How MakeBanc Aims to Bring Institutional Liquidity Into Crypto Through Trust and Security

Table of Contents

• You might want to know


• Main Topic


• Key Insights Table


• Afterwards...

You might want to know

• What keeps institutions from deploying more capital into crypto, and how does MakeBanc propose to reduce those barriers?


• Can investors access professional trading strategies without giving up control of their assets?

Main Topic

MakeBanc founder Chris Mihos describes the company as his fifth entrepreneurial venture. In an interview, he reflected on lessons from earlier startups and explained why he sees a growing opportunity at the intersection of institutional finance and crypto. His central argument is that the next phase of adoption depends less on hype and more on solving concrete problems: making digital-asset strategies easier to access, making custody safer, and reducing the operational burden involved in using them.

Mihos says he has worked across mining, energy, fashion, retail, and crypto. He characterizes his record as four learning experiences and one exit, and compares founding a company to an endurance sport. The most important lesson he draws from that experience is to distinguish a genuine, costly pain point from a problem that is merely inconvenient. In his view, a successful product should work like a painkiller rather than a vitamin: it should address a need important enough that customers are motivated to act.

He also argues that “crypto” is not a single category. It can refer to commodities, such as Bitcoin as a potential store of value; equity-like assets, such as Ethereum, Hyperliquid, and Aave, which may have operating activity and profit potential; currencies, including stablecoins that function as fiat equivalents; and technology, meaning the infrastructure beneath these assets. Mihos sees a significant opportunity as institutions use crypto technology and stablecoins to trade equivalents of conventional securities and commodities.

Two barriers to institutional adoption

According to Mihos, two broad barriers have historically limited institutional participation. The first is technical complexity. Users may need to understand key management, global payment and trading rails, staking, bridging, and the principle commonly expressed as “not your keys, not your assets.” These requirements create a substantial learning curve for individuals as well as institutions.

The second barrier comes from traditional finance. Institutional participants are often less focused on maximizing returns at any cost than on avoiding losses and managing risk. That emphasis contrasts with early crypto culture, which frequently celebrated rapid growth and “to the moon” narratives, including during the meme-coin era. Mihos believes the industry is moving into a more mature phase, where products must help users earn, protect, and use capital while making the underlying complexity less visible.

MakeBanc’s proposed approach is to let specialized professionals manage strategies while the platform handles supporting infrastructure. Mihos believes experienced asset managers—people with backgrounds in hedge funds, arbitrage, directional trading, and combinations of strategies—are better positioned to make investment decisions than a general-purpose platform. His shorthand is: let experts do the work they are expert at.

Providing access to those managers safely is the difficult part. Historically, one route has been to use separately managed accounts (SMAs) at major exchanges such as Binance, where liquidity is available. But an exchange-based arrangement can create counterparty concerns: users need to consider who controls their assets, what happens if a service fails, and whether funds could be compromised or exploited.

MakeBanc says it aims to separate asset ownership from trading activity. It works with partners to maintain non-custodial ownership while professional managers carry out transactions. The company also describes its protection model as including 100% asset insurance against technical risks. It seeks to simplify both fiat and crypto access, including through a fiat virtual account intended to offer an experience comparable to services such as Revolut, Wise, or other neobanks. The name MakeBanc is a play on “make bank,” a slang expression for making money.

Trust built through verifiable performance and custody design

Mihos describes MakeBanc’s approach to trust through the phrase “Only the paranoid survive.” He says that in crypto, caution is a practical necessity, not simply a slogan. The company divides trust into three areas: the credibility of returns, the credibility of custody, and the design of the product itself.

For returns, MakeBanc says it aims to work with managers who have verifiable records. Mihos is skeptical of relying on backtests alone, describing them as fictional representations of what might have happened rather than evidence of actual results. The company says it wants to provide verified performance and to work with managers who have operated through real periods of market volatility. Investors, in this model, assess the managers’ track records rather than relying solely on claims made by a new platform.

For custody, the company says it works with institutional providers such as Ceffu, keeps assets in cold storage, and connects to Binance for trade execution. It presents this arrangement as a structural safeguard. The third trust layer is deliberate restraint in product design. MakeBanc says it does not build around looping or exaggerated leverage. Its accounting system is on-chain, while trading takes place off-chain. Mihos describes this relatively unflashy design as a feature, and points to insurance as another important part of the protection framework.

