September 2026 marks ten years of SettleMint. Over the decade, digital assets have developed from an emerging field of institutional experimentation into a growing part of the financial technology landscape. SettleMint has developed alongside that market, working with regulated institutions as their ambitions, requirements and operating models have evolved.
To mark the anniversary, CEO Adam Popat, Co-Founder & President Matthew Van Niekerk and Co-Founder & CTO Roderik van der Veer joined Rachel Pether to reflect on that development and, increasingly, on what comes next.
Matthew and Roderik recently explored many of the lessons from SettleMint’s first decade in their Co-Founders' Note, including the realities of operating digital assets inside regulated institutions, the importance of supporting the full asset lifecycle and the standards production infrastructure must meet.
This interview builds from that foundation, focusing on the priorities now defining the next phase of institutional digital assets: higher volumes, deeper integration, increasingly interconnected technology ecosystems, and new forms of automation.
As institutional digital asset activity grows, infrastructure must support higher volumes without adding equivalent operational complexity. Automation, resilience, and integration with existing systems are essential, alongside the governance and controls expected in a regulated environment.
SettleMint's Digital Asset Lifecycle Platform (DALP) has evolved with these requirements. It provides a single platform for institutions to manage issuance, compliance, custody, settlement and servicing across larger, repeatable programs. This allows digital asset activity to scale within the institution’s existing operating environment rather than creating a parallel technology stack.
Scalability also increases the importance of interoperability. Financial institutions operate across complex technology environments, and digital assets introduce additional infrastructure spanning distributed ledgers, custody, settlement, trading and tokenization.
As Adam notes in the interview, no single provider can deliver every capability a financial institution requires to the highest standard. Institutions therefore need infrastructure that can connect specialist providers within a coherent operating model, while preserving their own systems, controls and governance.
DALP provides that connective layer across the digital asset lifecycle, allowing institutions to work with the networks, custodians and market infrastructure appropriate to each use case without creating fragmented operating models across different assets or markets.
Our partnerships reflect this approach in practice. Inspire for Solutions Development brings regional implementation and enterprise delivery expertise across the Middle East and Africa, while integrations such as Ripple Custody extend DALP with specialist institutional custody capabilities. Together, these relationships allow institutions to draw on the strengths of different providers through a consistent lifecycle platform.
Regulated institutions need to retain control over the technology and processes supporting their digital asset activity. This includes how keys are managed, where infrastructure is deployed, how access is governed and which providers form part of the operating environment.
Specialist partners can extend an institution’s capabilities, but the institution remains in control of the infrastructure supporting critical financial activity. The ecosystem provides institutions with the flexibility of digital asset production, without compromising internal security, governance or operational requirements.
This principle has also informed how SettleMint has developed DALP, particularly around deployment flexibility and integration with an institution’s chosen infrastructure. The broader production requirements behind that approach are explored in more detail in the Co-Founders' Note.
One of the more forward-looking themes in the interview concerns the rapid development of AI and agentic systems. Financial infrastructure has moved toward greater automation for many years. AI agents introduce new possibilities through software that initiates and coordinates activities across multiple systems with less direct human involvement.
For regulated institutions, this ushers in new requirements around access, permissions, governance, and auditability. APIs, command-line interfaces and MCP servers provide structured ways for automated systems to interact with digital asset infrastructure while remaining within defined operational controls.
SettleMint’s technology already provides command-line interfaces and Model Context Protocol (MCP) capabilities designed to give automated systems structured ways to interact with the platform. As institutions explore AI in production environments, this creates scope to automate more of the digital asset lifecycle while preserving the governance expected of regulated infrastructure.
The panel also looks beyond the infrastructure itself towards the way the industry describes financial markets. For much of the past decade, digital assets have developed alongside established financial markets as a distinct category. Terms such as digital finance, traditional finance and decentralized finance have helped describe different technologies, structures and communities. Those boundaries are becoming less rigid.
Decentralized markets have provided an environment where new financial mechanisms can develop and be tested rapidly. Increasingly, elements of that model are finding their way into regulated financial markets, adapted to the governance and operational requirements of institutions.
There are already clear signs of this convergence. Binance Research, in its 2026 report, The Convergence of DeFi, TradFi and CeFi, points to the growth of tokenized equities, the integration of digital asset services by traditional financial institutions and the emergence of more institutionally compatible DeFi structures, including configurable vault-based lending. Together, these developments show how products and mechanisms first associated with digital-native markets are beginning to influence the way traditional financial services are delivered.
These developments closely reflect the direction discussed throughout the interview: digital asset infrastructure is becoming more deeply integrated with established financial markets, bringing the two closer together as institutional adoption advances.
SettleMint’s tenth anniversary marks more than a milestone. A decade of building alongside regulated institutions has shaped the technology, operating principles, and product architecture that define SettleMint today.
That experience has culminated in DALP. The platform brings together the requirements encountered repeatedly across real institutional deployments: lifecycle management, integration with existing systems, deployment flexibility, interoperability with specialist providers, institutional control and the ability to support increasingly automated operations at scale. All while continuing the ambition on which the company was founded in 2016: enabling financial institutions to bring digital assets into real-world production.
Each stage of the market’s development has added to that foundation. What began as a platform designed to make blockchain accessible to enterprises has evolved into infrastructure built around the realities of issuing, managing, and servicing digital assets within regulated financial environments.
After ten years of delivery, the opportunity ahead remains unmistakable. As Matthew observes:
“We’re 10 years later, but we’re still only at the beginning.”
SettleMint, headquartered in Leuven, Belgium, with offices in UAE, Singapore and Japan is the company behind DALP, the entirely composable Digital Asset Lifecycle Platform. DALP enables financial institutions, market infrastructure operators, and governments to build, deploy, and manage digital assets and blockchain applications at scale.