Artem Ponomarev, CEO & Founder, XPlace

Today we're delighted to speak with Artem Ponomarev, CEO & Founder of XPlace, a financial platform built for crypto's high-net-worth generation. With a background spanning venture capital, fintech lending and consumer credit, Artem is tackling a critical gap in digital asset infrastructure - how to access liquidity without selling your holdings.

My questions are in bold - over to you Artem:

Who are you and what's your background?

My background is at the intersection of investing, venture capital and financial services. I studied at Bayes Business School in London, which is where I first got properly exposed to how financial markets and institutions actually work. I started my career at Concentric VC, looking closely at how financial technology was being built and which problems it was actually solving. I later co-founded Alvos, a fintech lender in Mexico, which gave me a close look at consumer credit, risk management and how differently access to financial products can look depending on the market.

What pulled me toward building XPlace wasn't a particular interest in crypto for its own sake – it's credit. I've always seen credit as one of the most foundational tools in finance, and I kept seeing people build real wealth in digital assets with almost no financial infrastructure around that wealth. You could own an asset that was appreciating, but if you needed liquidity, the only answer was usually to sell it. That gap is what led me into this space.

What is your job title and what are your general responsibilities?

I'm Founder and CEO of XPlace. Day to day that means setting product direction and vision, leading fundraising and investor relationships, building partnerships, and working closely with the team across product, growth and compliance.

Can you give us an overview of your business?

XPlace lets people borrow against digital assets, including tokenized equities, instead of selling them, and spend that liquidity through a Visa card. Eligible users put supported assets to work as collateral and access liquidity against them, without closing the position.

We're non-custodial by design – the architecture is built so users keep control of their own assets rather than handing them to us outright. On top of that we offer tiered memberships with cashback and other benefits, and the option to earn yield on idle assets through onchain protocols.

I'd actually push back a little on the label "crypto card" – it's too narrow for what we're building. The bigger opportunity is giving people one place to put everything they own to work, instead of managing crypto, stocks and spending as separate, disconnected pieces.

Tell us how you are funded?

Financing isn't something I discuss publicly at this stage – I'd rather keep the conversation focused on the product.

What's the origin story? Why did you start the company? To solve what problems?

It goes back to that same gap: people were building real wealth on-chain, but there wasn't serious financial infrastructure around it. If you needed cash, selling was basically the only lever available, which meant closing out a position you might have wanted to hold for years.

Most card products in this space are really just a spending rail bolted onto a wallet. Most cards are built purely around spending. I wanted XPlace to do the opposite, and make people more invested by keeping their assets working for them even while they spend.

Who are your target customers? What's your revenue model?

Our members are people who hold meaningful digital wealth, whether in crypto or, since we added support for tokenized equities, in assets like tokenized Apple, Tesla or Nvidia stock, and who don't want to choose between holding that wealth and being able to use it day to day.

Revenue comes from membership fees across our four tiers, plus the margin on Credit Mode borrowing, similar to any card-based fintech product.

If you had a magic wand, what one thing would you change in the banking and/or FinTech sector?

I'd want the industry to stop treating leverage as a feature to be marketed and start treating it as a risk to be managed properly. The last crypto lending cycle had plenty of products that dressed up opaque risk-taking as "yield" or "credit" without being honest about what happened when the market turned. Risk and compliance should be built into products from day one, not bolted on afterwards, industry-wide, not just at XPlace.

What is your message for the larger players in the Financial Services marketplace?

Tokenisation is moving from the fringes of finance into its actual infrastructure. Institutions that treat that as noise will find in a few years that a meaningful share of their clients' wealth has moved somewhere that offers the same services, borrowing, spending, access to liquidity, without forcing a sale first. I'd rather see the large players build this well than leave it entirely to newer entrants.

Where do you get your Financial Services/FinTech industry news from?

At the top, the Financial Times and The Economist, classic British titles with real history covering finance, and I trust them for the macro picture. Below that, for fintech specifically: The Fintech Times, Finextra, American Banker, plus CoinDesk and The Block for digital assets.

Beyond outlets, I probably get as much from constant conversations with people across the industry, investors, other founders, people building the infrastructure we rely on, as from any single publication. The one discipline I try to keep is double-checking anything before treating it as true, rather than reacting to the first headline.

Can you list 3 people you rate from the FinTech and/or Financial Services sector that we should be following on LinkedIn, and why?

I don't track specific people too closely – not enough time for it. But a few accounts I always stop for are Chiara M., Marcel van Oost, and Jason Mikula – people who actually dig into the market and the products instead of just reacting to headlines.

What FinTech services (and/or apps) do you personally use?

The one I keep coming back to is Stripe. Less because I open it daily like a consumer app, and more because of what it's done for the plumbing underneath fintech generally – it's hard to find a payments or card product today, including ours, that doesn't owe something to standards Stripe helped set.

What's the best new FinTech product or service you've seen recently?

Two that stand out to me right now, for different reasons, are Robinhood and Mercury. Robinhood has been pushing further into tokenized assets and round-the-clock trading, which is exactly the direction I think the whole industry is heading: assets that behave less like static holdings and more like something you can actually use. Mercury is a different kind of impressive. It takes a genuinely complex category, business banking, and makes it feel simple, which is a hard thing to pull off.

Finally, let's talk predictions. What trends do you think are going to define the next few years in the FinTech sector?

I think the next few years are about convergence. We'll stop talking about crypto finance and traditional finance as separate worlds, because the infrastructure underneath will increasingly be shared. Collateral will keep broadening past crypto into tokenized real-world assets. And I think selling an asset to cover a cash need will start to look like the old default, rather than the only option available.

Many thanks to Artem for taking the time to share his insights with FinTech Profile. You can learn more about XPlace on their website.