Interview with MakeBanc Founder Chris Mihos: Building Institutional Trust and Security to Bring Their Liquidity into Crypto

MakeBanc founder Chris Mihos shares insights from his fifth startup venture in this interview. (Previously: Is OpenAI devouring the application layer? a16z: Opportunities lie beyond the "yellow brick road"—entrepreneurs still have opportunities ahead) (Background: Foresight Ventures: What is a decentralized AI Marketplace?) This article is a press release written and provided by MakeBanc, and does not represent the views of BlockTempo. Alex: First, please briefly introduce yourself. Chris: My background is quite mixed. Born in Melbourne, grew up in Hong Kong, then back to Australia, then working between Europe and Asia—mining, energy, fashion, retail, and now crypto. This is my fifth time starting a company—four learning opportunities, one exit, that's how I'd describe it. Being a founder is an endurance sport, that much I'm sure of. Alex: You've done many startups, and now MakeBanc is your latest. When you saw "institutions" and "crypto" converging and never separating again, what made you decide to enter this market? Chris: The most important thing I've learned on the startup path is: what you're solving must be a "pain point"—and a truly big pain, not just a "problem." This is the essential difference between a painkiller solution vs. a vitamin solution. Institutions now truly understand the power of this technology. I think we need to break "crypto" apart—many people package it as one thing, but it's actually four things: - Commodity: like Bitcoin as a store of value, similar to gold - Equity: like Ethereum, Hyperliquid, Aave, with clear operations and profit potential - Currency: stablecoins and other fiat equivalents - Tech: underlying infrastructure Institutions are now starting to use crypto tech and stablecoins to trade equivalents of equities and commodities—that's the real unlock point, with enormous potential. Alex: So why is this unlock only starting now? Chris: Historically, there have been two big gates blocking it. The first is the technology gate. Crypto is too complex: you have to be your own security officer, understand global rails, become familiar with staking, bridging, "Not your keys, not your assets"—a learning curve both individual users and institutions have to cross. The second is the TradFi gate. After entering, the question isn't "how to make money," it's "how not to lose money." The more mature and institutional, the more the focus shifts from making to not losing. Early crypto was "to the moon" with anything you touched—pure growth marketing; the meme coin era was the same. But now we're entering the maturity stage. What MakeBanc aims to do is dismantle the structural friction behind these two gates and abstract away the complexity—allowing users (whether institutional or retail) to do three things: make money, protect it, and use it. Alex: What's the core of MakeBanc? Chris: Our hypothesis is: the ones who can best make money for capital are professional asset managers—those with hedge fund experience, running arbitrage strategies, doing directional (long/short) plays, or combining multiple strategies very delicately. These people have accumulated decades of expertise. It's: when it comes to making money, let the experts do what experts do. But the problem is, structurally, safely accessing them is difficult. Historically, the solution was through opening SMAs (separately managed accounts) at major exchanges like Binance, because that's where the liquidity is. But SMAs have counterparty risk—exchanges can blow up. The thing crypto-native users have been best trained on is exactly this: who holds my assets? How do I ensure ownership? How do I ensure I won't get hacked or exploited in various ways? Our solution: maintain non-custodial ownership of assets through strong partners, then hand execution to professional asset managers, while providing 100% asset insurance covering technical risk. We also abstract away the complexity of on-ramp / off-ramp—if you want to use crypto, use crypto; if you want to use fiat, use fiat, your choice; set up a fiat virtual account, and the experience will be like Revolut, Wise, or any neobank. The name MakeBanc itself, "make bank" is slang, meaning make money. We're helping people make bank. Alex: In crypto or trading, trust is the most important thing. You're still a startup, so how do you get institutions to trust you? Chris: This is the problem we're obsessed with. We have a mantra: Only the paranoid survive. After being in crypto for a while, this is how you survive. We break trust into three layers: Layer one: credibility of returns. We partner with players who have genuine track records. There's too much growth marketing in crypto saying "look how much we can make in backtests"—but backtesting is fiction, we want facts. We can give you verified performance, and these trading partners aren't newcomers—you're not trusting us, you're trusting experts who've gone through truly high-volatility cycles with verifiable performance. Numbers don't lie. Layer two: credibility of custody. Partnering with institutional-grade custodians like Ceffu, with assets in cold storage, then smartly connecting to Binance for execution. This is structural protection. Layer three: the "boringness" of the product is a feature, not a bug. We deliberately do "boring" things—no looping, no crazy multiples of leverage. We have an on-chain accounting system, but trading happens off-chain. Sounds boring, but that's the feature. Most importantly, we have insurance. In crypto, trust is often "forced," and