Dinis Guarda Discusses Digital Asset Management With Thomas Kiddle And Manthan Dave From Palisade Inc.

Dinis Guarda interviews Thomas Kiddle and Manthan Dave, co-Founders and co-CEOs of Palisade Inc. in his YouTube Podcast series. In this episode, they talk about Palisade’s approach to transforming digital asset management, ensuring their security and compliance with regulatory requirements. The podcast is powered by Businessabc.net and citiesabc.com.

Thomas Kiddle and Manthan Dave are the Co-Founders of Palisade, a company that provides secure storage for digital assets. The market for Digital Asset Management systems is growing rapidly, with a forecasted increase to 994.30 million users by 2027, as reported by Statista. 

Together, Manthan and Thomas are shaping the future of digital asset management through their innovative platform Palisade. During the interview with Dinis Guarda, Manthan Dave, a technology leader with extensive expertise in blockchain and fintech, explains digital assets:

“Digital assets are issued on a ledger and can range from simple tokens to complex stablecoins or tokenised real-world assets. They are not physical assets but represent value in the digital realm. Our role at Palisade is to navigate these varied asset types and their regulatory requirements, offering solutions that align with their specific needs.”

Manthan’s notable roles include contributions to decentralised payment systems and Ethereum virtual machine technologies at Ripple and Ava Labs. His prior experience at Capital One, where he led innovations in identity management and multi-factor authentication, has played a key role in shaping his expertise and skills in digital asset management. 

Thomas Kiddle, a software engineer and entrepreneur, with over two decades of background in e-commerce, payments, and blockchain and who has worked at major companies like BT, Apple, and Ripple, says: 

“The flexibility of digital assets means that each type requires its own set of regulatory considerations. As a custody provider, Palisade must ensure that we comply with relevant regulations when managing these assets. As the industry evolves, we anticipate more clarity in regulatory frameworks, which will help us adapt and meet new demands”. 

Palisade: Ensuring a secure digital asset management 

Palisade is a provider of secure digital asset custody and tokenisation solutions, to meet the needs of businesses and financial institutions in the evolving digital economy. The company provides regulated custody, multi-party computation (MPC) wallets, and blockchain integrations to ensure security and compliance.

Manthan explains:

“Palisade in a single sentence would be that it's a 360 shape-shifting custody platform that focuses on delivering solutions to real use cases. There are a lot of custodians that are out there solving the technology problem and there are—and they're selling technology like something like MPC wallets or HSM wallets—but with Palisade, we let that thinking around key management and solution and cryptography. A wallet has to be secure and it has to be using the best standards of security compliance and or the actual granularity of the technology. This means that the client should get a secure wallet infrastructure that works for their use cases, is legal, is compliant, and that's it. 

Palisade offers a platform with composable units of technology, ranging from key management and governance policy engines to counterparty management and blockchain integrations. This flexibility allows clients to use and combine different aspects of our platform to address their unique challenges.”

According to Thomas:

“We are a digital asset wallet and custody company that simplifies Web3 operations for businesses. At the most fundamental level, operating in Web3 requires secure custody of assets. Over the past two years, we’ve developed technology that provides either regulated wallets or wallets-as-a-service. This ensures that businesses can operate compliantly and securely in Web3, no matter their type or size.”

How Palisade ensures secure custody of digital assets

Digital assets encompass a broad range of items, from non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and utility tokens to tokenised real-world assets and stablecoins. As the definition of digital assets evolves, understanding their regulatory and custody implications becomes increasingly complex.

Palisade plays a crucial role in providing secure custody solutions amidst these changing definitions and use cases.

Thomas explains to Dinis: “Digital assets cover a really broad range of different asset types and you know you hear the term digital assets in conversation it can really mean many different things. Some of those include non-fungible tokens, utility tokens, it could be tokenised real-world assets or it could be currencies and stablecoins and things like that. The term encapsulates all of those and more.

Over the past 10 years we’ve seen the term cryptocurrency being used predominantly in the early days and now we have this broader definition of digital assets. This has come about because over time we’ve seen new use cases emerge, such as NFTs which have been around for about five years, and currencies and stable coins becoming more important now. The thing that’s on everyone’s mind these days is tokenised real-world assets, which is a super broad term.”

Continuing the discussion Manthan explains: “Digital assets are the assets that are issued on a ledger. We can get into the technicalities of this but it's quite broad and it ranges from something as simple as a token to something as complex as a stable coin or even a real-world asset. 

What it is not is that it's not the physical asset itself. It's in all the use cases that we see, it is either the digital-only asset. So, it is only digital, and doesn't exist in the real world. So, something like an NFT, for example. 

