Dear customers, investors and stakeholders of SMART VALOR,
SMART VALOR is one of the
first regulated European digital asset exchanges. We provide private investors with a wide range of products
such as brokerage, trading, custody and staking. On the B2B side we offer banks and FinTechs a white label
solution, enabling them to offer cryptocurrency and digital assets to their clients.
Retail business
On the retail side, the third quarter of this year was a good quarter for SMART VALOR. Although the cryptocurrency markets experienced a bit of the summer slowdown, the overall sentiment was good. After coming down from April’s all time high of 63k, the Bitcoin price started to recover in July, settling back on around 50k. The volatility went down during the summer months.
This resulted in a drop of trading volumes on global exchanges. In our European market, there was also a significant reduction of volumes. The trading volumes of the EUR-BTC pair went down from 36 billion US dollars in May, down to 11 billion in July, recovering just a little bit in August and September.
Despite this slump, the trading volumes on SMART VALOR doubled in comparison to the previous quarter, defying the gravity of the market. This was due to several factors: Firstly, the number of users grew by 100% compared to the prior-year quarter. Secondly, the marketing efforts towards user activation have paid off. And lastly the extension of tradable assets also played its role. We listed Cardano (ADA), which delivered an impressive performance of 1,200% this year
B2B business
On the B2B business side, we continued integration work with several financial institutions and worked on further build-up of the pipeline for next year. We continue to experience increased demand from the side of financial institutions interested in offering digital assets to their customers. We expect this trend to strengthen going into 2022, although one can say, that currently Europe is lagging behind on adoption of digital assets among financial institutions. One recent example is the announcement of US based Interactive Brokers to offer their asset managers access to trading and custody of digital assets. Interactive Brokers is one of the largest electronic trading platforms in the US. So, such moves are important to create a sense of urgency on the top levels of European financial institutions as well.
Corporate development highlights
On the corporate development side we successfully closed the first part of the funding round and continued to build out our board and management team.
The board was strengthened by addition of two advisors to the board. Manuel Ebner at Bank of America is a Country Head in Switzerland and has been at Merril Lynch Bank (Suisse) for the past ten years. Previously he was CEO of BZ Bank. Manuel brings to the SMART VALOR board a valuable experience of a top executive of a truly global bank.
Timo Sioninen, who also joined as advisor to the board, is an award-winning entrepreneur who made his name as a co-founder of the leading gaming company Small Giant Games, where he was acquired by Zinga for around one billion US dollars. Timo brings to SMART VALOR his huge experience as a successful entrepreneur and founder.
On the executive management side, in Germany we hired Bruno Monteiro, Engineering team as Vice President. Bruno previously led software departments of three German startups and scaleups through their growth.
We are also continuing to build our legal team. Here, we recently hired a new general counsel Adrian Faulkner. Adrian not only has 15 years’ experience as an in-house lawyer working for global brands such as BBC but was also a founder of two companies and has worked on crypto projects.
Currently we are further expanding our team, looking for a range of positions in marketing, business development and of cause also on the tech side.
Branding
On the branding side, last quarter we made a mark by presenting SMART VALOR on the Swiss television during the CEO Talk series with Martin Spieler produced by Telezuri and streamed to millions of TV fans in Switzerland.
