank of Singapore (BoS), which is a subsidiary of OCBC. BoS is a massive private bank and OCBC is the second largest bank in Southeast Asia by assets. He joined InvestaX in 2021, the same year he helped co-found IX Swap and originally these two sisters formed a partnership.

Aforementioned, InvestaX is aimed towards the institutions, high-value and accredited clients. IX Swap is designed to be the world’s first AMM for security tokens and together they can provide end-to-end solutions from issuance to custody, exchange, market making, and SaaS solution.

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How far crypto has come. This was before my crypto time but there used to be a thing called BitInstant. When the Winklevii invested in Charlie Shrem’s start-up BitInstant, way back in 2011, the twins wanted to purchase some bitcoin.

You had to deposit the funds on BitInstant, Winklevii put in $100, then you receive a BitInstant deposit slip. BitInstant had a deal with MoneyGram and SoftPay, who were networked across thousands of stores in the US. Pop over to a Walgreens, Duane Reade, CVS, or 7-Eleven and give the slip to a cashier.

There is a red phone, the signature phone from MoneyGram. You speak to the rep and provide the necessary info and eventually you get bitcoin. This is from NY Mag in 2013: nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/04/i-bought-a-bitcoin.html

How chaotic. TradFi seems more appealing when you see this process.

If you bought bitcoin on a red phone, you are an OG my friend.

Brian Armstrong read Satoshi’s manifesto in 2010 and that got his brain moving. In 2012, he started Coinbase with Ben Reeves and at the time of writing the company has a $40bn market cap. Brian was listed as the 10th most powerful young mind of 2017.

In his journey, Armstrong invited Shrem to his house, present was Roger Ver, Jered Kenna, and Tony Gallippi. Shrem quips that was Bitcoin back then, there was essentially ten people. At this gathering in California, Shrem divulged near enough everything about BitInstant and to quote Shrem’s appearance on What Bitcoin Did podcast, “Then he's [Armstrong] like, "oh, thank you for telling me everything. I'm starting my own competitor to you." That is literally how it went down!”

Here we are in 2024 and BASE, an L2 from Coinbase, is bridging to IX Swap. InvestaX is the first platform to integrate with Coinbase Prime Web3 Wallet.

Crypto and DLT has come from the red phone to this:

That’s from Binance research but it isn’t to be taken for granted that DeFi provides smoother use cases these days. It takes a lot to do the simple thing of swapping assets.

Just because you have a token does not mean you have liquidity straight away. You need to match the order spread and in a raw, emerging industry liquidity can be tricky. In 2016, Vitalik posted, “My proposed solution is to use the style of "on-chain automated market maker" used in prediction markets in a decentralized exchange context.” - www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/55m04x/lets_run_onchain_decentralized_exchanges_the_way/

Hayden Adams began to work on the concept, Ethereum Foundation gave him $100,000 and 2018 comes around, the market receives Uniswap and a host of liquidity pools.

The liquidity pool idea allows a user to put their fund unit into a smart contract and this forms a pool for a pair of digital coins or crypto, known as a liquidity pair. If a user of the exchange trades one of those tokens, the smart contract uses the funds from the pool to execute the trade. Therefore, traders do not require another trader to make the trade on the other side of the trade. The trader is interacting with the pool.

Liquidity Pools (LPs) are a crowd source market maker solution.

This is how crypto has AMMs and it has greatly increased the lubrication of the transactions. Now, if Uniswap has devised a brilliant protocol and others have come out such as 1Inch, why not simply use Uniswap for RWAs rather than IX Swap?

What’s that phrase? You are lucky when preparation meets opportunity.

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Digitised securities are paper securities that end up with digital representation, digital securities are digital native securities, they don’t have paper. Either way, these require regulation for these sorts of financial instruments.

Luckily for the asset managers of this world, Alice and Julian with their background in real estate and law were already thinking ahead. Them and their team have seemingly got ahead of the curve as IX Swap is the first RWA/STO AMM.

The access to alternative investments is what is being automated and there is another important avenue IX Swap is opening up. Entry.

A lot of funds and private markets requires a minimum amount of capital that maybe deemed out of reach for retail. IX Swap allows for people to invest as little as $1 in STO. IX Swap has a launchpad to provide Security Token Offerings (STOs),

Securities such as stocks and bonds have the public market and over the previous decade or so there have been apps such as Robin Hood and Trading 212 that opened up access to trading with the same premise, you can invest $1 to participate.

Yet there are many more assets. Creative assets such as paintings or even the painter themselves, a way of patronage can be financed this way. Wine is a lucrative market and cars; the real estate asset market is larger than all the stock markets combined.

