Borrowing against a portfolio rather than selling it is a long established private banking service. A newer set of platforms is applying the same idea to digital assets, letting a holder draw liquidity against crypto and tokenised equities and spend it on a card, rather than selling the position to raise cash.
XPlace is one of them. The Fintech Times put written questions to Artem Ponomarev, founder and chief executive of XPlace, on what makes the model different from securities lending, how liquidation should be designed so that a spending product does not force
selling in a downturn, and what separates this generation of crypto-backed credit from the lenders that collapsed in the last cycle.
1. Borrowing against securities is as old as private banking. What makes borrowing against crypto for everyday spending different, and why is it emerging now?
Borrowing against securities has existed for decades because the collateral is liquid, verifiable, and actionable without friction. Crypto has only recently caught up on all three. Positions are now verifiable by whoever holds them, and on-chain borrowing markets price and enforce collateral in real time.
What is different is the holder, not the mechanics. Someone who built a position over a full market cycle has no interest in selling it to cover a mortgage payment. That reluctance to sell is the real shift, and spending against the position is the natural answer to it.
2. Who is actually doing this today? What does the typical user with real digital wealth look like?
We call this group crypto’s high-net-worth generation. It is not a trader chasing yield. It is someone who built a real position over a market cycle, often through early involvement in the industry, and now holds more wealth on-chain than in a traditional brokerage account. What they share is a long time horizon and no interest in selling a position they spent years
building.
3. Crypto collateral is volatile. How should liquidation thresholds, margin calls and haircuts work so that a spending product does not become a forced-selling machine in a drawdown?
The design principle is simple: give the holder room to react before the system has to act for them. That means conservative starting loan-to-value ratios, staged margin calls rather than a single trigger, and full visibility into position health in real time. A haircut schedule should widen gradually with volatility, not snap shut at one price point, so a short drawdown does not force a permanent loss.
4. You argue platforms should stop treating crypto, stocks and spending as separate products. What breaks, structurally or in regulation, when they are combined?
Structurally, very little breaks. On a settlement layer that can hold a token and clear a card transaction from the same account, treating them as separate products is a legacy habit rather than a technical requirement.
What is tested is the regulatory assumption that a brokerage, a lender, and a card issuer are different entities doing different things. Combining the three under one account means the industry has to answer which standards apply, and resist the temptation to pick the lightest one.
5. Which guardrails matter most to make this model work responsibly, and which of them should be imposed by regulators rather than left to platforms?
Over-collateralisation and on-chain verifiability matter most, because both are checkable by the user rather than taken on trust. In a non-custodial model, positions live in public smart contracts: anyone can verify them directly, which is stronger than any attestation a platform could publish.
6. Where did the model go wrong for the crypto lenders that failed in the last cycle, and what is structurally different about the current generation?
The pattern across the lenders that failed was structural: customer collateral was reused for proprietary trades, and short-term deposits funded long-dated, illiquid positions. When the market turned, there was no way to unwind fast enough.
What is different in this generation is where the asset sits. When collateral stays in smart contracts the customer can verify, and the platform does not take control of the underlying asset, reuse of that collateral is limited by the architecture rather than by policy. That is a design constraint, not a promise.
7. What is next for XPlace, and for crypto-backed credit more broadly?
XPlace usually gets filed under crypto cards. That is not the category we build against. The reference point is a mainstream card, judged on the same terms as any other card, where the collateral behind it happens to be digital rather than a savings balance. Most of what is next follows from that.
The collateral base is the clearest example. It started with digital assets, and it is already wider than that today: tokenised equities sit in the same account. Where this goes is fairly obvious. If an asset can be priced and verified independently, there is no good reason it cannot back the same position, and the mechanics do not change when the asset does.
The infrastructure part is less visible and matters more. Positions sit in public smart contracts. A customer can check their own collateral without asking us to confirm anything, which is a different relationship from the one most people have with a financial provider.
None of this is new, though. Borrowing against a portfolio instead of selling it is what private banking has offered its clients for decades. Access was the missing piece. Most cards in this category are still built around selling, so every purchase leaves the holder with slightly less of the asset they set out to hold, and after a few years of that, the card has quietly done the opposite of what the customer wanted. Spending without selling should not stay confined to people who have a private bank.
For the category, the next few years decide which version of this wins. The permissive version, where collateral quietly does something else while it sits there, has already been tried and it ended in bankruptcy filings. The version that lasts is the one a customer can verify without trusting anyone. Slower to build, and the only one that holds up in a drawdown.
About Artem Ponomarev
Artem Ponomarev is the Founder and CEO of XPlace, a digital wealth platform helping long- term crypto holders unlock liquidity, make payments and grow their wealth without selling their assets. With a background in venture capital, investment and financial risk management, Artem has founded fintech companies focused on consumer finance and digital wealth.
Artem began his career at venture capital firm Concentric VC, where he gained first-hand insight into fintech, investment strategy and financial innovation. He later co-founded Alvos, a Mexican fintech lender, giving him first-hand experience developing consumer lending products, credit infrastructure and financial services.
Drawing on those experiences, Artem founded XPlace to solve one of the biggest challenges facing long-term digital asset holders: accessing liquidity without having to sell their investments. Today, he is focused on redefining digital wealth management by building secure, non-custodial financial infrastructure that enables people to borrow, spend and grow their digital wealth without selling their assets.
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