For years, the gap between institutional capital and digital asset strategies was largely structural — the right strategies existed, but no appropriate vehicle did. The AMC changed that, providing a regulated, bankable wrapper for approaches that would otherwise have lived entirely outside traditional financial infrastructure. This chapter examines what that pairing looks like in practice: the client profiles driving demand, the operational architecture that has become the post-FTX standard, and a genuinely contested question about whether tokenizing AMCs is the next distribution breakthrough — or just another layer of complexity.
Dominic Lohberger is Chief Product Officer at Sygnum, the Swiss digital assets bank that received the world's first banking license of its kind from FINMA in 2019. He joined the firm as Head of Trading when it had roughly twelve employees and has since helped grow it to around 280, with offices in Zurich and Singapore. Florian Marty recently joined GenTwo Digital, GenTwo's digital assets subsidiary, after fifteen years at Bank Vontobel, where he spent the final five years leading the blockchain and crypto initiative. Unlike the other sessions in this report, this one was held live — an evening panel at GenTwo's Zurich offices, two practitioners talking through a market they both operate in from the inside.
05·01Why the AMC fits a digital asset strategy
The case for the AMC as a vehicle for digital asset strategies is essentially the same as it is elsewhere — fast, cost-effective, and regulated — but Lohberger frames it in terms of a specific journey he sees repeatedly among Sygnum's clients. Someone builds an algorithmic trading strategy, runs it on their own account, builds a track record, and then asks a natural question: how do I open this to investors? A fund structure is possible but carries significant overhead, particularly for a small operation. An AMC fits quite naturally at that step — regulated enough to satisfy the first wave of investors without requiring institutional infrastructure, and fast enough not to slow the strategy down. From the issuance side, the speed advantage is not theoretical: as Marty points out, for banks running on GenTwo Pro, a new AMC on digital assets can be issued within minutes, with accounts opened automatically, terms accepted digitally, and no manual intervention required.
05·02Two kinds of client
Lohberger groups the digital asset AMC client base into two distinct types. The first is the fund manager profile — typically someone who came from technology, built a strategy running across exchanges, found it profitable, and now wants to turn it into a product. These clients often trade derivatives: options, futures, basis trades. The second type is less intuitive but increasingly common: external asset managers and multifamily offices that want to differentiate their offering by launching proprietary products. For this group, having an AMC factory that can issue new instruments quickly becomes a competitive advantage — a way to build an in-house product capability that sets them apart from peers offering only third-party funds.
The practical constraint, in Lohberger's experience, is not the issuance itself but the bank. Getting an AMC onboarded and through compliance takes time, particularly the first time. Once that initial hurdle is cleared, subsequent launches become progressively faster.
05·03Strategies in motion
Marty traces the evolution of digital asset AMC strategies across four broad phases: single-underlying trackers, static baskets, discretionary portfolios across the top-20 or top-50 tokens, and now increasingly complex strategies that incorporate yield-generating components — staking, yield farming, DeFi protocol exposure. Hybrid strategies that combine digital assets with traditional instruments are also becoming more common, reflecting Sygnum's positioning at the intersection of both worlds.
One theme running through the more sophisticated strategies, according to Lohberger, is a near-zero tolerance for idle assets. The direction of travel is toward automated allocation systems that ensure assets are always deployed into something yield-generating — holding assets in a non-yielding form is increasingly treated as a cost, not a default. Tokenized money market funds are the most visible expression of this trend, offering second-by-second yield accumulation that keeps assets working without requiring them to leave the crypto ecosystem entirely.
We're moving towards a world where automated allocation systems will start to ensure assets are always deployed into something yield-generating. Any asset held in a non-yielding form is essentially a loss at that point.Dominic Lohberger, Sygnum
05·04Off-exchange custody: the post-FTX gold standard
For Lohberger, the operational architecture of a digital asset AMC is shaped, more than anything else, by the memory of FTX. Risk awareness in the crypto market tends to spike sharply after a collapse, then fade as prices rise again — a cycle the Bybit hack reinforced more recently. The calculus is uncomfortable but honest: when the market is up 100–200%, the motivation to protect against a 100% loss can feel abstract.