If you look at any of the punk NFTs, they are the digital version itself and they're digital only. Or you have digital assets that are pegged to real-world assets, like a stablecoin. And in all of these assets, the actual definition depends on what it is either pegged to or what the use case is. 

So if you have an asset for example that gives you access to a house or a portion of a house in the sense that you have equity and the asset represents a certain percentage of the equity of the house, then that could be classed as a security and it likely is a security. Or if you have an asset that is pegged to a dollar or a fiat currency, then it's sort of classed as a stable coin because it's kind of what the current definition is. From a custody standpoint, there are a lot of different terms in the space that are being thrown around.

So it goes from non-custodial where there is no custody of the asset or the custody of the asset is not with a custodian, in the sense that if you're the asset holder, you have the custody yourself for your own assets, to shared custodial where you can share the custody of your assets with someone else, or you have a bunch of partners and you all share custody of a single pool of assets, to custodial which is where you can sort of delegate custody to a third-party custodian or someone like that. 

A normal person in Web 3 will typically interact with all three models in one way or another. So you may be sort of holding custody of some assets yourself because you have a wallet, you might be talking to an exchange or you might have funds on an exchange which may be using a shared custody model or you might be buying or selling assets on a swap or somewhere which at some point is being interacted with a custodian somewhere. So it ranges quite a lot. 

I think the key or the interesting thing about this is that the definition has been changing over time. So we've been seeing that custody has come into question a few times and I think there's a real push to make sure that the custody of the self-custody of assets remains sort of outside of regulation or it remains neutral. But what is increasingly happening is that businesses that are operating in the space are demanding more and more.”

Integrating DeFi innovations with regulated finance

As the digital asset space evolves, the challenge is to bridge the gap between innovative, fast-moving DeFi solutions and traditional regulated financial systems. Palisade is at the lead of this effort, ensuring that digital assets are managed securely and in compliance with regulations.

Manthan highlights the transformative potential of DeFi: 

“DeFi is quite complex compared to the traditional finance world. It’s fintech but on steroids. What’s really great about DeFi is that it allows you to move money at lightning speed, not just in one direction but across multiple assets. It makes finance more accessible; for instance, you can provide liquidity on a decentralised exchange in ways that traditional finance doesn’t allow. In traditional finance, using assets like NVIDIA shares to generate money from NASDAQ is almost impossible due to centralised exchanges. DeFi offers democratised access to finance with blockchain’s transparency, ensuring that everything executed is instantly visible to parties and regulators.

What we’re doing at Palisade is looking at how to open up these DeFi innovations to the world in a secure and compliant manner. For example, we’re working on issuing carbon credits on our platform where these credits are verified, tradable, and traceable from source to transaction. This ensures that assets are secure and compliant with regulations.”

Palisade's vision for scalable and secure Web 3.0 solutions

Thomas explained:

“In super simple terms, our goal is to provide secure and compliant wallets and custody services to businesses. We're here to transform industries by leveraging web3 technology. Over time, we aim to build a secure network of wallets and applications on web3, setting the standard for compliance and security.

Web3 today has many wallet providers, but few are focused on compliance like we are. Our vision includes improving tools for businesses, not just providing wallets. We believe that while wallets are crucial, they are just the beginning. Our broader goal is to equip businesses with all necessary tools for success in the web3 space."

Manthan elaborates further and says:

"Palisade’s primary mission is to enable businesses to onboard the next billion people into crypto. We start with wallets because they are fundamental to blockchain technology. The user experience (UX) of wallets has long been problematic. For instance, if you use a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) to buy carbon credits, you typically need your own wallet. It’s unrealistic to expect everyone to use MetaMask or manage their own crypto wallets securely.

At Palisade, we simplify this process by providing businesses with a better UX, allowing them to focus on their core functions without worrying about security and compliance. Just as a computer like a MacBook comes with built-in security, our platform ensures that businesses don't need to manage security risks themselves. Instead, they can concentrate on solving their own industry-specific problems.

With Palisade, businesses can integrate our API to issue wallets, create carbon credits, and manage NFTs while relying on our secure, compliant infrastructure. This approach lets businesses focus on innovation and improving their products without being bogged down by underlying technical complexities."

Manthan adds that the current landscape may evolve towards what he describes as:

“What we're going to see is we're going to see Web 2.5 rather than Web 3.0 in practice we'll see financial institutions using crypto on the back end rather than the front end as a way to settle payments as a way to track I and those are as mentioned those kinds of payment related use cases are really quick, but impactful wins. I think in a lot of industries where you have lots of intermediaries and if there's a shorter path from source to destination and if that can be executed, blockchain is a really good tool for that.

The goal for the blockchain and Web3 is to make things into a level playing field to make it easy to access The wider set of audience and to make things immutable, more auditable, and more transparent. That's primarily where I think the focus will be."