Nexo is an all-in-one digital wealth platform that empowers investors to buy, earn, borrow, and manage crypto assets through high-yield savings, crypto-backed credit lines, and seamless trading experiences. Trusted globally since 2018, Nexo combines security-first infrastructure, personalized wealth services, and institutional-grade financial tools to help users grow and protect their digital wealth with confidence.
In this episode, we speak with Kiril Tsenkov, Head of Business Development at Nexo, a digital assets wealth platform. We discuss the integration of traditional financial concepts with digital assets, focusing on how businesses can leverage crypto without selling their holdings. Kiril explains Nexo’s role in providing credit lines backed by cryptocurrency, allowing users to maintain liquidity without triggering tax events. The conversation covers the growing adoption of stablecoins in B2B transactions, the benefits of crypto-backed loans, and the evolving landscape of digital finance. Kiril shares insights into the practical applications of these financial tools, emphasizing their potential to streamline operations and enhance financial flexibility for businesses.
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Show Notes
Takeaways
- Nexo was created to help crypto holders access liquidity without selling assets.
- Digital wealth platforms turn crypto into a usable financial toolset.
- Stablecoins are increasingly used for day-to-day business operations.
- Crypto adoption is expanding beyond early evangelists and investors.
- International stablecoin payments reduce friction and settlement delays.
- Businesses are using stablecoins to simplify global treasury operations.
- Nexo focuses on operational convenience rather than speculative hype.
- Crypto-backed loans can help businesses preserve upside and avoid tax events.
- Founders and entrepreneurs are driving many of the most innovative use cases.
- Real estate purchases backed by crypto collateral are becoming more common.
- Treasury flexibility and liquidity are central themes in modern finance.
- Stablecoin adoption is accelerating among mainstream businesses and consumers.
- Simplicity and usability are critical for broader crypto adoption.
- White-glove support remains valuable despite growing automation and AI.
Chapters
00:01 – Nexo and the evolution of digital asset finance
01:18 – How Nexo began with crypto-backed lending
04:08 – What a digital wealth management platform actually does
08:03 – Kiril’s journey from e-commerce founder to crypto adoption
13:30 – Turning crypto treasury management into operational convenience
16:12 – Why stablecoins are growing in global business operations
17:09 – Positioning Nexo between fintech, banking, and crypto
20:54 – Simplifying treasury and payments for modern businesses
23:19 – Common pain points driving companies toward Nexo
26:15 – The explosive rise of B2B stablecoin payments
29:24 – Reducing the learning curve for crypto financial tools
31:18 – Real-world business use cases for crypto-backed lending
35:25 – Supporting founders, innovators, and growing companies
39:34 – Treasury strategy, tax shields, and capital structure basics
47:05 – The rebound of the crypto-backed lending market
55:36 – Crypto-backed real estate financing becomes more mainstream
Transcript
Beau Hamilton (00:01.259)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the SourceForge Podcast. I am your host, a Beau Hamilton. And today we’re joined by Kiril Tsenkov, head of business development at Nexo, a digital assets wealth platform focused on helping clients grow, manage and preserve their crypto holdings. In this episode, we’re going to be digging into some of the pretty fundamental financial ideas that are now being applied to crypto and digital assets in a business setting. So we’ll talk about why some companies are starting to outgrow traditional banking relationships, what a modern treasury setup can look like, why borrowing against digital assets can sometimes make more sense than actually selling them. And then how businesses owners and CFOs are approaching these decisions in practice.
And Kiril, he brings a practical really ground level perspective to all this. He’s shaped his career, has been shaped by years in financial services, fintech and B2B growth roles. So this should be a really interesting conversation for anyone trying to understand where digital assets fit into the broader future of business finance. So with that said, Kiril, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here.
Kiril Tsenkov (01:07.854)
Thank you, Beau. I’m really honored to be part of your podcast. And of course, my greetings to all of your followers. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Beau Hamilton (01:18.237)
Absolutely. I’m honored to have you here on the show. I want to get right into it. So before we get, you know, really too far into the weeds here, let’s make sure all the listeners are on the same page. So I just want to give some background information on Nexo. Nexo has been around since 2018. And correct me if I’m wrong on any of these statistics, by the way. But when Nexo was launched, it was primarily known as a crypto lending platform, right? But the company’s clearly evolved a lot since then, I would say. The firm is now managing over $11 billion in assets. You’ve processed something like $370 billion in transactions across 150 plus jurisdictions. So it’s a pretty different animal now. For listeners who may have heard the name but don’t really know what Nexo is, can you tell us what it is and who it’s actually built for?
