Ambre Soubiran is chief executive of Kaiko, which was founded in Paris in 2014 to provide institutional-grade data, analytics, and data infrastructure across centralized and decentralized digital asset markets, covering spot and derivatives trading venues globally.

Kaiko said in a statement on 23 April 2026 that it had joined ISDA, the derivatives markets association, which Soubiran said reflects the increasing integration of digital asset markets in capital markets and financial market infrastructure.

In March this year S&P Dow Jones Indices and Kaiko announced the tokenization of the iBoxx U.S. Treasuries Index, which marked the first time that a major index provider made a financial benchmark available as a native digital asset on a blockchain, with embedded index data distribution, licensing and permissioning. The two firms aim to potentially bring other indices onchain.

– Why did you leave HSBC to join Kaiko back in 2014?

My crypto journey began in 2012, while working at HSBC in Equity Derivatives and Financing Solutions. I stumbled across the Bitcoin whitepaper while reading a blog (about maths and money), which led me down a rabbit hole: first meetup, first Bitcoin, and my curiosity was piqued.

Ambre Soubiran, Kaiko

What originally hooked me was the concept of digital scarcity. When you send Bitcoin, you no longer have it. Simple, but revolutionary in the world of “digital assets”. For the first time in financial engineering, we had technology enabling true digital ownership (hard to have true ownership without scarcity). At the same time, the LIBOR scandal unfolded, which enabled me to witness first-hand the consequences of data manipulation. This event deepened my conviction that data and transparency is foundational for markets to function.

Two years later, Ethereum was launched, and I found the combination of smart contract logic with the digital scarcity and a single ‘source of truth’ database to reconcile into to be extremely powerful, and so relevant to my world of collateralized lending solutions and equity derivatives.

I believed that blockchain technology would eventually become the underlying infrastructure for capital markets to move collateral and execute contracts more efficiently. In such a future “capital markets onchain” state of the world, where smart contracts orchestrate financial workflows, my conviction was that reliable data would be absolutely critical to enable disintermediated contract execution.

In 2016, I resigned from HSBC’s Global Equity and Capital Markets team and moved back to Paris to grow and scale Kaiko. In the early years, we had no clients, no team, limited market interest, and an enormous amount of hard work. Nearly 12 years later, Kaiko has grown into the leading independent provider of cryptocurrency market data and analytics.

– What has been useful in your current role from your banking career?

Over the first decade, Kaiko acted as a trusted data provider, enabling financial institutions to understand and interact with the digital assets (originally, crypto) markets, by delivering clean and accountable market data and analytics solutions. Today, Kaiko also delivers critical data (Kaiko Indices) and infrastructure (Kaiko on/-off-ramps) to bridge traditional and digital asset markets – connecting the established global financial system with the emerging world of tokenized assets, stablecoins, and financial innovation.

Having worked in banking gave me the ability to see the potential of digital asset technology, but also to be realistic about what needs improving and what doesn’t. Seeing both sides of the coin has made it possible for me to shape Kaiko into an infrastructure that bridges legacy systems and the digital world. Without an in-depth understanding of market structure, workflows, and how investors and traders actually think, it would have been very difficult to position ourselves the way we do today.

– Why did you want to bring the iBoxx US Treasuries Index onchain? What are the benefits of putting the index onchain?

U.S. Treasuries are increasingly being brought natively onchain, with initiatives like DTCC’s move onto the Canton network being a prime example. As the underlying securities become available on blockchain infrastructure, there’s a natural opportunity to bring the index layer on top. Tokenizing the iBoxx U.S. Treasuries Index was the logical next step: making an institutional-grade benchmark available onchain so developers and counterparties can build financial products with both the index and its underlying assets on the same infrastructure.

Importantly, this isn’t just about publishing the price of the benchmark onchain. S&P Dow Jones Indices and Kaiko have tokenized the iBoxx U.S. Treasuries Index as a programmable, permissioned data asset that encapsulates index data, licensing rights, and access controls simultaneously. Licensed participants receive a token that supports the distribution of the index for integration into digital-native financial products.

The benefits are significant. Onchain distribution gives S&P DJI better auditability and instantaneous reporting on how their IP is used, compared to TradFi’s delayed volume reporting and months-long settlement cycles. The token-plus-smart-contract architecture is also composable and reusable: the wrapping can be tailored to each use case without renegotiating a new licensing schedule, which massively speeds up time-to-market. AUM and turnover tracking, which is heavily manual in traditional markets, can be verified onchain, enabling new commercial models such as daily fee collection. And with Canton specifically, reporting stays private for institutional use cases like swaps while remaining public where appropriate, simplifying distribution across both product types.

– Do you expect onchain products to be built using this index?

Absolutely. The whole purpose of tokenizing a benchmark like this is to support financial products and protocols that reference institutional-quality data directly onchain. The token itself isn’t an investable product, but it enables developers and issuers to build index-linked products ̵...

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