Coincheck Group N.V. Ordinary Shares The KeyBanc Technology Leadership Forum 2026

Absolutely. Pascal St-Jean, I've been the CEO since April, and I came in through the group through the 3iQ acquisition. The Coincheck Group platform really is a continuation of the mission that we've been set as a team for almost a decade now. The two growth engines that we have right now, which is essentially execution or exchange and asset management, those two companies or those groups have been in the space for almost a decade. 3iQ since 2014 and Coincheck since 2017 in Japan. The mission was always to bring access to crypto to individuals. Now you got to think, a decade ago, no regulation, uncertainty of the asset class. Retail was the natural user, and it was very difficult for retail to gain access to crypto. How do you simplify that?

You create an exchange, you create that's regulated, you create ETFs, et cetera. Now, like any disruptive tech, as you move up the bell curve, where are we today? Clear regulation. I know clarity hasn't passed yet, but globally, regulation's as clear as it's ever been. It's creating tailwinds for a lot of companies. Institutional adoption is here. Everyone's testing out crypto rails. What are we going to do with this? What does that mean? That means that continuing the mission of giving access means we need to start shifting our approach. That approach has started several years ago, which is to become an institutional partner of choice. That means mostly infrastructure. Where are all the users?

The users are with the banks, with the asset managers, with crypto exchanges, with wealth managers, as a Coincheck Group, we provide multiple services, infrastructure, execution, and asset management to those institutional partners to reach as many people as possible to continue our mission.

Yeah characteristically. You got to think right now, this industry itself is having sort of a pivotal moment.

I was talking with someone before. You see Robinhood get into crypto, Coinbase getting into equities. The reality is the concept of BlendFi is happening, which is where we thought the space would always be. The reality, and I have been in disruptive tech my whole career, this idea that crypto was going to replace everything and be its own thing, it is not the case. If success was going to happen, which we are seeing, it is natural that this integration was going to take place. Everyone in the industry that has been here since the beginning are trying to reinvent themselves. You got to think of Coincheck Group as that. To your point, Alex Markgraf, we do have what we call our legacy businesses that are quite well-positioned.

3iQ Corp. is the leading crypto asset manager in Canada by far. In Japan, we are continuously ranked top 3 from an exchange perspective. In our native organic businesses, we are in a position of strength and power in our key regions, and that has created sustainable cash flows to help continue to expand the business. In terms of where we are going on the institutional side, we have taken that pivot for quite some time. We are now in 8 different jurisdictions, license-wise, capability-wise. Who are those customers? Those customers are institutions looking to gain exposure or to give exposure to their customers. Think of banks looking to get into crypto products and need a partner, whether that is infrastructure or asset management capabilities. Think of sovereign funds saying, "We want to allocate beyond Bitcoin. We want active strategies. Who has that pedigree to be able to manage that?" A telco in Japan saying, "We want to create a whole financial services arm.

We have 70 million users. We want to leapfrog legacy tech and build this whole new business on chain. Who do we pick to help power all this?" Coincheck Group, right? The customers have shifted, but the end user sometimes is still retail, but we are just going through institutional channels.

Japan regulated crypto relatively early after Mt. Gox and those kind of things. They had a Stable Coin Act, and then they also had some regulation to say, "Well, how should capital requirements be treated for a crypto exchange and AML KYC?" Which enabled the industry to grow to where it is today. From the next level in terms of expansion, in terms of who can access it, wasn't an enabled infrastructure, so institutional could not access it. It was really just retail. Retail could access it through exchanges, but it was treated as income and not capital gains. There was a lot of tailwinds that became headwinds. A lot of people were excited about Japan, and for years they were saying, "We want to get in." Coinbase came in and left.