STS Digital has been granted a full licence by the Bermuda Monetary Authority after advancing through the testing and modified licensing stages.

They received the designation under the Digital Asset Business Act 2018.

Speaking in a panel at the Digital Finance Forum, panellist Maxime Seiler, cofounder and chief executive of the firm said: “We are one of the few companies that have gone through the graduation of the entire three-phase process.”

STS Digital has doubled its team in the last year.

“We are a principal dealer and a market maker in digital asset options,” Mr Seiler said. “We put options on up to and over 400 different tokens today.”

The news came despite a deceleration in retail activity in crypto, he said.

“On the other hand, institutions have become very, very active post exchange traded fund approval in the US,” he said. “It is very exciting to see that sophisticated investors who have in the past neglected digital assets come in and are looking at this space very seriously.”

He said digital finance is about taking an ageing financial system and integrating it into a world that is more digital.

“That means that rather than operating five days a week, eight hours a day, it will work 24/7,” Mr Seiler said.

That meant a more efficient, less operationally intense financial environment.

“That lowers the hurdles and the friction that you have for transferring wealth from place A to place B,” STS Digital’s CEO said.

STS Digital recently partnered with Kraken, a US-based cryptocurrency exchange and financial services firm.

Gurpreet Oberoi, head of institutional at Kraken, said many financial institutions are now creating digital asset products for their clients.

“They are partnering with firms like ours to help them co‑create them and buy liquidity for them,” he said.

On real‑world assets, Mr Oberoi saw immediate traction in tokenised yield and tokenised credit.

Kraken is working with traditional managers such as Franklin Templeton on tokenised credit products which can offer yield to people that have bitcoin and digital dollars in short duration.

Mr Oberoi argued that digital‑asset players must focus less on hypothetical demand and more on building products traditional investors actually want.

“There are trillions of dollars in the traditional asset space, and we have to think about how, as pioneers in the digital asset space, we can thrive and build better products,” he said. “I always say, money chases product. Product doesn’t chase money.”

Panellist Brett Harrison, founder and CEO of Architect Financial Technologies, described how his firm is using digital‑asset market structure to modernise trading in traditional instruments.

“Architect runs a BMA-regulated exchange for perpetual futures,” he said. “This is a futures‑like product that has no expiration date, but otherwise can trade 24/7, and apply leverage to traditional non‑cryptoasset classes like precious metals, FX, single stocks, energy and weather computes.”

Mr Harrison saw real opportunity in taking this infrastructure beyond crypto tokens to “everything else”.

His firm is seeing volume in precious metals such as gold and silver and demand for professional instruments on non‑ferrous metals such as copper and aluminium.

He said it was inevitable that people would soon be using blockchain without even knowing it.