Kiril Tsenkov (02:09.198)
What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to bridge the gap between traditional finance and literally the future. When we started back in the day, we started with a very simple idea. And it was the fact that there was a growing number of people that adopted cryptocurrencies or namely Bitcoin early on and they had significant unrealized profits. They held huge positions in Bitcoin. And you know, when you’re in a situation like this, you have all of this wealth, you don’t necessarily want to sell your Bitcoin, or if you do, you’re going to trigger a significant tax event. You’re going to have to pay a lot of taxes. But still, every now and then, you want to enjoy your wealth, you want to do something, or you want to grow, or you want to invest somewhere else. So the idea of the company was very simple. We wanted to provide people with credit lines using their cryptocurrency, Escolator.
So you don’t sell your cryptocurrency, you don’t lose the upside if you believe that it’s going to keep growing, but you are liquid. You get some cash, you get some fiat that you can use for your other projects. And this being a credit line, essentially, you don’t trigger a tax event. So you don’t have to pay taxes for this. So this is where it all started. And as you rightfully noted, now it has a life of its own. It’s whole selection of wealth management products that come together in our platform, Nexo platform. And it’s all wrapped around an extremely handy mastercard that many of our clients in Europe enjoy and we’re slowly rolling out everywhere else around the world.
Beau Hamilton (04:08.717)
OK, that’s exciting. I’m definitely going to mention the MasterCard tidbit here later on in the episode. But thanks for breaking down what it is Nexo is focusing on. Obviously, the platform has grown over the years, do all platforms that want to stay relevant. But I want to focus a little bit more on the positioning for a second, because I think that digital assets wealth platform. It’s a phrase that can sound a little bit abstract if you’re not already living and breathing this crypto world. For someone who’s never maybe used the platform, touched the platform, what does that actually mean for them day to day? What is a digital assets wealth platform? And then what can they do on next that they couldn’t do with a financial brokerage or maybe a regular bank?
Kiril Tsenkov (05:02.548)
Once again, that’s an excellent question. Well, imagine it like this, you know, in the early days, one way or another, you would acquire some cryptocurrency, right? What you’d need in order to, you know, own cryptocurrencies, would need a wallet, a wallet of some sort. So you find yourself a wallet, you either register somewhere on, you know, on some service provider’s website, or you use a hardware wallet, whatever, you know, you like, you receive your cryptocurrency. That’s it. Now you have digital assets. And the question was, now that you do have these cryptocurrencies or Bitcoin or whatever it is, what can you do with it?
So in the early days, people would acquire Bitcoin and they would either spend it for something or they would hold on to it, essentially hoping that it will grow in value and that they would see, you know, gains, capital gains. They would realize a profit from this investment. What the digital platform, digital wealth management platform does is it allows you to use this crypto. It allows you to use it to operationalize it, so to speak. It’s not only about holding it and keeping it safe and sending it to someone else as, you know, as a payment, whatever. It is about being able to use it in the more traditional sense of money, which is for example, to earn a yield on top of your digital assets or to borrow against it or to trade it against other cryptocurrencies.
So these things, right? They sound like separate services. And, you know, back in the day when the world wasn’t so digitalized, maybe they would have been even separate companies, you know, with separate brick and mortar offices, right? But what the digital wealth platform does is it brings all of this together in one wallet, right? In one software wallet, let’s say, in one online service that allows you the convenience of keeping your crypto safe while at the same time getting a yield on it, while at the same time having the flexibility whenever you need to, to borrow against it, you know, make a different investment, make a payment or just spend it directly using your card.
Beau Hamilton (07:34.475)
Fantastic explanation. I really appreciate that. Yeah, because it’s really about bridging that gap between the traditional like fiat currency, the dollars or whichever currency we’re all used to in our country of origin and bridging that gap between this kind of new digital currency that’s making it in a lot of cases much easier to conduct business with, which we’ll get into.
Yeah, so lot has changed. I just also think of the pizza, like people were buying pizzas for hundreds of bitcoins, you know, back in the day, and it’s just quite wild to think, think about the how much those are worth now. But I want to also talk a little bit about your role specifically, because business development, you know, I think that means a little bit. That means different things at different companies. At a SaaS startup, it might mean, you know, partnerships and integrations. At a bank, it might mean, focusing on on like institutional sales at a global digital assets platform operating at 150 jurisdictions. I imagine it’s a whole separate thing entirely. So can you walk us through a little bit of what you’re doing day to day? Who is Kiril Tsenkov, head of business development in Nexo?
Kiril Tsenkov (09:13.56)
Well, thank you very much for that question. It’s quite humbling really. What does business development mean in Nexo? And you’re quite right in many companies, it means outright sales, right? In other companies, it can mean something else entirely. In Nexo, it’s all about innovation. What really is business development for us? Business development for us is looking for use cases, talking to other businesses, talking to innovators around the world and seeing where this might lead us as the company who, as I said, is trying to bridge traditional finance with the future. You know, there are two types of innovations. There is every now and then you get a brilliant idea and you push it to the market and you need to create demand for it. Other times, the market just pulls you in a direction and people kind of show you what they need.