that's what makes people nervous—often you don't even know who's behind the platform. We're human-first from the website on, these people are the ones behind the platform. Alex: Would you see MakeBanc as a marketplace for institutions? Even though you don't take their money. Chris: Yes. It's a kind of "reverse observation." During the process of building MakeBanc, one thing was particularly interesting: at first we thought what we needed to solve was the access barrier capital providers face when approaching asset management institutions. However, after we completed the MVP development, we realized—asset management institutions themselves actually have a huge infrastructure gap; now, asset managers are pushing us to launch quickly because they want to onboard their clients onto our platform. There's a trend in the market moving from SMAs toward setting up fund structures, mainly because the infrastructure friction of non-custodial trading setup is too great. But this is essentially handing custody to a fund manager you don't know. The ideal scenario is—you don't need to "trust" anyone at all, because they have no permissions that can expose you. You have full control, full transparency. That's how to truly build trust, not the crypto-textbook "trust me bro." Alex: From my perspective, institutions now face four paths: ETF (no yield), DeFi (high risk), Hedge Fund (custody / lockup / fee problems), traditional SMA. Which do you prioritize? Or all four together? Chris: Our infrastructure is designed to serve all four routes simultaneously, but currently the most painful pain point is the emotional cost of passive buy-and-hold. Crypto is too volatile, so the emotional swings are massive—that's the biggest pain point. But this is also why TradFi experts love crypto—they know how to leverage volatility. We're essentially somewhat like an actively managed ETF. For institutions or anyone with wealth, what they need to manage at the core is "risk exposure" and keeping the maximum drawdown from peak to trough very tight. Actively managed strategies can very effectively hedge positions. BTC drops 40% and everyone loses conviction. It's actually never been a binary choice of "should I go all-in on crypto"—people want exposure without feeling exposed. After talking with asset managers, the most persuasive approach is actively managed strategies + multiple vaults for diversification—rather than the old "pick one strategy, all eggs in one basket" model. Our infrastructure lets you buy into a basket of different vaults, each connected to a specific asset manager strategy. Alex: BlackRock has BUIDL itself, the world's largest tokenized treasury fund, and even does secondary liquidity through permissionless Uniswap X. They can handle compliance themselves and build infrastructure. How do you persuade institutions not to build their own and use MakeBanc instead? Chris: There are different tiers of yield. BUIDL, BENJI, structured credit—that's the trillion-dollar pathway, traditional Treasury yield. If you're willing to bear DeFi risk for just 3% yield, then risk and return misalign—you might as well go the TradFi path. In our very early stage, we don't see ourselves as competitors to BlackRock. They do the trillion-dollar pathway, traditional yield. We do "real returns 2–3x higher than staking yield"—real return, not token emissions where you don't even know the underlying value. It's verified trading strategies, capturing value in a risk-optimized way. It's like going directly to the factory to get goods, rather than through layers of middlemen—and only crypto's technological progress can open this up. It democratizes access to these strategies. There are many paths to yield, the difference is whether users want the front-end complexity abstracted away. Both crypto and TradFi have a bad habit—complicating things to the point where people feel "I don't understand how this works." But users want it simple: "I want X yield, Y volatility, I can accept it, but I don't want to go through 20 steps for it." That's what we solve. Alex: You only do tech infrastructure—not the money, not the strategy. But managing money and strategy basically make up 80% of the value of asset management. So how do you make yourselves profitable and scalable? Chris: An intuitive analogy is Stripe. In 2009 I founded my first e-commerce company, and just integrating a payment gateway took three months. All the components were there, but no player abstracted the complexity and made it simple. The Shopify + Stripe combination didn't exist yet at that time, or at least wasn't as usable as today. Our fee structure is platform fee + automated trading fee—the latter automated trading fee, for example, if the asset manager earns $100,000 in performance fees, we charge a processing fee on this $100,000, because we automated the entire capital flow process—which previously was work they had to manually manage themselves. This was originally ops the asset manager had to run themselves to get done. Asset managers typically only charge performance fees (because they're confident in their performance). We charge an infrastructure fee, which is a percentage of the capital flowing through the platform—part goes to the custodian, the rest stays for our operations. We're very bullish on these moments of "abstracting away friction." I've done zero-to-one many times, and when you compress something that originally took six, eight, twelve weeks down to a few minutes—that leverage is clear. We're in the same position as Stripe: providing end-to-end connectivity. Alex: But infra companies like Stripe usually have to go through