The core trust proposition is to reduce the need for users to rely on opaque promises by combining visible ownership, defined permissions, verifiable performance, and safeguards around custody. Mihos says the company aims to introduce the people behind the service openly, rather than asking users to trust an anonymous platform.

A marketplace that serves both investors and managers

Mihos considers MakeBanc a kind of institutional marketplace, even though it does not charge asset managers simply for being listed. The company initially expected to focus on the barriers that investors face when trying to access asset managers. After developing its minimum viable product (MVP), it says it recognized a parallel infrastructure gap on the manager side: asset managers also need operational tools to bring clients onto a platform. Mihos says some managers have urged the company to launch so that they can onboard their own customers.

He describes a broader shift from SMAs toward fund structures, partly because setting up non-custodial trading can involve significant infrastructure friction. But a fund structure may transfer custody to a fund manager whom an investor does not personally know. MakeBanc’s preferred model, as Mihos presents it, is to limit the permissions any intermediary has over an investor’s assets. The intended result is greater user control and transparency, rather than reliance on a generic “trust me” assurance.

Four routes into crypto, and a focus on active management

The interview identifies four broad routes through which institutions may seek crypto exposure: exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which may not provide yield; decentralized finance (DeFi), which can involve elevated risk; hedge funds, which may raise custody, lockup, and fee concerns; and traditional SMAs. Mihos says MakeBanc’s infrastructure is designed to support these different routes, but that its immediate focus is the emotional and practical burden of passive buy-and-hold exposure.

Crypto’s volatility can make holding assets through sharp declines difficult. Mihos says traditional-finance specialists may view that same volatility as an opportunity to manage exposure. He describes MakeBanc’s model as somewhat like an actively managed ETF: an active strategy can adjust positions to manage risk and limit drawdowns from a peak. As an example of market psychology, he says a 40% decline in Bitcoin can cause investors to lose confidence, even when they remain interested in long-term exposure.

In his view, the choice is not simply whether to put everything into crypto or avoid it entirely. Many investors want exposure without feeling constantly exposed to risk. One approach is to combine actively managed strategies with diversification across multiple vaults, rather than choosing one strategy and concentrating all funds there. MakeBanc’s infrastructure is intended to let users select a basket of vaults, each connected to a particular manager or strategy.

Mihos distinguishes this offering from tokenized Treasury products such as BUIDL and BENJI, as well as structured credit. He characterizes those as part of a trillion-dollar pathway centered on traditional Treasury yields. He argues that taking DeFi risk solely to pursue a 3% yield may produce a poor alignment between risk and return, and that investors seeking that type of return may be better served by a traditional-finance route.

MakeBanc, by contrast, says it is pursuing real returns from verified trading strategies, with the aim of achieving returns 2–3 times higher than staking yield. Mihos contrasts these strategies with token emissions whose underlying value may be difficult to assess. He likens direct access to specialist strategies to obtaining goods from a factory rather than through multiple intermediaries, and argues that crypto technology can make access to such strategies more widely available.

The platform’s intended role is to simplify the user’s decision. Investors may know the kind of return and volatility they are willing to accept, but may not want to complete 20 separate steps to gain exposure. MakeBanc aims to abstract away some of those steps without hiding the underlying nature of the investment.

Business model: infrastructure rather than investment management

Mihos compares MakeBanc’s role to Stripe’s role in payments. He recalls founding an e-commerce company in 2009 and spending three months integrating a payment gateway. The necessary components existed, but they were not yet brought together in a sufficiently simple way. He says the combination of Shopify and Stripe was not then as accessible as it is today.

MakeBanc describes its revenue model as a platform fee plus an automated transaction fee. For example, if an asset manager earned $100,000 in performance compensation, MakeBanc would charge a processing fee for automating the associated movement of funds—a process that managers previously had to handle manually. The manager may collect the performance fee, while MakeBanc charges an infrastructure fee based on a percentage of capital flowing through the platform. Part of that fee goes to the custodian, with the remainder supporting the company’s operations.

Mihos says the company is optimistic about reducing operational friction, particularly when a process that once took six, eight, or twelve weeks can be completed in minutes. He believes MakeBanc can scale as a small, capable team rather than requiring thousands of employees. He also sees AI as a potential accelerator. Unlike a service that must connect to 10,000 financial institutions in the United States, a blockchain such as Base already records transactions on a shared, verifiable network. In his analogy, the blockchain can function as a kind of Plaid because activity is visible on-chain.

