What do billion-dollar asset managers really think about your token?

Pranav Kanade manages Digital Assets Alpha Fund, an actively managed crypto strategy at VanEck, one of the world’s largest asset managers with over $116B in assets under management. In this episode, Amanda and Pranav unpack how traditional finance approaches the space, how they evaluate projects, what good tokenomics actually look like, and why most founders misunderstand what institutional investors care about.

They dive into Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and even a few DePIN projects and dig into why some play well with capital allocators while others don’t stand a chance. Pranav shares what makes a token investable, how he thinks about liquidity, governance, and incentives, and what’s still broken in the DeFi–TradFi bridge.

This episode pulls back the curtain on what it takes for a crypto project to earn the attention of a firm like VanEck and reveals how institutions really view the space.