Sygnum's response is an off-exchange custody product that has become the default setup for serious institutional participants. A client's assets are held in custody at Sygnum, with an equivalent balance mirrored on the exchange for trading purposes. If the exchange fails, the underlying assets remain safely held by the bank. Traditional asset managers moving into crypto, Lohberger notes, are simply not willing to accept exchange counterparty risk within their existing risk frameworks — and this structure is what makes entry possible for them. As an extension, Sygnum also allows idle assets to be deployed into US T-bills or similar instruments, with equivalent margin returned to the exchange — so clients who want their assets working even when not actively trading can arrange that too.
05·05The tokenization question
When the conversation turned to tokenizing AMCs — wrapping an already-issued security in a blockchain token to enable distribution through crypto-native channels — Marty made the operational case: exchanges, custody providers, and crypto-native distributors work in tokens; a traditional ISIN-bearing security is nearly invisible within their systems. Tokenization opens a distribution channel that is otherwise closed. He argued this may be particularly valuable for traditional investment strategies — not just digital asset ones — that want to reach crypto-native audiences, and that the authorized participant mechanism, already used in the ETF industry, could manage the price-anchoring challenge.
Lohberger's concern is liquidity fragmentation. His image is a child opening Christmas presents — one box wrapped inside another, inside another, inside another. Start with a Bitcoin strategy: it carries Bitcoin's liquidity. Wrap it in an AMC and you have a second, smaller pool. Wrap that in a token and you have a third. Each wrapper creates a new instrument that competes with the others for liquidity, ending up thinner than any of its predecessors.
If you want to distribute through crypto-native channels — exchanges, custody providers, distributors — these players speak in tokens. A traditional ISIN-bearing security is almost invisible within their systems.Florian Marty, GenTwo Digital
If I look at tokenization today, there are really only one and a half use cases that actually work — stablecoins, and at a stretch, short-term money market instruments. Everything else is going against a marketing budget, not a capital restructuring one.Dominic Lohberger, Sygnum
Neither position fully closed the other. Marty's broader argument is that tokenization is a transitional phase rather than a permanent structure, and that the financial system is in the process of migrating toward blockchain-native infrastructure. In the meantime, a token wrapper opens a channel that would otherwise require building from scratch. Lohberger's timeline for when tokenized complex products are practically viable stretches further — he sees equities as the likely next step after money market instruments, before the infrastructure is ready for structured products.
I personally believe that in the future, all investment solutions will ultimately be traded as tokens — it's a migration from traditional financial infrastructure to a new tokenized, blockchain-based infrastructure.Florian Marty, GenTwo Digital
05·06The blockchain endgame
The longer-term question — whether a world of native blockchain infrastructure would make the AMC redundant — resolved quickly. In Marty's framing, the strategy lives inside the smart contract, but the smart contract needs to be written; it does not invent the strategy itself. The legal and structural layer around the product is not replaced by putting it on a blockchain; it remains necessary regardless of the infrastructure underneath. Lohberger framed it as complementary problems: blockchain solves the infrastructure question, the AMC solves the question of what is inside the product and how it is governed.
05·07AI agents and the always-yielding portfolio
Both Lohberger and Marty see autonomous agents managing investment strategies as an inevitable direction. Sygnum is actively investing in MCP infrastructure and compatibility with AI agents, and Lohberger believes the firm is not far from the first real client use cases connecting agents directly to its platform — at a regulated bank, not a fringe experiment. His view of the end state is concrete: an agent with access to an entire portfolio, making real-time decisions across a range of on-chain assets — stablecoins, tokenized gold, an AMC, whatever form makes sense — and ensuring that no asset ever sits idle in a non-yielding form if it doesn't need to. Tokenized money market funds, with their second-by-second yield accumulation, are central to that picture.
Marty notes that investment managers are probably already being advised by AI today, even if agents are not yet executing on their behalf within regulated wrappers. The regulatory path for autonomous execution will take time — but digital assets are the natural environment for it, since on-chain assets can be accessed directly by smart contracts without the friction of traditional clearing and settlement. The infrastructure is being built around a question that is not yet fully answered: not whether agents will run portfolios, but when, and through what structure.