For me, to be honest with you, this happened about eight years ago. About eight years ago, I had an online business and I worked a lot. I invested a lot in this. And I remember my very first, it was an ecommerce business. My very first customer, halfway around the world, his bank card declined on my website. And the customer support guy, the head of customer support. was one desk away from me. It was a very small startup. And he said, Kiril, this guy says he has Bitcoin and he wants to pay. And I was like, what is, man, that’s too much hustle. What’s no, you know, let’s not do that. And the head of support, said, listen, it’s $800 worth of Bitcoin. It’s our first sale. Take it or leave it, man. That’s it. And it took me literally a few minutes to open a wallet online. I registered on an exchange website, I opened the wallet and I was like, okay, let’s let him send it. Let’s see what we can do with it. And that’s where it all started for me. Very quickly, it solved the huge business problem for me, which was I had a decent product. I wanted to sell it online and there were people all over the world that could be my clients, but I couldn’t get the payments. For some reason, it wasn’t working out very, you know, it wasn’t working out correctly or when it was working with the traditional rails, it was quite expensive.
So I started accepting cryptocurrencies in my startup eight years ago. And then when I started doing that, very quickly, I realized that, you know, part, a portion of my cashflow is in cryptocurrencies now. It was Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin back in the day. And I need to do something with it. What can I do with it, right? I want to pay bills. I didn’t want personally, it was a personal business decision. I didn’t want to carry any exchange rate risk. So was immediately exchanging the currencies I received into stable coins. And then I figured out, you know, part of my treasury, obviously, it’s in stable coins. I need to do something with it. And this is how, by the way, me personally, I discovered Nexo. All those years, a few years ago, it was still a very young company. And I discovered that I can keep my stable coins there and generate new on them until the time comes for me to pay a bill. And next step, the next thing I did is I convinced a few of my software vendors. I was using a few white label platforms from different providers on software. I convinced them to accept payments in stable coins from me.
I didn’t know back in the day, but it kind of, you know, developed into a whole career. And this is pretty much what I do right now. I help many businesses around the world. And I talk to many businesses around the world about solving different day to day problems, operational problems, using stable coins and using crypto backed credits, and essentially everything that, that next we can do in combination with that. And turning literally digital assets into nothing to a hot from a hot potato back in the day, right? You get a payment in Bitcoin. You rush to get rid of the Bitcoin immediately liquidate into fiat. But right now I’m trying to do something different. I’m trying to turn this into convenience. Your company, you started the business, you get some payment from one of your clients in stable coin. You don’t need to liquidate it immediately. You could have a bank card that you could use and just spend it directly if you need to spend it. Or you can keep this part of your treasury in stablecoin and get a yield on it.
The initial users of this type of services were crypto evangelists. They were investors and entrepreneurs that really saw the potential, like early adopters, right? Really saw the potential in this innovation. Things started changing recently a little bit in my personal opinion. Things started changing. We see more and more people and businesses who are adopting crypto and particularly stable coins into their day to day operations for convenience. Not for investment purposes, which I’m not saying it’s not there. are plenty of investors and plenty of investment interest into Bitcoin and all the other tokens out there. But there is also lot of utility. There is also a lot of convenience in using stable coins day to day in your operations. Simply because it saves time. International wire transfers are slow thing. Sometimes they get blocked, you know, many people on your channel who work in or own any type of business online. I’m sure if they’ve experienced this a thousand times, you’re waiting for a big invoice and all of a sudden it’s blocked by some bank on the chain and they demand documents from your client and it turns into a very bad user experience for everyone.
So we see a huge growth in B2B stable coin payments and I think that’s here to stay and I think it’s only going to grow because it’s very quick, almost instant and you avoid all of these operational difficulties or friction points.
Beau Hamilton (16:12.915)
Absolutely. I mean, yeah, you just think of the fundamentals of, like you said, you were you were working at an ecommerce startup. When you when you work online and in the digital economy, it just makes sense that you need some sort of digital currency, whatever it might be, whether it’s a stable coin, you know, backed by the US dollar. You have company or countries focusing on trying to digitize their their currency. I mean, this is, it’s all just about making transactions easier to process. And it’s the fundamental way to think about it is just from the paper money to something online, it’s easier to move and translate accordingly.
But I think the yeah, your story is really fascinating. I appreciate you sharing that with us. You were I want to say you were an early pioneer in terms of your adoption and your company. And I think that’s really interesting to hear how you, you know, you didn’t just turn this client away. You found a solution. You looked into it, found out how you can actually adopt and accept this form of payment, accept the Bitcoin. then, you know, one thing led to another. And now you’ve really found a passion for it. And now you’re here working for Nexo. I think that’s great. That’s really neat. That’s like a great trajectory. And I think we’re still, I mean, in the grand scheme of things still in the early, early days. And it’s exciting to see where this is all going. And so I think you’re at a really good place.
