Artem Ponomarev, Founder & CEO of XPlace – Interview Series

Artem Ponomarev, Founder & CEO of XPlace, is a fintech entrepreneur and investor with experience spanning digital assets, venture capital, lending, and financial services. Prior to founding XPlace in 2025, he co-founded Alvos, a digital lending fintech, and held investment roles at Concentric and Vendian Investment Management. Earlier in his career, Ponomarev worked as a Business Tax Analyst at Deloitte. His background across venture investing and traditional finance has informed his focus on developing financial infrastructure that gives digital asset holders greater flexibility in how they access and use their wealth.

XPlace is a digital wealth platform designed to enable crypto holders to spend and access liquidity without having to sell their underlying assets. Built around a non-custodial model, the platform allows users to hold assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and stablecoins while borrowing against eligible holdings and spending through a Visa card. XPlace operates on Solana and integrates decentralized finance infrastructure, including the Kamino protocol, while offering separate cash and credit modes, on-chain USDC cashback, and support for Apple Pay and Google Pay. The company positions its platform as financial infrastructure for making digital assets more practical for everyday spending while allowing users to retain ownership and potential exposure to their portfolios.

Your career has taken you through venture investing at Concentric, tax at Deloitte, investment management, and now founding XPlace. How did those experiences shape your view that digital asset holders needed better ways to access the value of their portfolios without selling their underlying assets?

None of these roles were in crypto, and I think that matters. What connects them is credit.

Co-founding Alvos, a fintech lender in Mexico, showed me how much people’s options depend on access to credit, and how unevenly that access is distributed.

Working in tax and investment management, I spent a lot of time around how wealth is structured. People with significant portfolios often have an option most people never get: they can borrow against assets that stay invested, through a private bank that knows how to value and hold that collateral.

When I looked at digital assets, the wealth was real, but that option was not available in a form people could use in everyday life. Borrowing against crypto existed on-chain, yet it was disconnected from how people actually spend. XPlace started from a simple question: why shouldn’t a tool that wealthy clients take for granted exist for this kind of balance sheet too?

Borrowing against securities has long been available to wealthy clients through private banks. Why has it taken longer for comparable financial tools to emerge around digital assets, and what has changed to make this model viable today?

Borrowing against securities emerged earlier because private banks already had mature infrastructure for custody, valuation, margining, settlement and legal enforcement around liquid, recognizable assets.

Digital assets took longer because that infrastructure was fragmented or missing. The markets operate 24/7, collateral can move across wallets and protocols, and prices can change too quickly for traditional risk processes.

On-chain markets, real-time pricing, programmable collateral and stablecoin settlement have now made a more transparent model possible. The risks have not disappeared, but the infrastructure is much more mature.

My interest is credit, not crypto ideology. Properly structured credit can be net-positive because it gives people liquidity without forcing them to sell long-term assets. Crypto is simply the infrastructure that lets XPlace turn that familiar financial idea into a practical product: spending against digital wealth without liquidating it.

For someone encountering XPlace for the first time, can you walk us through what happens when a user makes a purchase against their digital assets rather than selling them? Where does the liquidity come from, and what happens to the collateral throughout the process?

In Credit Mode, the user first deposits supported digital assets as collateral. When they pay with the card, the purchase is funded by borrowing USDC against that collateral, so nothing has to be sold.

The liquidity for that borrowing comes from Kamino’s on-chain market. XPlace provides the spending layer, while the borrowing is executed through Kamino against the collateral.

Card settlement runs on a separate layer. XPlace partners with Credit Coop, an on-chain lender, to fund the flow between a card payment and its final settlement with the merchant.

Throughout the process the collateral is not sold. It stays in the position for as long as the borrowing is open, so the user keeps their exposure to the asset in both directions. As prices and borrowing levels change, the position’s LTV and health factor move with them. The user can repay or add collateral to keep a buffer, and if the position reaches the liquidation threshold, the collateral can be liquidated. That is why the buffer matters.

XPlace users spend against their portfolios rather than selling them. What does that behaviour tell you about how the role of digital assets in personal wealth is changing?

It suggests that people want their portfolios to do two things at once: stay invested and be usable.

The spending itself looks like ordinary life, and that is the point. What is different is the choice behind it. In Credit Mode, instead of selling assets to pay for things, users borrow against collateral that stays in place, and the card is simply the interface that makes this practical day to day.

That is a shift in how digital assets fit into personal wealth: from positions you or sell to a balance sheet you can actually use. It also raises the bar on risk management. Once an asset is collateral, loan-to-value and buffers matter as much as its price.

The previous crypto lending cycle produced several spectacular failures, particularly among centralized lenders that took risks users did not fully understand. What lessons did you take from those failures, and how is XPlace structured differently?

The previous cycle showed that labels such as “yield” or “credit” say very little about where the risk actually sits. Users need to understand who controls the assets, what happens to them while they back a position, who sets the terms and how the position behaves when markets move against it.

