Faster, cheaper and immediate trust (roundtable “AI & Blockchain” part 3)

February 19, 2026

_{This report was originally written in Dutch. This is an English translation.}

Part 3 of the roundtable report “AI & Blockchain” focuses on blockchain as a new basic infrastructure. The participants discuss how programmable money, real-time settlement and built-in trust remove friction from the system and why digital assets and tokenised investments are gradually finding their way into institutional portfolios.

By Hans Amesz

This is part 3 of the report. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 4 here.
 

What problem does blockchain solve that the existing infrastructure cannot?

Dieperink: ‘It can modernise wealth management administration. We are still using legacy systems and settlement sometimes takes days. The transition is slow, but the potential is huge. One example is cross-border payments. In the past, I tried to transfer a few million euros for a client to purchase a yacht in New Zealand: impossible through traditional channels. With crypto, this can be done in a matter of minutes.’

Swart: ‘Exactly. This also has positive effects on financial inclusion. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, people often send money across national borders to support their families. Thanks to crypto, this can now be done instantly, cheaply and 24/7, without the sky-high costs of traditional payment processors.’

Smets: ‘Today, trust is expensive because it depends on central intermediaries. That is exactly what blockchain solves: trust is built into the infrastructure itself, through open-source code, cryptography and financial incentives. If AI makes intelligence a commodity, then blockchain makes trust a commodity. And that fundamentally changes how we do business in the digital age.’
 

If AI makes intelligence a commodity, then blockchain makes trust a commodity.

 
Swart: ‘Blockchains turn money into software. They make financial systems programmable, controllable and transparent, and reduce the cost of trust by removing intermediaries who skim off value. It creates a system that is fully verifiable in real time, where trust comes from perfectly reliable code rather than an imperfect counterparty.’

Are digital assets investable? And do they offer sufficient liquidity?

Lemmens: ‘Absolutely. The opportunities are growing rapidly. Regulation has been the tipping point here: financial institutions are now much more open to it because the rules are clearer. Around 8% of our fintech fund is invested in digital assets. That share is growing with the arrival of new IPOs, such as Circle, Figure and Bullish. Valuations can fluctuate sharply – Circle's IPO rose 300% within a few weeks – but the market is maturing.’

Verhaar: ‘For most pension funds, digital assets are not yet directly investable. However, a survey we conducted among institutional investors shows that almost everyone wants to allocate more in the next five to ten years, especially in the US. Today, exposure is often indirect, for example through listed companies with Bitcoin on their balance sheets.’

Lemmens: ‘Pension funds are cautious and strongly focused on fixed income. Nevertheless, tokenisation is already taking place there too, for example in money market funds, and this will spread further. In the long term, investors may not even notice that their investments have been tokenised, because it will simply become the most efficient structure.’

Verhaar: ‘That's why family offices are leading the way here. Former entrepreneurs are more willing to experiment a little, while institutional investors are waiting for the market to become mainstream.’

Hendriks: ‘I am a shareholder in Amdax, the first crypto asset manager in the Netherlands to be licensed by the AFM. The company offers a Bitcoin Treasury strategy that allows anyone to gain exposure to Bitcoin via a regulated share on Euronext. It is not tokenised, which means that investors can easily participate even without any knowledge of crypto.’
 

When managers say “we use neural networks” or “random forests”, it's like saying “I cook with salt”.

 
Smets: ‘What makes blockchain unique is that investors can invest directly in the infrastructure itself, in the networks, and not just in the companies that build on it. The value ends up with the network itself, via tokens. This is a new paradigm that takes time for investors to understand. The US is leading the way in this, and American endowments, for example, are already investing heavily in it.’