So I, again, appreciate you sharing that with us. And I want to focus in a little bit on the branding standpoint now. I know Nexo launched as a crypto lending company and you’ve got this mastercard backed card. You have institutional custody of OTC services. You have, you know, as with most businesses nowadays, AI powered portfolio tools. But at some point the label crypto company, think kind of stops covering all these different offerings you guys are now capable of. But FinTech has its own sort of baggage at the same time, right?
So you’re, you’re not a bank, at least not in the traditional sense. I’m just curious, like when you’re in a room with maybe a potential broker or a partner, a regulator, a CFO, how do you describe what Nexo is? Do you tailor your wording and your branding and your conversation accordingly?
Kiril Tsenkov (18:43.778)
That’s an amazing question. Beau, I have to be honest with you. That’s an amazing question. And you’re right. A crypto company does create certain associations. Let me put it like this. A fintech creates other considerations. And we do believe that we are a bridge between all of those things.
When I’m in the room with, I wouldn’t say a CFO to be honest with you, because, if I’m in the room with the CFO, they will humble me very quickly. I can tell you, I can tell you that much. But there’s so many entrepreneurs out there. There’s so many people now starting their own online business or software business, you know? I’m sure you get spammed by many, advertising ones about coding AIs nowadays, literally anyone can create an app and if the idea is good enough, I guess anyone can start a business online.
And these people, don’t need to be intimidated by the concept of treasury operations, right? They don’t need to be intimidated by how am I going to handle payments from different countries? And I’m not talking about the tax aspects or the legal aspects, right? Everyone needs to consult a qualified professional with regards to that, right? We’re not here to give that kind of advice. I’m talking about strictly operationally, right? Day to day, how am I going to handle receiving payments from people all over the world? Where I’m going to keep this money? You know, do I want to go through the hassle and the cost of opening bank accounts in different countries? Do I want more control over my assets? These kinds of things. These are the things that really are interesting for entrepreneurs and for people with small and mid-cap companies. It’s really the company that doesn’t want to, or doesn’t have the resources to invest in a huge treasury team. Let me put it like this or huge payments. So as with everything else in the world, services such as what Nexo can do for you are here to help you achieve better efficiency, better automation, and basically the business achieve the business of tomorrow.
So back to your question, when I’m in a room with a person like that, how do I introduce Nexo? Very, very simple, right? If as a company you have or, you know, or as an individual, you have any part of your assets in digital currencies, in cryptocurrencies, Nexo is the platform that can help you earn yield on top of your digital assets. Will pay that on top of your balance daily. You will obtain full flexibility. You can withdraw or send your funds or payments whenever you want. Or if you need to, we can give you a credit line backed by your crypto so you don’t have to sell it. You don’t have to trigger tax events. So very simply put, we’re a company that you can store your digital assets in our wallets, you can get a yield on that, or you can get the credit from us. Which sounds very very familiar to a bank, right?
Beau Hamilton (22:36.619)
Yeah, it does. It shouldn’t be too forward. Yeah. I mean, some of these, the, you’re helping clients set up and, and, reassure them with it does sound very similar to a bank. So there shouldn’t be too much of a learning curve.
Kiril Tsenkov (22:52.16)
You know, it’s simplicity is the ultimate complication, as I believe Leonardo da Vinci said. And at the end of the day, the most brilliant innovations are always simple. So really, it is as simple as that. We can turn the ownership of cryptocurrency into a convenience.
Beau Hamilton (23:19.627)
So I want to get into the B2B side of things here a little bit, because I know that’s clearly becoming a bigger focus and bigger part of what Nexo does. And I think it’s also, of course, particularly relevant here on the SourceForge Podcast. I’m curious about maybe the entry point and what’s actually sort of driving businesses to show up at your front door in the first place. What is maybe the most common frustration you hear from digital business owners when they first come to Nexo?
Kiril Tsenkov (23:51.672)
Well, there is no single answer to that question. Every business, depending on their context, their location specifically, then the local tax and legal situation has its own use cases, and they have their own needs, and they need to solve a different set of business challenges. When we are talking about, for example, ecommerce businesses, the first thing you do is you set up a good, let’s call it a platform. You set up a good ecommerce platform, you figure out a way to get paid. And then you arrive at a situation where you want to settle your funds from your, let’s say, payment service provider or payment gateway that you’re using. You want to settle that funds into your own account.
Back in the day, that was problematic. Many banks frowned upon receiving transfers from companies that were known to exchange cryptocurrencies, and that was creating problems. you’re a business, you don’t want to miss out on clients that are in different locations around the world. You do want to accept their preferred payment method, which is increasingly becoming stable coins. But at the same time, you know that you’re going to have some friction with the bank that you use. Usually that was the usual case why someone would arrive at our doorstep seeking an account, let me put it like this, where you can settle from your payment gateways, payment service providers. Again, whatever you’re using, you want to settle your cryptocurrency into your Nexo account, then you want to maybe take out a maybe make a few internal transfers, you know, to your other employees so that they can use the funds with their card with their crypto backed card. Maybe you want to pay a few invoices. Many, many software vendors nowadays are perfectly happy to accept stable coin payments that as I said, that that market particularly is growing massively.
