On August 15, HSC Conference held its latest edition in Ho Chi Minh City, bringing together senior voices from across financial institutions, technology companies, and the venture capital world to debate blockchain infrastructure, digital assets, and the future of on-chain financial markets.
One of the standout sessions was “Who Gets the Next Billion: Infrastructure, AI, and RWA,” moderated by Dominic Cox of 1inch. The panel featured Kate Wang of Oniiri Capital, a Singapore-based blockchain fund backed by Japanese credit giant Credit Saison; Alice Truong, VP of Digital Assets at global payments processor Nuvei; and Tony Tran, Ph.D., of TOTM Labs, an AI and blockchain venture builder active across Southeast Asia.
Rather than offering a straightforward optimist’s roadmap, the panel cut through the noise — interrogating what is still blocking institutional capital from entering crypto, why the checklist for investment has fundamentally changed since 2021, and where the real value of AI and RWA tokenisation lies beneath the hype. Infrastructure, they concluded, is the answer to almost every question the industry is asking right now.
The panel broadly agreed that the current environment is defined not by a shortage of capital, but by a crisis of confidence. Kate described a “VC winter” driven less by bad projects than by increasingly selective LPs. “There’s no lack of capital,” she said. “It’s really about the institutional trust.” Alice drew a sharp line between innovation and operational reality — her preference is for projects that build bridges between legacy infrastructure and the aspirational future, not the future itself. Tony offered perhaps the sharpest observation: investors are not afraid of regulation, they are afraid of not knowing what it will be. “They don’t afraid of the regulation. They really afraid of the ambiguity.”
The panel agreed that the era of narrative-driven investing is firmly over. Kate noted that in 2021, startups could raise enormous sums on pitch decks alone; today, Oniiri Capital scrutinises team experience, gross margin, burn rate, and realistic exit multiples. Alice added a dimension she argued founders consistently overlook: the exit strategy. From an institutional perspective, any capital deployment requires a clear path to recovery — whether through integration, acquisition, or extraction.
When pressed to define “institutional-grade infrastructure” — a phrase that has become a marketing staple — Alice offered a grounded reframe. It is not primarily a technology question. “Technology can be built. You can use AI today to build any infrastructure.” What institutions actually need is risk control and reporting. Risk control means fallback planning: if a custody API fails, what happens to a company that has already left traditional finance behind? Reporting means seamless integration with compliance dashboards across multiple jurisdictions. “If your product cannot resolve that reporting, it’s going to be very challenging for me to convince my operation team to use the product.”
On AI, the panel converged on a similar message. Alice cautioned against chasing flashy applications: “Build the boring stuff. The boring stuff is not boring. The boring stuff can make you a lot of money.” Infrastructure-level AI — improving transaction monitoring, automating compliance, enhancing operational efficiency — is where she sees durable returns. Tony raised the accountability challenge of agentic AI: who is responsible when an AI agent makes a damaging financial decision? He pointed to Vietnam’s AI law, effective this year, as a notable regional development placing legal responsibility on developers and founders.
RWAs generated the most divergence. Alice was the most sceptical, identifying two unresolved problems — accessibility and interoperability — that she believes undermine the broader tokenisation narrative. The one use case she found genuinely compelling was tokenised deposits for institutions: intraday liquidity management between financial counterparties, essentially a modernised repo market. Kate agreed that distribution remains the central unsolved problem in RWAs. Tony saw near-term viability primarily in trade finance and cross-border settlement, with more complex consumer-facing tokenisation coming later.
Asked where they would allocate a hypothetical billion, all three chose infrastructure — the invisible layer that makes everything else possible. Alice’s answer was the most specific: the next wave of agentic AI needs two things builders haven’t yet provided: rule-based transaction controls, and the ability to reverse AI-made errors. “Then the end user feels safe, and there would be a boom of agentic AI.” The panel’s consensus was clear — before the next billion flows into crypto’s most exciting applications, the foundational layer needs to be built, trusted, and made compliant.
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