Citi Ventures has invested in digital asset startup xalts along with Accel India and others. Hong Kong-based Xalts was co-founded this year by former HSBC operator Ashutosh Goel and former Meta Asia executive Supreet Kaur.

“The next stage of growth for digital assets will be driven by institutional participation in the asset class,” said Goel, chief investment officer at xalts. “We are starting to see the first signs of that with a lot of new initiatives coming from banks and asset managers.”

The startup aims to launch ETFs and mutual funds for cryptocurrencies. It also has platforms to tokenize structured products and tokenized funds.

“In addition to investors, we are also seeing a lot of interest from fund managers and issuers in using our platform to launch fund and structured products for their clients. We hope to build a team of 30 by the end of this year across our offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai and Geneva,” said Kaur, COO of xalts.

Kaur noted that many institutions cannot directly access the crypto ecosystem, hence his goal of launching accessible products. When it comes to ETFs, there is a lot of competition. However, many of the players are targeting Europe and the United States. Existing deals are from newcomers like Galaxy Digital, NYDIG, 21Shares, and Coinshares, as well as incumbents like BlackRock, Schwab, Fidelity, and Invesco.

Meanwhile, Citi has increased its activities related to digital assets across the board. Some of that is focused on more mainstream assets, but he is also active in the cryptocurrency sector. He has invested in infrastructure (BlockDaemon and Talos), blockchain intelligence (TRM Labs), and data (Amberdata).

“xalts is our first investment in a digital asset manager, and we support its vision to create innovative products to meet institutional investors’ growing appetite for more efficient and robust cryptocurrency investments,” said Luis Valdich, CEO of Citi Ventures.