Beau Hamilton (26:15.403)
Yeah, there was actually a, that kind of gets me into the this recent report, I found that there’s B2B stablecoin payments are at, we’re at $226 billion in 2025. And that works out to actually a 730% jump year over year. So they’re absolutely being more adopted and incorporated into the the digital economy. So that’s, you’re absolutely right there.
And I think what’s what’s interesting, about that profile is who is adopting it, you know, and it’s not just the crypto native firms, it’s the auto part manufacturers, it’s the maybe the textile importers, the renewable energy suppliers. There’s all sorts of businesses using stable coins, because the correspondent banking is perhaps slower and more expensive. Does that does that match what you’re seeing on your end?
Kiril Tsenkov (27:12.782)
Absolutely, absolutely. That’s a fact. And as I said, it’s here to stay, you know, the definition of a disruptive innovation is something that starts out first off, it’s cheaper, significantly cheaper. And second off, it starts off being more inconvenient than the incumbent solution. But then very quickly, it overtakes it.
So you arrive in a situation where this new initially inconvenient, but significantly cheaper solution slowly, slowly improves. And now you have something that is cheaper and significantly better. And this is where we are with the cryptocurrencies, with stable coins. They truly were a disruptive innovation. They truly are disrupting the traditional banking scene in the sense of payment services, of course. But yes, I can agree with you. Absolutely. It is cheaper, it is less problematic and in many, many cases it’s giving a better user experience to your customers.
What we do see as well on our side here in Nexo, we do have this annual report. We published this annual report that is essentially studying how people use crypto backed cards, what they use them for. Who are the people that are using these cards? And what I can tell you is that the data there also is backing my personal opinion. It’s no longer strictly crypto evangelists, Web3 entrepreneurs, and investors. It’s increasingly becoming the average Joe. Let me put it like this. Someone working in an innovative company that wants to spend usually by the way stable coins using a crypto backed card for their day to day needs like getting a coffee.
Beau Hamilton (29:24.459)
Yeah, they’re really it’s starting to get that kind of mass adoption phase, you know, and it’s it, it makes me think like just when there’s there’s all was some new technology that comes along. Obviously, there’s a little bit of a learning curve. People are comfortable doing what they’ve, you know, conducting business the way they have for years and decades. And so there’s a little bit of a upheaval and in terms of the everyday, you know, like you got to you got to spend some time to learn and figure out how to adopt it. But like you were saying, it’s like once you get through that initial, you know, adoption phase, that learning curve, it’s gonna end up saving you, saving you money, it’s gonna end up actually working better for you in the long run, it sounds like.
Kiril Tsenkov (30:08.502)
Absolutely, absolutely. And it’s excellent that you mentioned the learning curve, by the way. What I can tell you is that one of the big challenges, one of the big tasks that we have in front of us is to minimize that learning curve. We need to make these services easy to understand and easy to use, and of course, keep them as safe as possible, which is something we’ve always taken great pride in as a company.
So one of the things that makes people come to me, to go back to your previous question and to our company, is the fact that we’ve reduced this process to a simple few-click operation. Getting a crypto-backed loan could be an entirely automated few-click process. As long as you open an account, as long as you provide the crypto collateral, it could be as simple as that and it could be extremely fast.
Beau Hamilton (31:18.057)
Yeah. Do you have any maybe real world, B2B specific use cases or, or examples you can think of maybe something you’ve seen clients, do at Nexo or, a hypothetical that kind of captures how it actually works?
Kiril Tsenkov (31:34.444)
Imagine the following, of course, strictly hypothetical scenario. You’re running an online business. Part of your clients, for one reason or another, are transacting with you in cryptocurrency. They’re sending cryptocurrency payments to you. These payments arrive, you know, you have the receivable side, you want to get the money you wrote as a business as soon as possible. And you have the payable side, essentially, you need to pay your dues. You want to do that as late as possible. That’s a very, simple principle in treasury operations. You want to funds inside your company as long as possible so that you can get some yield on that. But imagine on top of this, right, that you’re in a situation where you have some seasonality, let’s say a huge holiday is approaching and you know for a fact that that’s a very strong period for your company and you have this cryptocurrency, this digital currency balance on your books. It’s sitting there. It’s going to be there for a few months. What we could do in a Nexo account is we can give you a credit backed by your crypto balance so that you can actually, let’s say, double or triple your marketing acquisition budget during, let’s say, Christmas, which might be a very strong period for you.
Beau Hamilton (33:28.925)
Is there an industry that you were surprised to see was, maybe, maybe listeners wouldn’t expect to have come to you to work with you and adopt some of your staple coin, crypto services or, is there any like surprise? I know you can’t name a specific client, but is there a surprise industry you can think of that, you know, adopted this technology?
