Empire Fintech Conference, hosted by Empire Startups as part of New York Fintech Week, included a few hot takes on the regulation of cryptocurrency, the relevance of Web 3.0, and where venture capital wants to invest in this space.

The mix of one-on-one discussions and panels showed that as fintech has seen some fast-moving growth and deals, there is still plenty of reason to remain pragmatic about what may come next.

During a discussion of venture capital trends in fintech, moderator Kelly Fryer asked the panel if they were leaning more towards fintechs with B2B or SMB-focused models as potential gets for their portfolios. Fryer is executive director with FinTech Sandbox, a nonprofit advocate for and supporter of fintech startups. The panel included Jennifer Lee, partner with Edison Partners; Jordan Nof, co-founder and managing partner with Tusk Venture Partners; Christa Williams-Collett, senior vice president and investing principal with Citi Impact Fund; and Peggy Mangot, operating partner with PayPal Ventures. See the rest of the slideshow for their responses.

In a fireside chat with Donna Parisi, partner and global head of finance for law firm Shearman & Sterling, Flori Marquez, co-founder and senior vice president of operations with BlockFi, discussed the hypergrowth her company has seen as well as major policy matters the company had to contend with.

BlockFi is a blockchain crypto investment wealth management platform founded in 2017. Marquez said BlockFi’s first product was loans backed by crypto. “Since then, really what led to exponential growth was when we started offering interest on crypto assets,” she said. With that growth has come a pronounced need in crypto, Marquez said, for infrastructure and services that exist outside of crypto. “We’re still at the beginning of the growth stages for this entire ecosystem.”

BlockFi has grown from some 10,000 clients in 2019 to more than 600,000 in 2022, she said. “There’s this huge demand from people who’ve already invested in crypto and also from the mainstream.”

Regulators also have their eyes on this space. BlockFi agreed in February to pay $100 million in fines to settle charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission for “failing to register the offers and sales of its retail crypto lending product” as well as other violations. In discussing the issue with Parisi, Marquez framed the situation as something of a lesson learned.

“Crypto, in order to truly continue to mature and grow, needs regulatory clarity,” Marquez said. She explained that many organizations such as BlockFi did not know how these types of products should be regulated. The settlement with the SEC was in regard to the BlockFi interest account, she said, which allows interest to be earned on crypto. “From the moment that we launched that product, we knew there was regulatory uncertainty,” Marquez said.

BlockFi has worked with the SEC, she said, to create a construct for US citizens to earn interest on crypto in a regulated way. “We’ve figured out a way to register the product -- it will be called BlockFi Yield,” Marquez said. “What this marks is a new turning point in the maturity of the crypto space.”

More of Marquez’s comments and a selection of other speakers from the conference follow in the slideshow.