Proactive - Interviews for investors

Valereum CEO on Apex admission, surge in tokenisation and upcoming milestones

Valereum PLC (AQSE:VLRM, OTC:VBLXF) CEO Nick Cowan takes Proactive's Stephen Gunnion through recent advances at the company, including its admission to the Apex segment of the AQSE Growth Market and the tokenisation breakthroughs driving its success. Cowan highlighted Valereum's focus on tokenisation technologies and its role as a market operator, managing tokenised marketplaces. Cowan described 2024 as a transformative year for the company, citing profitability milestones and its strategic minority stake in Bitcoin miner Vinanz Limited as key growth drivers. He also detailed the company's global expansion, including obtaining a digital asset service provider (DASP) license in El Salvador. This development positions Valereum to manage tokenised marketplaces and operate as a broker and custodian. Additionally, Cowan introduced the V-Wallet, which is in soft launch, with a hard launch anticipated by year-end. The CEO shared excitement about the demo release of the Bridge, a digital financial infrastructure for instant settlement. These innovations aim to solidify Valereum's position in tokenisation and real-world asset marketplaces. Stay updated with more insights like this by visiting Proactive's YouTube channel. Don’t forget to like the video, subscribe, and turn on notifications for the latest updates. #ValereumPLC #Tokenization #ApexSegment #DigitalAssets #BitcoinMining #TokenizedMarkets #VWallettLaunch #RealWorldAssets #BlockchainTechnology #ProactiveInvestors #invest #investing #investment #investor #stockmarket #stocks #stock #stockmarketnews

Duration:: 7m
Broadcast on:: 28 Nov 2024
Audio Format:: other

Hello, you're watching Pro Act, and I'm joined by Valyrian CEO, Nick Cohen. Nick, very good to meet you. Congratulations on your admissions and APEC segments of the Agus Exchange. Before we get into the benefits of that, for viewers not familiar with the company, tell us a little bit about Valyrian. Yeah, Valyrian PLC is a tokenization company. That's what we're focused on, and we focus on really two core areas, tokenization technologies, we're a technology solutions company, and we're also a market operator. We'll talk about it a little bit later, which is we operate tokenized marketplaces. And look, the view of Valyrian that this is a... We've been doing this now for about five years, in terms of when we really started to look at tokenization. And you've seen probably in 2024 is the breakthrough year where there seems to be now some serious mainstream adoption and awareness that's coming through. So I think we're in a good place. And also in a very good place with Agus as well. So tell us, take us through some of the benefits of moving up to the apex segments of the markets. Yeah, I think, I mean, look, obviously Agus has just had a big piece of news anyway, but prior to that, we were on the access market, and the access market is the lowest market for sort of start-up-type companies. And we had reached the threshold of 10 million market cap, which you need to be on for about three months in order to go up to apex. And apex just provides that greater degree of often comfort and confidence for investors because of the additional requirements and the size of the company. And so we applied to go up to apex a few months ago, and we were accepted a couple of weeks ago, which is fantastic. So we're now on that next market up. Nick, you talked about 2024 being a breakthrough year for the company. You were out with your half-year results a couple of months ago. And it really was a turning point in terms of profitability, in terms of assets, and in terms of like the cash that you generated and the cash that you ended the period with. Take us through some of the drivers of that growth. Yeah, I think, look, the first thing to actually make absolutely clear is a lot of the value creation was through a minority show, and we have, and funny enough, another aqueous company called Vinance. We hold a minority stake around 27 million shares. They are a Bitcoin miner. So of course, that company has been benefiting from the recent developments in Bitcoin. So a lot of our increase in terms of balance sheet value came from holding those, holding that shared position. But otherwise, look, Valerian was all about trying to integrate the GSX group. We laid out in February 24, our vision and our milestones that we're going to try to achieve, not just in 24, but also into 25 and 26. And look, I'm pleased to report that those milestones are completely on schedule. You know, some of them have some unknowns around it, particularly when you're applying for licenses from regulators and stuff like that. But we've hit the milestones, and so far, you know, we are on completely the right track. So I think we're set, you know, for a really exciting 25 and 26. Nick, where are you seeing, I mean, you mentioned you're also a market operator, where you see opportunities in the markets at the moment? Well, we think obviously tokenization and more specifically real-world assets. We've seen real-world assets really exploding in terms of awareness. And it was probably started in many ways by, you know, the awareness increasing, Boston Consulting came out with this fantastic report, I think about 18 months ago, where they're talking about sort of up to $68 trillion opportunity in tokenization by 2030, 10% of global GDP. You've had BlackRock, Larry Fink talking about tokenization being the game changer. And I think this overall awareness, I think, is really helping us. But in terms of the specific opportunities and the specific developments, absolutely, we're seeing that this real-world asset, evolution, and growth path to tokenizing really anything that can be valued, stored, of legal provenance, you can actually tokenize anything from real estate to royalties. So, and this is now really, we just saw a report yesterday of a new uplift in terms of assets being tokenized in terms of real-world assets. You're going to see explosive growth in all of you in the next five years. I mean, following the end of your reporting period, you've also been awarded a digital asset service provider license. That's in El Salvador. And more recently, you also launched VLR Capital Management. Tell us a little bit about that, and the prospects for that. Yeah, we had started really looking for a jurisdiction that shared our, you know, in many ways, shared our ethos and our culture and enthusiasm. And we really, really found in El Salvador a just fantastic setup there. Not only are they going through a lot of changes at a macro level within the country, and BTC is legal tender there, but they've also started a new regulator called CNAAD, and the regulator, what tends to happen is regulators are often, as you can imagine, run by regulators. What they did with CNAAD, set up by the government, was they have a regulator that's actually, they brought in a technologist to run the regulator. So you have a technologist who really, really understands the underlying core infrastructure technology, and then also they have a really broad team of top regulators. So we found there, when we talked about our vision in terms of what Valerian PLC is all about, we found a very, very, very supportive regulator, a great reception, equally as tough as every other regulator. But you can actually have a really constructive conversation about our goals and objectives that they can come on the journey with us. And we've been genuinely just a in press, but the privilege to receive our license, I think is in September, and that allows us to operate a tokenized marketplace, but also operate as a broker, operate as a custodian, manage fiat on and off rails. So we've got a whole broad spectrum of Canvas of licenses there, which really allows us to scale up next year. In terms of Valerian capital, we've got three verticals, Valerian technology, Valerian markets, and Valerian capital. Valerian capital is the asset management business, and I look after that as well as being the group CEO. And that is an asset management business, where we manage third-party capital to basically invest in everything, but really with a core focus in terms of tokenization opportunities as we see them over the next few years. Any upcoming milestones, Nick, that's an investor should be looking out for? Well, we've got milestone one is the release of the V wallet, the Valerian wallet. We're in what's called soft launch at the moment, where we have a small group of people testing, but it gets expanded during December. And then we hope to hard launch the V wallet before the end of this year. The second milestone is we are called tokenization infrastructure, which is what Valerian is all about, which is T-instant settlement. We call it the bridge, it's digital financial markets infrastructure. We've been working on that for five years, and we release the demo version finally during December. So we'll be able to actually start to really showcase the world about what we've been working on behind the scenes all this time, which we're really excited about, and then also for opening the real-world asset marketplace. So the pipeline is building, we want to get the marketplace in our Salvador open to get product starting to push through the marketplace there. So there's a lot of stuff that we're looking to get done, and that's just between now and the end of this year, before we go into 25. I hope you'll keep us posted on any progress. Thank you very much for the introduction today. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for having me. That's Valerian. See you next time.