Kiril Tsenkov (33:56.846)
To be honest with you, we’ve pretty much seen everything by now. We were originally very, very surprised by real estate. A few years ago, not a lot of people would have imagined it, but there was a moment in time where people showed up and they wanted credit line against their significant Bitcoin holdings so that they can buy real estate.
So this, it was earlier, obviously in the day, I was back in my consulting days, but I was keeping very close. I was in touch with the founders of Nexo, we were discussing things regularly. And it attracted attention when we got around it. People are actually buying real estate without selling their Bitcoin. Before that point in time, people were buying real estate with Bitcoin. Of course, that wouldn’t surprise anyone. Many people became very, very rich when they invested in Bitcoin earlier on. But when people started using it to essentially get a crypto-backed mortgage, that was very interesting for us and it was very inspiring as well.
Beau Hamilton (35:25.417)
Yeah, that’s thanks for sharing that. That’s I can imagine. I mean, crypto or the real estate industry is is a huge market. And it just makes perfect sense dealing with, you know, buying real estate. But also, I think of two when you’re dealing with with landlords and tenants and the processing of transactions there also seems like a natural use case for adopting a stable coin, let’s say, to facilitate those transactions.
I know that, so I’d say the earlier days for Nexo, it’s my understanding that the company’s built a real reputation in the high net worth and the ultra high net worth space. But you’re also clearly going after corporate clients that are at a much earlier stage. Maybe it’s a SaaS company, a digital agency, a founder who’s got some crypto on the balance sheet, it wants to do something smarter with it. How does the product and the experience translate for those specific clients? And are these the same tools or are they sort of a different offering for them?
Kiril Tsenkov (36:29.822)
Excellent question. Thank you very much for that. No, it’s not a different offering. We’re committed to providing the same level of service and the same level of excellence, of course, to everyone of our clients. Why founders? Why entrepreneurs? Why managers in growing companies? Because these are the innovators. These are the people that are going to disrupt the market tomorrow and we really believe in them. What we are doing essentially is providing a credit against an asset, against an asset that’s used as collateral. That’s not a very new concept, to be honest with you. We were one of the innovators in the context of doing it against cryptocurrency collateral, but it pre-existed in the traditional finance world. And the people that made this concept famous were specifically founders of big companies. If you go online and you Google it, you’re going to find a very, very interesting, many, many actually very interesting stories about founders of huge companies who never sold the shares that they were awarded, you know, via stock options or other means for their performance. They never sold them. They never paid huge taxes in some cases. But what they did instead is they used them as collateral and they got credit, sometimes billions of dollars worth of credit. And they spent many, many years using that credit line in their day to day life and business and other new investments instead of selling their actual wealth. So these founders, these innovators, they’re the people who actually made this use case interesting.
Beau Hamilton (38:44.491)
Yeah, I mean, these these are the people that are these are changemakers. These are these have these guys have real ripple effects with the policies they implement and technology they adopt. So that makes total sense. One interesting idea that you shared with us and you mentioned it earlier on as well. But it’s just the idea of using crypto as collateral for a loan instead of selling it. You know, I think it’s a concept that a lot of people have maybe perhaps heard about, but haven’t really internalized, especially on the business side. So I’m curious, maybe you could walk us through the case for it, especially from the perspective of a business owner making a capital allocation decision.
Kiril Tsenkov (39:34.766)
Absolutely, it would be my pleasure. Of course, let’s clearly specify that we’re not advising anyone here. This is not tax advice. It’s not investment advice. Anyone listening to this should really consult a qualified professional in their specific location, depending where they are in the world. let’s say this is mostly opinion.
You mentioned CFOs a little bit early. Corporate finance, right? It’s fascinating subject, fascinating really. It is in its core, corporate finance is about achieving the optimal capital structure for your business. Treasury operations, by the way, is part of that discipline. And it’s all about having flexibility, having liquidity when you need it and where you need it. And, you know, obviously managing your funds and your payments.
One of the core principles of corporate finance is this optimal capital structure. And what it says is that as a business, you might be profitable and hopefully, obviously, and as such, you will need to pay taxes. If your business loans part of the capital it uses, the interest payments are deductibles. So basically you are reducing your tax expense. This is a concept that’s widely known as a tax shield. So essentially borrowing funds creates a tax shield for your company. It reduces part of the taxes that you’re going to pay.
So every company essentially has an optimal point between equity and borrowed funds, equity and credit. An optimal point where the cost of equity equals essentially the cost of credit. This allows you as a business to grow again, optimally. The bottom line here is that if your business is successful, you will generate an operating profit, you end up paying taxes. Whether you pay taxes or interest, arguably it’s the same thing. You still end up paying, right? You end up suffering an expense. In one case, in the borrower case, you will suffer the same expense, but you will have more capital to operate with. Now, this is a terrible oversimplification, I’m sure. As I said, a CFO sitting in this room will probably humble me immediately. But I’m pretty confident that as far as an oversimplification goes, it’s pretty accurate.
