Despite 2022's Crypto Winter, VC Dollars Chaser Upstart Digital Asset Firms Targeting Asia's Rich

The return to the White House of the former reality TV star, cast as a figure whose policies will usher in a boom for virtual money, has spurred rising bets on the sector's coins and companies.

Over steak and wine at a swanky restaurant in downtown Singapore a week after Donald Trump won November 2024’s US presidential election, Gerald Goh pitched a bright future for digital assets to journalists covering cryptocurrencies.

The return to the White House of the former reality TV star, cast as a figure whose policies will usher in a boom for virtual money, has spurred rising bets on the sector’s coins and companies. And for bankers, fund managers and private wealth advisers in the city-state, it has triggered a frantic chase for the rich clients allocating more capital to a reenergized segment of digital finance.

Goh, the co-founder and CEO of Sygnum, a virtual asset banking group serving high-net-worth customers in Singapore, is among scores of crypto executives who have seized the momentum to raise the profile of their services in the region’s financial hub.

“Specifically, in Singapore … investors generally are more positive about incorporating crypto investments as part of their investment portfolios,” Goh told Nikkei Asia. “We’ve already seen in 2024 an improvement in the mood, let’s say, in the sentiment, on the crypto side.”

Following the drastic decline in digital asset prices in 2022 and the toppling of industry names such as FTX, a virtual token exchange, over financial fraud, crypto has staged a dramatic comeback in the past year.

Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, surged to new highs and cracked the USD 100,000-per coin ceiling for the first time in December. Despite falls early in February, many analysts are predicting further gains in the months ahead.

In Southeast Asia, cryptocurrency-related companies attracted USD 325 million in funding in 2024, a 20% jump from the previous year, according to a January report by Tracxn, which monitors startups and private companies.

While this is slower growth than in the payments and banking tech segments, it still bucks the trend of the region’s broader financial technology scene, which recorded an overall 23% drop last year to USD 1.6 billion in total funding from USD 2.1 billion in 2023, the report showed. Charged by this inflow of capital and growing investor exuberance, crypto players are racing to ride the wave up.

But the path to wealth is not without its challenges. Singapore has a reputation as an Asian virtual currency hub but also has a financial regulator, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, which frowns on the enticement of mom-and-pop investors by digital payment token service providers, the term used for crypto companies.

MAS heavily discourages mass marketing of crypto assets to retail consumers. Platforms are thus treading carefully. Professional investors, including the rich, however, are fair game. Many buy major tokens such as Bitcoin and Ether directly, industry players note, often through centralized exchanges, or CEXs.

Crypto data tracker CoinGecko highlighted in a January report that CEXs recorded USD 17.4 trillion in spot trading globally last year—more than double the USD 7.2 trillion volume in 2023.

In a January update, Singapore officials said the number of single-family offices—organizations set up to manage the portfolio of millionaires, billionaires and their kin, exceeded 2,000 at the end of 2024, up from the 1,400 recorded a year earlier.

Lured to the politically stable island nation in recent years from as far afield as China and Indonesia, the expanding network of rich Asians has become a natural hunting ground for players like Sygnum.

Without giving specific numbers, Goh said his firm’s rate for onboarding clients “probably doubled or tripled” the week after Trump’s election victory.

In January the company announced it had achieved unicorn status, crossing the USD 1 billion mark after closing a USD 58 million funding round; its client assets under management topped USD 5 billion.

In September, as the Republican presidential nominee campaigned his way to the White House, Sygnum surveyed 400 respondents from family offices, funds and asset managers across 27 countries, including China, South Korea and Thailand.

Its poll found 57% of respondents in Singapore planned to raise their portfolio allocation for crypto in the next two years, higher than the survey average of 47%.

Sygnum is not the only outfit reporting an eagerness among Southeast Asia’s wealthy to dabble in crypto. Independent Reserve, a token exchange licensed in Singapore, told Nikkei the number of its clients from family offices grew 20% in 2024 compared with the year before.

The platform said there is a mix of first-time investors and existing crypto holders raising their exposure, with clients buying into virtual coins like Bitcoin and Ether, either through family offices or via direct trading on its exchange.

“We’ve seen more