Treasurer is the first project on IX Swap launchpad, this Korean project is tokenising luxury goods such as collectible wine, luxury watches, art pieces, and jewellery. The wine market is strong across the affluent classes, after 2008/09 when the world was crashing, the wine market saw a 52% rebound largely due to Asian buyers.

Coach K’s GameFi Portfolio (CKGP), the world’s first Onchain Tokenized Portfolio (OTP) was launched through IX Swap. With other 123k followers on twitter and nearly 45k YouTube subscribers, he is an example of how influencers can utilise IX Swap to provide a portfolio to the market.

There is the SEA Solar Series 1, a ESG-fund aimed at solar asset in Southeast Asia.

Tiamond have partnered with IX Swap in April 2024. Tiamonds is a LCX project and it is involved in tokenising diamonds. According to Tiamonds, “these are certified diamonds that are stored securely in a vault in Liechtenstein. It guarantees the authenticity and security of these priceless assets through insurance by Lloyd's London and certification by LCX and GIA.”

Oasis Pro and InvestaX formed a partnership in November 2023 - 24345494.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/24345494/SFF%202023/Media%20Hub-%20press%20release/Oasis%20Pro%20and%20InvestaX.pdf?ref=blockhead.co

Oasis Pro tokenised the Diamond Standard Fund. The DSF is the creator of the world's first regulated diamond commodity, allow access to around $1.2tn. In July 2024, Oasis Pro and DSF launched on InvestaX.

As Julian Kwan said, “This is the ETF moment for the private markets, bringing in new value propositions and alternatives for more investors.”

A key investor of Inveniam is GBV, they have now partnered with IX Swap. GBV are a significant fund who invest in Google AI Quantum, Securitize, Chainstone Labs, Prisma Finance and more.

www.gbv.fund/ - See their team here, they have a lot of expertise.

For example, advisor Dr Alex Cahana is “consults multiple private and public companies, start-ups, healthcare organizations and the United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT). Dr. Cahana advises on blockchain technology, digiceutical integration and healthcare redesign.”

Gal Landau-Yaari served as the Acting CEO of the Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange; as SVP and the COO, and as the CRO of the Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange. She has a whole history that is too long to list but worth scanning yourself.

Anil Chintapalli has an even longer list and wealth of experience.

Investment advisor Michelle McKenna has been a board member for WWE, Universal, NFL, and VP at Walt Disney.

The co-founder of the fund was Al Weiss who was President of Worldwide Operations for Disney.

In short, lots of wealth lots of experience across a broad range of sectors and nations. That is wanting to utilise IX Swap.

www.ixswap.io/ecosystem - follow this link to see the investors of IX Swap along with the ecosystem.

Here is an interesting thing to think about long term. As there are more and more funds on IX Swap and there is the application on OTP, there will be the formation of indexes, similar to how we have the S&P 500 index.

And with programmable portfolios, the speed at which a personalised index can change is quick. With the speed of automation and up-to-date data, assets can be fairly valued and with the base broader than previous eras of finance, capital can flow much more freely than ever before. With AI advancements and progress with DLT and DeFi, there are financial innovations yet to come that we have not thought of.

With AI agents, there is room for composability with stablecoins in DeFi, something that cannot be attained in web2 as it is fractured and silo’ed. Someone can deposit a set amount into their AI agents digital wallet and boundaries can be set. Essentially a more sophisticated trading bot and this is being applied to new markets and faster technology.

The team of IX Swap have helped to provide education for RWA and blockchain, which is IBF accredited. This will help the space and the RWA accelerator programme they have launched. They are pioneering the Digital Stock Ownership Plan (DESOP), which helps administration and provide incentive for daily tasks. With Real Estate 2.0 offering it help democratise investment into real estate.

Project Diamond is a Coinbase initiative. As the US regulators drag their feet, places in MENA have opened up to crypto, such as the UAE. Who, it may interest you, in 2022, incorporated IX Swap into the NY StartAD Corporate Sprint Accelerator.

Coinbase through Project Diamond in UAE were able to set up an Asset Management platform. This is integrated with InvestaX. A note from Coinbase that is bullish for the RWA space is that less than 0.25% of global assets are currently represented on blockchain infrastructure.

Hugely positive for IX Swap is due to the close partnership with Coinbase it also exposes them to Coinbase’s 15,000 institutional clients.