Beau Hamilton (42:40.339)
Yeah, no, I think oversimplification is great, especially when you’re speaking to someone like myself who, you know, has a surface level understanding, I would say, of this industry. So I appreciate the simplicity. And, you know, the CFOs, they live and breathe this stuff. So of course, they’re going to humble you a little bit.
But, you know, okay, speaking of CFOs, though, that’s one thing, you know, I didn’t ask you specifically, it was just, you know, when you sit down and talk with a CFO, it start mapping out, you know, what a modern treasury setup could look like with digital assets in the mix. You know, does that conversation differ from some of the other conversations you have with other maybe SaaS founders, maybe a more, kind of a more broader audience, let’s say?
Kiril Tsenkov (43:32.558)
No, not particularly, to be honest with you. Software-as-a-Service company founder is by necessity a walking CFO, CEO, COO, and head of product. So usually this type of person would have even more questions for me. CFOs, they know exactly what they want. They know exactly what they’re trying to achieve. So, you know, we use less time in exploration, I can say. But at the end of the day, it comes again, it comes down to the same concept. It is, I have some crypto running through my company, what can I do with it? Or I’m already doing something with it, can I do it in a better way? Can I simplify it? Can I make it more secure? Can I make it cheaper?
Beau Hamilton (44:29.067)
So it’s really focused in on the specific as opposed to the kind of more broad-based, let’s say generic questions that you might receive?
Kiril Tsenkov (44:38.348)
Yeah, well, to be honest with you, yes, it is related, really related to the specific use case of each company and each individual. One huge benefit that I have on my side is the amazing private client services, the private client desk at Nexo, which is a team of incredible professionals who can help and advise our private clients.
So when it comes down to the learning curve, you know, it’s always better to have someone to talk to that can actually help you set up. That’s one of the huge benefits, right? We live in the world of AI, we live in the world of automation. But one thing I can tell you is when we’re talking about high network services, high network individuals, the light white glove approach, right? The real professional that you can speed dial on your phone, that’s still very highly valued.
Beau Hamilton (45:45.171)
Absolutely. And having those person to person, you know, in some cases face to face, conversations are really valuable, especially when you’re dealing with, like you’re saying, the high net worth individuals, the, you know, so much currency and digital tools and software. A lot of times, I mean, you’re going to have questions, going to concerns, but having a person to really talk to and weed out the details and the concerns is very valuable.
I want to throw this recent survey I found at you. So Deloitte actually put out a survey from mid 2025 that I thought was pretty, it was pretty jarring. They pulled 200 North American CFOs at companies with at least a billion in revenue. And the overall number planning to use digital currency for treasury within two years was about 23%. But for companies with $10 billion or more in revenue, that number jumped up to nearly 40%.
But what really stood out to me was that only 1% of the respondents in that survey said they had no long-term vision for a stablecoin at all. So there’s very little outright no, it’s mostly when and how. From where you said, does that sort of match the conversation you’re having with CFOs?
Kiril Tsenkov (47:05.176)
Absolutely, absolutely. As I said, when it comes to innovation, you are either push it to the market if you’re the one who came up with it, or the market pulls you in that direction. If you’re smart, you listen. A company with billions of dollars of revenue, I promise you Beau, the CFO is a very smart person and very data driven, and they appreciate already the benefits of using stablecoins as part of their treasure operations.
Beau Hamilton (47:33.867)
Now, I wanna pivot and get back to the crypto backed lending market some more because I think there’s also an interesting backstory here. The crypto lending market, as many of us are aware, got pretty badly burned in 2022 and 2023. Several firms went under Celsius block fee, Genesis. That whole sector pretty much, it contracted pretty hard.
But compared to today, things are turning around. A report from a company called Galaxy Research, they found that the market has actually rebounded 157% from its quarter three, 2023 low. And it’s actually reaching something like $36 billion. It actually reached $36 billion by the year 2024. So those numbers have really turned around. They’ve continued to climb ever since. And I think the recovery is definitely very much underway.
But again, things are different now things are still in flux, I would say. There’s more concentration, there’s fewer players, and presumably, I would say a more cautious borrower base. Who are you actually seeing on the borrowing side at Nexo today? What are they? What are they using it for?
Kiril Tsenkov (48:49.614)
The market did go through a bit of a Wild West phase and many people lost a lot of money. Many companies went out of business. And now what you see on the market is that both the users and the service providers are more cautious. They’re being more careful and you have significantly more regulation, of course, than back in the day.
What I’m seeing on the borrower side is we’re seeing adoption is growing. This is what I can tell you for sure. It’s many, many more people now own cryptocurrency than what the numbers were back in the day. The total number of cryptocurrency adopters globally is rising every year, more and more. I don’t have the exact numbers in front of me, but we can Google them and we’ll be amazed. I can promise you that much. And these people are finding use cases for their crypto, especially when it’s a lot of it, especially when you’ve invested early on and when you have significant digital asset holding, then the idea of not wanting to trigger tax events, the idea of not wanting to sell your wealth, but wanting the liquidity to buy something, to invest in a real estate, to buy an airplane, if you will, right? The idea is there and you want to do it. And that’s when the crypto backed credit starts to appeal to you.