a long J-curve before becoming profitable. Stripe itself took nearly six years to reach the profitable stage. How long do you estimate? Chris: I think we'll be pretty fast. This is more of a product-market fit issue, not building an entirely new product. For asset managers, with our infrastructure, they just need to connect to an SMA—something they already do and know how to do. We handle the rest. From the very beginning, we have a pipeline of asset managers + their investor pipeline wanting to use us. We're a very small, very lean team, don't need thousands of people. More like the Hyperliquid model—a small but highly competent team, capable of scaling. We also have something that can accelerate things: AI opens up many paths. Plus crypto itself has been connected globally from day one of being built—Plaid (the well-known US financial API company)'s pain is connecting 10,000 US financial institutions, but the blockchain itself, like chains such as Base, is essentially already a Plaid—all transactions are on-chain, everything is verifiable. Alex: Which region will you prioritize now? Hong Kong, Singapore? Chris: We don't specifically target any region, we target user profiles. First group: Recovering Degens. People who've been deep enough in the crypto trenches to accumulate considerable wealth. They want exposure but don't want to feel exposed—don't want to wake up at 3am every night to check the market. Second group: Yield Seekers. People who want to access crypto but don't know how to get in. We found something interesting: if they want to access crypto, they ask their degen friends around them—they don't Google it. Hope they don't Google. Many in this group currently have BTC as their only crypto exposure, and now from the peak of 120K dropping to around 80K, they're a bit unsure about volatility—but don't want to just hold and pray, want some different exposure methods. As for the other side of our platform—asset managers—they're spread globally. As long as we provide infrastructure to let them unlock their investor base—wherever they have licenses to operate, do marketing, that's their business. We're their infrastructure partner. Alex: Will you continue to bring in more strategies? Chris: Yes. We're not trying to make their returns higher, nor make them trade faster. But we will significantly accelerate their capital conversion—what originally took eight weeks of operational admin can become one click: connect capital to strategy, off you go. Alex: Your custody is Ceffu, execution uses Binance SMA. Although legally separate, both come from the Binance ecosystem. Putting all eggs in one basket—will that limit you in onboarding more clients? Chris: When we did legal due diligence, Ceffu and Binance are indeed separate—although there's the history of Binance Custody, they're now regulated independent entities. And the strategic reason we built our own on-chain orchestration vault is partly for future diversification: You can split exposure to the same strategy across multiple custodians—Komainu, Copper ClearLoop, BitGo are all options. The user experience doesn't change, just from one vault to three vaults. Same strategy, but distributed across three different custodians. That's structural protection. Same as any company—first do MVP, then continue stacking more custodians, more exchange venues, more asset managers. Alex: From now until May 2027, what's your one-year plan? Any TGE plans? Chris: We currently have no token plans. The industry is maturing, rethinking what tokens actually are and when they're useful—do airdrops retain users, or let early users cash out and leave? This mechanism might actually be counterproductive. We'll wait until tokenomics makes sense for our business. For the next 3–6 months, mainly focusing on three things: First, continue to abstract away crypto complexity. When the platform launches, users need to bring their own MetaMask to connect to a Safe wallet—meaning you have to know how to manage your own keys, manage security. For crypto-native users that's fine, I personally prefer it that way; but for yield seekers it's a barrier. We'll evaluate embedded wallet solutions like Privy—experience like Web2, but underlying is Web3. Second, free switching between fiat and crypto. Your choice—this will open up possibilities for global payments, cards, automated life flows. Third, accumulate more asset manager partnerships. Many TradFi asset managers will move into crypto, and we want to become their infrastructure partner of choice—just like you use Stripe if you want to start an e-commerce store. Emerging asset managers don't need to build a BlackRock-level infrastructure themselves, they need a trusted partner. Looking further out, medium to long term: - Wealth management platforms, family offices, licensed financial advisors—they want access to interesting yield products but need ownership to structure. For us this is simple, just combining different vaults. We're already in conversations on this part. - Agentic wealth management—this is a very natural evolution. We have a strong foundational advantage because our own vaults are permissioned, with "boring" exposure being a feature itself. On this foundation you can stack a whole layer of agentic flow. Given the pace of progress in open core, harness, and related tools over the past 12-16 weeks, this path will move fast, and we're positioned exactly to capture this opportunity. - Then there's a wave of retail + institutional treasury, who want to access global rails in complex ways—but with simple methods. That's the opportunity we're going to capture over the next 18 months.