Elliot Andrews and the end of the 100x conversation

Elliot Andrews has a sentence that would make an awkward slogan for a speculative frenzy: “The days of chasing 100x returns are over.” Coming from the chief executive of a digital-asset business, it is an intriguing way to greet the customers. The extraordinary payday has been part of crypto’s sales patter for years. Andrews is describing clients who have begun asking a less theatrical question: what belongs in the portfolio?

That question suits his career. Before he became CEO of Aspen Digital, Andrews worked in financial technology, eventually leading Asia Pacific at Dealogic. His professional world already contained investment banks, institutional clients and the systems that support them. When he moved into digital assets in 2021, he brought experience of institutions buying technology. The vocabulary changed. The need to understand the buyer travelled with him.

His route offers a useful view of a business often narrated through price charts. Follow Andrews and the landmarks become different: a client struggling with complexity, a wealth manager weighing a new service, an approval in Abu Dhabi. There are still tokens. There is also a considerable amount of work between a promising idea and something another person can responsibly consider owning.

A career spent learning the buyer

Andrews holds law and finance degrees from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and is a CFA charterholder. It is an education with room for both an investment proposition and the conditions attached to it. His later work would bring those concerns into the same conversation.

His career has included a London chapter as an investment-banking relationship manager at Dealogic between 2010 and 2012, followed by planning and strategy work at Discovery Networks International in 2012-2013. Back at Dealogic, he progressed through business development and client coverage. From 2018 to 2021, he led the Asia Pacific business. The progression put regional responsibility alongside years of dealing with clients.

There is a revealing continuity here. A relationship manager has to hear what a customer means, including the reservations tucked behind a polite question. A regional executive has to turn that understanding into a business. Those are useful disciplines when the next product requires customers to learn unfamiliar financial plumbing before they can even decide whether they want it.

The problem before the product

In 2022, while still head of business development, Andrews identified complexity as a major source of friction for prospective clients. His explanation connected simplicity, security and client service. People considering digital assets were trying to navigate a difficult environment; the service had to reduce that burden.

The distinction matters because complexity is easy to mistake for sophistication. An investor confronted by unfamiliar exchanges, storage arrangements and terminology may be learning a great deal without getting any closer to a decision. Andrews’s diagnosis placed a practical task in front of Aspen: make the process understandable enough for a client to examine the investment itself.

Custody sharpened the problem. In 2023, Andrews highlighted the difficulty institutions faced in understanding how digital-asset custody differed from arrangements for traditional assets. Before an investor can settle comfortably into a discussion about returns, there is the question of how the asset will be held. A dazzling presentation has limited powers against that question. Someone still needs to explain the arrangements.

For Andrews, these concerns sit close to the customer relationship. They make education part of the work of providing access. A client’s hesitation can contain useful information: perhaps the explanation is incomplete, perhaps the product does not fit, perhaps more work is required. Getting to a considered answer takes longer than getting someone to click.

“Clients want consistent, risk-adjusted performance.”

Elliot Andrews, October 2025

A CEO title, then a different kind of business

Andrews joined Aspen in 2021 with a business-development title and responsibilities spanning sales, marketing, product and operations. He became CEO on April 1, 2023. The appointment gave him a brief to develop the technology and pursue growth in Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

The breadth of his earlier role is telling. Product, operations and sales all meet at the moment a client tries to use a service. Responsibility across them places an executive close to the gap between what a platform promises and what its customers experience. His promotion came after working across those adjoining parts of the business.

By January 2024, Andrews was explaining Aspen’s role to independent wealth managers in terms of connections: exchanges, custody providers, staking services, structured products and investment funds. The technology brought counterparties together. The service also extended to product structuring, launch strategies and a platform that a wealth manager could offer under its own brand.

That last detail changes the scale of the relationship. A manager adopting Aspen’s technology has clients of their own to consider. Andrews’s customer may therefore need both a working service and a convincing explanation to pass along. Webinars, analysis and events belonged in that offering. The work of explanation had acquired its own distribution network.

An address with consequences

The Middle East element of Andrews’s brief became concrete in June 2024, when Aspen announced in-principle approval from Abu Dhabi’s Financial Services Regulatory Authority. The plan was to establish its financial-services headquarters in Abu Dhabi. In-principle approval was a step toward permission; the final permission still had to follow.

It arrived on December 11, 2024. Aspen Digital Financial Limited’s entry in the ADGM register records permission covering activities including custody, asset management, fund management, arranging investments and investment advice, alongside dealing as matched principal. For a CEO expanding a financial business, the list of permitted activities gives an ambition an operating shape.

Andrews marked the headquarters announcement by thanking his team, investors and clients. His public message described the work involved and the effort of colleagues who had helped bring it about. The move also puts a geographical arc through his Aspen years: Hong Kong at the time of his appointment, Abu Dhabi on his current professional profile.

What should Bitcoin do all day?

In April 2025, a partnership with Coinbase Asset Management gave a specific expression to the kind of access Andrews was building. Aspen was among the seed investors in the Coinbase Bitcoin Yield Fund and initially served as its exclusive wealth-distribution partner across the UAE and Asia. The fund launched on May 1.

The underlying question was simple enough: holders wanted a way to seek additional returns denominated in Bitcoin. Bitcoin ownership does not itself generate yield. A managed strategy introduces a different proposition, with terms and arrangements that have to be understood. The Coinbase fund’s published return objective was a target, carrying no guarantee of achievement.

For Andrews, the partnership made the intermediary role tangible. Aspen connected a private-wealth audience with a product created by another asset manager. His role in that chain was about access and distribution as well as understanding demand. It is recognisably related to the work he had described to independent managers a year earlier.

Another April 2025 announcement connected Aspen and Everest Ventures Group with the Stacks Asia Foundation. That collaboration concerned adoption of Stacks, a Bitcoin Layer 2 network, across Asian markets. Andrews’s remarks focused on holders wanting Bitcoin to have more productive uses. Alongside a managed fund, here was a technology ecosystem exploring another route to utility.

The two announcements show the range of his interests without making their approaches interchangeable. One concerned an investment vehicle. The other concerned a network and its adoption. In both, Andrews was addressing people who already understood Bitcoin as something they could hold and were considering what might come next.

Back to the room

Andrews’s public discussions can take unexpectedly concrete turns. In September 2023, Aspen advertised a webinar pairing him with BTX Technology’s Steve Piek and Anthony Jones on tokenizing horse racing. The subject was the accessibility and tradeability of horse ownership. Even a conversation about financial infrastructure can eventually find its way to the stables.

Tokenization also featured in his discussion at the 2023 Hubbis Investment Forum in Hong Kong, where he explored widening access to private-market investments. These are questions about the form an investment takes and the people who might gain access to it. They give his digital-asset interests a reach beyond buying a cryptocurrency and waiting for its price to move.

A photograph from an HKUST fireside chat catches another version of this work. Andrews holds a microphone in front of a room of students. Screens identify the discussion; the setting is a classroom, with all the ordinary proximity that implies. An unfamiliar idea eventually has to survive a room where someone can ask a follow-up question.

By October 2025, Andrews was describing clients who wanted consistent performance adjusted for risk, with crypto occupying a limited place in a diversified portfolio. That is a modest-sounding destination for a career in a market so fond of enormous numbers. It is also a demanding one. A place in someone’s portfolio comes with expectations that persist after the excitement of entry.

Andrews’s career has moved across countries, technologies and job titles. The recurring task is easier to recognise: understand what a client is trying to do, explain an unfamiliar service, and build the arrangements that make using it possible. Crypto supplies plenty of conversation about the future. His work keeps returning to the person deciding what to do on Monday.