There are other interesting use cases as well. For example, especially with the younger generation, many, many, many people have part of their savings in cryptocurrency for one reason or another. For example, maybe they live in a country where there is an inflation problem. So they want to keep their money in a stable coin that’s, let’s say, US dollar backed or something else because they don’t want to risk whatever their income is being paid into, whatever fiat currency they’re getting. They don’t want to risk the devaluation of their savings. Maybe it is because they just like cryptocurrency and they get or they work remotely, let’s say, and they get paid with cryptocurrency stable coin transfers. This is, by the way, this is something we’re seeing more and more. So many software companies specifically hire people remotely in different regions around the world and it’s actually significantly easier just to pay them in stablecoin many people are opting for them.
And One way or another you end up with part of your savings being in cryptocurrencies and let’s say you want to buy something you want to buy an apartment you want to buy a car. It doesn’t matter for one reason or another it becomes easier for you just to get a loan backed by your cryptocurrencies. There are locations around the world where, you know, let’s say that the investor, the proprietor would not be interested in paying in, in selling you real estate against a crypto payment. So, you know, this, this can solve that problem for you without triggering a tax event. So you won’t sell your Bitcoin, let’s say. You won’t have to pay taxes. And then you go and you buy the apartment you liked, you know, in a holiday destination.
Instead, you get a loan, you skip the paying the taxes, right? And you will buy that holiday property. So any things you can do, again, we’re not giving advice here, but imagine it like this. You get a crypto bank loan, you buy a holiday property, few months down the line. Maybe you want to get a second mortgage on it from a traditional banking institution and just liquidate, just terminate your crypto backed loan. Maybe you wanna go back and forth, you know, it’s all about the flexibility that this service can give you the extra flexibility that wasn’t there a few years ago.
Beau Hamilton (53:22.877)
Absolutely. Yeah, there’s so many different use cases like you mentioned. Yeah. And each and the what the example there that you offered is a very sort of practical use case. And it just, it’s fascinating to see how it’s it’s an everyday conversation to the crypto has changed. And it’s become more widely discussed.
But there’s, like you’re saying, there’s some really, useful practical cases, a lot of which are in the B2B space, the real estate market is really exciting. You know, I think it’d be a good place to end on is that lending section and that use case, because I think it, I’ll be honest, it sounds a little bit exotic when you first hear it, but it’s really real. I heard that there’s this story about a guy who financed a converted church in Amsterdam using crypto as collateral rather than selling his holdings. And I understand that Nexo was actually involved and, you know, lot of the real estate deals, including some pretty, pretty large ones. Is that a niche thing that, that Amsterdam example, like, is that a curiosity for a lot of these crypto billionaires out there or is, or is crypto backed real estate financing becoming a, genuine option for people?
Kiril Tsenkov (55:36.607)
Well, it turned a lot of heads when it happened back in the day, but to be honest with you as of right now, it’s more of a typical use case. It’s not that uncommon anymore.
Beau Hamilton (55:52.969)
Is there a way listeners can get in contact with you or a place to go to learn more about Nexo? So it’s some of the specifics we talked about?
Kiril Tsenkov (56:27.096)
Well, when it comes down to Nexo, it’s nexo.com. That’s the best source of information about the amazing world of the digital wealth platform. If anyone there out there, if anyone has any interesting ideas, especially about crypto backed loans or using stable coins in your day-to-day operations. I’m on LinkedIn. I would love to connect. I’m not a salesperson, so I’m not here to sell anything, but if you’re one of those innovators we just spoke about, I would love to talk to you.
Beau Hamilton (56:36.565)
Kiril, I think this has been a really great conversation, and I just really appreciate all the time you’ve taken to break all these concepts down and what it is Nexo is working to do for clients, especially with what they’re what they’re doing in the B2B space. I think it’s really useful to hear about it, especially from someone actually on the inside like yourself.
Kiril Tsenkov (56:55.406)
Thank you very much, Beau. It’s been a pleasure. I’m a big fan of your channel. And, to be honest with you, I can’t believe I’m actually on it. So I hope this session would be interesting.
Beau Hamilton (57:39.571)
Yeah, I appreciate all the kind words and we’d love to connect with you. Kiril Tsenkov, thank you so much again for everything you shared with us and thanks for being on the show.
Kiril Tsenkov (57:47.128)
Thank you, Beau. Thanks. Have a good one.
Beau Hamilton (57:49.407)
Thank you all for listening to the SourceForge Podcast. I am your host, Beau Hamilton. Make sure to subscribe to stay up to date with all of our upcoming B2B software related podcasts. I will talk to you the next one.