It was after Dubai Token2049, which Aaron Ong attended with Julian Kwan, that IX Swap announced tokenising IP through their launchpad, “Kumar Finally Unbanned” being the first example of this on IXS. Blockchain and IP have a large future together and our friend IX Swap is once again in a prime position to provide utility.

It seems to be America that is behind. Singapore finds itself in a nexus with Japan and South Korea accelerating their legislation for crypto. India is a hotbed for talent. Australia must not be forgotten and notably Redbelly is coming out, a RWA dedicated chain, places such as UAE are proactive in their attempt to attract talent and EU has provided MiCA.

Your honour, see this evidence:

What am I showing you?

I am showing you the incredibly exclusive RWA Summit Singapore 2024: www.rwasummit.io/singapore-2024

Only 150 people are allowed into this summit, people apply and they are hand selected. One of the hosts of this summit is Libeara, who have done a PoC of tokenised carbon credits with SCBHK, Mastercard and Mox. Japan’s Sainson Capital provide a lot of seed funding in Asia and a lot of attention towards RWA. Centrifuge is the third co-host, they appear on InvestaX’s Infinity and Beyond podcast (podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/infinityandbeyond/episodes/Tokenized-Funds-The-Future-of-Real-Estate--Private-Equity--and-Venture-Capital-e2k52n4/a-aba8bb9).

Out of those speakers consider the market cap of each. Then consider the market cap of IX Swap.

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The token. $IXS.

There are no more tokens locked up.

To have these fundamentals, this market opportunity and to have the token fully diluted is incredibly rare.

And there is another first IX Swap can boast.

You can stake the token and be available for an airdrop, not just any standard airdrop, no. You can get RWA tokens. No one has done this before. So, you aren’t diluting the token by staking on their platform, instead you are opening up to a new type of asset class. Brilliant.

There are 180 million IXS tokens, these can be applied to liquidity pools.

IXS Token holders will be able to stake their holdings in compounded interest pools to receive a share of the swap fees.

There are deflationary mechanics involved.

Whenever there is a swap, 5% of the fee is used to buy back IXS and another 5% is used to buy IXS and burn it. Same with the liquidity pools.

For the launchpad is the same principal but it is 15%.

There are two vaults, the Moon and the Solar.

The Moon Vault will receive a portion of the fees that accumulate on IX Swap then buy back IXS throughout the year on the open market.

The Solar Vault will receive a defined contribution of IXS where the tokens are either locked permanently or burned.

As the platform is used more, the more tokens are bought back and burned. IXS will also be the native payment token on the InvestaX licensed security token CEX platform.

Ondo Finance has some big wigs involved from BlackRock and Goldman Sachs. It tokenises US treasuries and has seen a good rise since its inception, it has, at the time of writing, around $540 million TVL and is leading the way on tokenised treasuries.

It took 452 days for tokenised treasuries to reach $1bn in total, it took 151 days for it to reach $1bn to $2bn. No one wants to be first; no one wants to be last.

The team at InvestaX/IX Swap are willingly first and they have cut the path for others to follow.

IX Swap is under $100 million market cap, a STO launchpad with fully diluted token supply that is deflationary, all for the worlds first regulated RWA/STO AMM.

There will be other platforms that will do the same in the future, no doubt. IXS is the first.

This is a massive industry and competition is always positive to resist stagnation. But one must consider this, you need licences, licences are hard to come by. To get licences, you need to put in the work, be resilient and have connections. It took IX Swap 4 plus years to get the licences in crypto-positive countries.

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FTX did not do proper risk-management. With proper oversight, these things would not have happened and IXS has the team to provide the professional oversight needed. The tech was not the issue, it was a centralised exchange run poorly by a drug-addled, psycho-sexual hedge fund who felt morally righteous. Fortunately, the head team of IX Swap are reasonable, smart and driven, more importantly, they are adults.

People will take for granted what IX Swap achieved and the team have seized the opportunity and made good of it.

Network, connection and distribution are absolutely key, IX Swap is right in the middle of this. For funds, they can increase their AUM and traders can programme and customise indexes. There is the option to use RWA as collateral when borrowing crypto assets. This brings in new revenue streams.

This is the automation of private markets, this is the convergence of defi and tradfi, this is a generational opportunity.

The London Stock Exchange has been dematerialising assets for 400 years. There is the old story of the main driver to build ships was to divide the hull into twelfths to diversify investors.

To avoid becoming like the towers of San Gimignano, an attraction and UNESCO site but one that has lost its might and status of its original intent, the towers of Canary Wharf must take the lead on DLT much like how Singapore has.

After IX Swap, the flood.

Twitter: @Psilocybe____