The company’s near-term growth, Mihos says, depends more on product-market fit than on inventing an entirely new category. Asset managers already understand how to operate an SMA; MakeBanc aims to provide the infrastructure around it. The company says it has pipelines of both managers and investors interested in using the service.

Target users, diversification, and future development

MakeBanc says it focuses on user profiles rather than particular regions such as Hong Kong or Singapore. One group is “recovering degens”: people who have spent time deep in crypto, built up wealth, and still want exposure but no longer want to monitor markets in the middle of the night. Another group is yield seekers who are interested in crypto but unsure how to enter. Mihos says these prospective users may ask a crypto-experienced friend for advice rather than searching online.

He notes that some people in this group have only held Bitcoin, and may feel uncertain about volatility after a decline from a high of 120K to around 80K. They may want alternatives to simply holding and hoping. On the other side of the platform, asset managers are distributed globally. MakeBanc says it intends to serve as their infrastructure partner, while managers remain responsible for the jurisdictions in which they are licensed and conduct marketing.

On custody diversification, Mihos says legal due diligence found Ceffu and Binance to be separate entities, despite Ceffu’s history with Binance Custody. He says the company designed its on-chain orchestration vault partly to support future diversification. A user’s exposure to one strategy could be split among custodians such as Komainu, Copper ClearLoop, and BitGo, without changing the overall user experience. One vault could, in effect, become three vaults holding the same strategy across different custodians. MakeBanc says it expects to add more custodians, exchange venues, and asset managers as it moves beyond its MVP.

Looking toward the period from now to May 2027, Mihos says MakeBanc has no current token plan. He believes the industry is reassessing when tokens are useful and whether airdrops retain users or instead give early participants a reason to sell. The company may revisit token economics if they become relevant to its business.

Over the next 3–6 months, MakeBanc says it plans to focus on three areas. First, it wants to make crypto less technically demanding. At launch, users need to bring a MetaMask wallet and connect a Safe wallet, which assumes familiarity with self-custody and security. The company is evaluating embedded-wallet tools such as Privy, which could offer a Web2-like experience with Web3 infrastructure underneath.

Second, the company wants to let users move more easily between fiat and crypto. Mihos says that flexibility could support global payments, cards, and automated financial workflows. Third, MakeBanc plans to build relationships with more asset managers, including traditional-finance managers moving into crypto. The company hopes to become a preferred infrastructure partner, so emerging managers can use established services instead of building institutional-scale systems from scratch.

Further ahead, Mihos sees potential demand from wealth-management platforms, family offices, and licensed financial advisers seeking access to yield products while retaining the ability to structure ownership. He also anticipates “agentic wealth management,” in which automated agents operate on top of a permissioned vault structure. He describes the vaults’ conservative design as a foundation for such automation. The interview points to progress in open-core systems, harnesses, and related tools over the past 12-16 weeks as a reason this direction could develop quickly.

Finally, Mihos expects retail users and institutional treasuries to seek more sophisticated access to global financial rails while still wanting a simple interface. He frames this as a central opportunity for the next 18 months: combine the reach and programmability of crypto infrastructure with more comprehensible products, stronger risk controls, and a clear account of who controls assets and how strategies operate.

Key Insights Table

Afterwards...

MakeBanc’s vision reflects a broader question facing digital finance: can technology make sophisticated strategies more accessible without making risks harder to see? Resolving that question will require more than a simple interface. It will depend on robust custody arrangements, transparent reporting, clear legal structures, and reliable methods for verifying performance. Independent assessment of insurance coverage and operational controls will also matter as platforms expand.

Several areas deserve continued exploration. Better standards for on-chain and off-chain accounting could help investors compare products and understand where activity occurs. Interoperable custody and settlement systems could reduce reliance on a single provider or trading venue. Embedded wallets may lower the learning curve, but should preserve clear recovery options and user control. AI agents could automate portfolio tasks, but they will need permission boundaries, audit trails, and safeguards against acting beyond an investor’s stated risk tolerance.

Institutional participation will also depend on how effectively crypto services connect with existing financial rules and responsibilities. Research into risk measurement, stress testing, market liquidity, and the behavior of active strategies during severe downturns can help distinguish durable products from attractive marketing. The lasting opportunity is not simply to bring more capital into crypto, but to make access understandable, verifiable, and appropriately controlled. If technology can reduce operational friction while strengthening those protections, both institutions and individual investors may be better equipped to use digital-asset markets on informed terms.