XPlace is non-custodial: users keep control of their assets. In Credit Mode, XPlace provides the spending layer, while borrowing is executed through Kamino’s on-chain market against collateral, and the position can be verified on-chain.

That is a different architecture from relying on an opaque centralized balance sheet. It does not eliminate protocol, smart-contract, liquidity, market or liquidation risk, but it makes the structure of the position clearer.

Liquidation risk is one of the biggest trade-offs when borrowing against a volatile asset. How do you think about loan-to-value ratios, collateral buffers, and liquidation mechanisms so that accessing liquidity does not become an unintended forced sale during a market downturn?

Liquidation is a core risk parameter, not an edge case. LTV parameters are asset-specific and should reflect the volatility and liquidity of each asset. The maximum LTV should be treated as a ceiling, not a target.

As collateral values or borrowing levels change, the user’s LTV and health factor can move closer to a liquidation threshold. Maintaining a sufficient buffer and being able to repay or add collateral are essential.

We want using collateral to be as safe as it realistically can be. We are working on a feature designed to help positions avoid full liquidation, so users have less to worry about when markets move quickly. It will reduce that risk, not remove it: if a position becomes undercollateralized, liquidation can still happen.

When does borrowing against an asset actually make more financial sense than simply selling a portion of it? What should investors consider when comparing interest costs, expected returns, volatility, taxes, and the risk of liquidation?

Borrowing is useful when the objective is temporary liquidity while retaining exposure to an asset. Selling is often the simpler and lower-risk choice if borrowing does not provide a clear benefit.

The comparison should include the all-in borrowing cost, expected duration, asset volatility, available buffer and the credibility of the repayment source. If repayment depends on the asset price continuing to rise, the decision is becoming leveraged speculation rather than liquidity management.

XPlace has expanded beyond cryptocurrencies to support tokenized equities as collateral. Do you expect the distinction between crypto portfolios and traditional investment portfolios to gradually disappear as more securities move on-chain?

Tokenization matters only when it changes what an asset can do.

Because supported xStocks can be used as collateral alongside crypto assets in Credit Mode, a portfolio can be managed as a broader digital balance sheet rather than as separate, isolated positions. xStocks on XPlace are available to eligible users in permitted jurisdictions and are not available to US persons or residents of the UK, Canada, Australia and other restricted territories.

The assets are still not economically identical. Tokenized equities can have different rights, issuer and custody arrangements, eligibility requirements and liquidity characteristics from direct ownership of a stock.

The interface may converge. The legal and economic reality of the assets will not.

If tokenized stocks, cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, lending, and payments can increasingly exist within the same financial infrastructure, could platforms like XPlace eventually compete with traditional brokerage and private-banking relationships rather than simply crypto exchanges?

The overlap is real, but it is functional, not institutional. What private banks have long offered wealthy clients is borrowing against a portfolio: liquidity without selling the assets. That is the function XPlace is built around, and on-chain infrastructure makes it possible to offer it to people who would never meet a private bank’s minimums.

Replacing those relationships is a different question. Brokerage and private banking are also advice, structuring, regulation and years of trust. Tokenization can unify the infrastructure, but it does not remove the accountability and trust those services rest on.

That is also why the comparison with crypto exchanges misses the point. Exchanges are built around trading assets, while XPlace is built around using the assets people already hold. In that sense XPlace is first of all a card built around borrowing against what you already own, not a crypto card. Traditional credit cards are built on unsecured debt;  XPlace is designed so people can spend and stay invested.

So I would not frame it as a contest with brokerage or private banking. The better question is which specific functions can be done better on shared infrastructure. For us it is spending and borrowing against a portfolio that stays invested. Whether other functions follow depends on the structure, the risks and the regulation genuinely supporting them.

Looking five to ten years ahead, what do you think digital wealth management ultimately looks like? Will selling assets to fund everyday spending become less common as borrowing, tokenization, and programmable collateral become more widely accessible?

I expect digital wealth management to look less like trading and more like managing a balance sheet. People will hold a broader mix of assets, including crypto, tokenized equities and stablecoins, and manage them together as something that can be used, not only held or sold.

Selling will become less of a default for funding everyday spending, but it will not disappear. Borrowing makes sense when the need is temporary and the person wants to keep their exposure. Selling is often the simpler and lower-risk choice, and the honest test is whether repayment depends on the asset price continuing to rise.

Three things have to be true for this to go mainstream. The collateral has to be broader than crypto, which is why tokenized equities matter. The infrastructure has to keep control with the asset owner and make the structure of a position clear. And risk management has to mature, because once an asset is collateral, loan-to-value, buffers and early warnings matter as much as its price.

If that happens, the useful question stops being whether people hold assets or spend them. It becomes how well the structure lets them do both without taking on risks they do not understand.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit XPlace.