From Patna to Institutional DeFi: How Akash Gaurav Is Building the Financing Layer Crypto Forgot to Build

In this episode of The Blockopedia podcast, Palladium Labs founder and CEO Akash Gaurav sat down with The Blockopedia’s Co-founder Mohammad Ahmad Khan to talk about his path from IIT Bombay to Bitcoin arbitrage to building institutional grade financial infrastructure, and why he believes financing assets matters just as much as tokenizing them.

Akash Gaurav‘s journey began far from crypto. Raised in a middle class family in Patna, he grew up around small scale entrepreneurship through his father’s textile business, but technology and startups were not part of the world around him until he arrived at IIT Bombay. Joining the college’s Innovation Cell in his first year, working on an autonomous car project, and watching peers build ambitious things reshaped what he expected of himself after graduation.

His introduction to Bitcoin came almost by accident, through a passing mention in a cryptography class taught by a professor who had personally received the Bitcoin whitepaper from Satoshi Nakamoto. That offhand comment sent Gaurav down a rabbit hole back in his dorm room in 2014, years before most of his peers, or most of India, had heard the word Bitcoin at all. He soon turned that early conviction into something practical, spotting a Bitcoin price gap between Indian and European markets and using banking channels through his brother in Italy to capture arbitrage profits for a couple of years before the market became too efficient for a college student to compete in.

What Government Certificates Taught Him About Institutions

Before Palladium, Gaurav built Auxesis, one of India’s earliest enterprise blockchain companies, working with NITI Aayog on tamper resistant, blockchain based certificates. The real lesson from that work, he said, was not about blockchain at all. It was about how large institutions actually adopt new technology: not because it is exciting, but because it reduces friction in existing workflows and manages risk within processes that already exist. That insight has stayed with him through every company since.

From a Personal Bitcoin Problem to Palladium Labs

Palladium Labs grew out of a problem Gaurav faced himself. After selling his first company, he converted most of the proceeds into Bitcoin, and over subsequent market cycles kept running into the same frustration: holding a valuable asset with no good way to put it to work without selling it. That question, how do you build better credit around Bitcoin, expanded as tokenized treasuries, equities and funds increasingly moved on chain. Gaurav realized the real gap was not tokenization itself but the financial infrastructure needed to actually use those tokenized assets, through borrowing, collateral markets and liquidity.

Why Canton, Not Ethereum or Solana

Institutional finance demands privacy and settlement certainty that public blockchains generally cannot offer, since banks cannot broadcast their positions and counterparties the way DeFi protocols do. Canton Network’s combination of private, atomic settlement with Daml’s ability to express financial agreements like loans, repos and derivatives in their native form is what convinced Gaurav to build Palladium’s entire stack on top of it rather than a more conventional public chain.

Alpine and the Genesis Fund

Palladium’s money market product, Alpine, lets users supply assets, earn yield, and borrow against their holdings without selling them, the same logic Gaurav applies personally to his own Bitcoin. Beyond serving users directly, Alpine is meant to become shared infrastructure other builders can plug into rather than reconstructing credit and liquidity engines from scratch. That thinking led to Palladium’s Genesis Fund, a 10 million dollar grants program for financial builders on Canton, launched in late June, which has already backed four companies with roughly sixteen more grants planned over the next year.

Financing Assets Matters as Much as Tokenizing Them

Gaurav was direct about a distinction he sees the industry underweighting: owning a tokenized asset and being able to finance it are two very different things. An institution holding tokenized treasuries can either sell a portion to raise cash, triggering a taxable event and changing its balance sheet, or borrow against the position and keep earning yield while accessing liquidity. Without financing infrastructure, he argued, trillions of dollars in tokenized assets on chain would sit largely idle.

Where AI Fits In

Gaurav sees AI increasingly stepping into roles blockchains have traditionally reserved for human or rule based observers, verifying and reconciling information at a scale neither pure automation nor human oversight could manage alone. He expects AI agents to take on more significant roles within blockchain systems over the next few years, working alongside the settlement guarantees blockchain already provides.

Looking Ahead

Gaurav’s five year vision for Palladium is one of invisibility: a company whose infrastructure underlies major on chain financial activity without users ever needing to know Palladium is there. On regulation, he was unambiguous, calling clarity an accelerant rather than a blocker for institutional adoption, while still crediting traditional banks with doing one thing better than crypto currently manages: protecting new, less tech savvy users from losing their funds.

Watch the full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COdJCCPvib4