At the start the institutional phase for the validator nodes of the RIV Chain, the blockchain on which RIV Coin will be born. DAO structure, real underlying and no rehypothecation to attract security-seeking investors
RIV Coin, the first cryptocurrency whose underlying is backed by a reserve of real assets, has come to market (see here a previous article by BeBeez). The invested reserves are managed by RIV Capital, an innovative group based in Luxembourg and Dubai, founded by Roberto Rivera.
The money of those who buy RIV Coins is invested in an investment strategy that has a history starting in 2011 and has a track record of great performance. That strategy is exactly the one also used in RAIF, the Luxembourg alternative fund that serves as the core investment for the holding company.
From launch until today, in fact, the strategy has returned 33.47 percent in terms of total return. That’s a good calling card for Alessandro Delia Russell, managing director and global head of sales at RIV Capital, with a decade-long background at Jefferies as managing director, Equity Sales for Italy and Spain and even before that at Nomura and Lehman Brothers as managing director, Equity Sales for italy, who is now placing with institutional investors and family offices the RIV Capital Sicav RAIF, a Luxembourg-law hedge fund launched in October 2023, but which adopts the investment strategy mentioned above.
Precisely that investment strategy has been RIV’s workhorse, ever since the club deal of private investors invested in RIV Capital, the group’s Luxembourg holding company, in 2021, putting their trust in Mr. Rivera, formerly at Lehman Brothers, who in the early 2000s had been among the key players in the then nascent securitization market in Italy, with a background in European and American investment companies in London, Frankfurt and Milan, such as American Express Bank, Dresdner Bank, Banca IMI and Nomura
Today the holding company has a fully diluted pre-money valuation of about 120 million euros based on a positive adjusted ebitda of about 7.5 million. Mr. Rivera has in fact diversified the allocation of capital raised and deposited with UBS Luxembourg, also investing in private markets, an approach that, he confided to BeBeez, “has helped us a lot in the dark times of the stock market, allowing us to more than compensate for declines in listed markets.”
Investments in private markets include, for example, 15 percent of the well-known super-luxury venue Billionaire Dubai, an iconic entertainment venue founded and led by entrepreneur Flavio Briatore. RIV also owns other minority stakes in companies where other well-known names in finance have invested.
Returning to the RIV Coin, “we have just begun institutional pre-sales for the validator nodes of the RIV Chain, the quantum-resistant blockchain on which we will launch the RIV Coin,” Mr. Rivera told BeBeez. The RIV Coin will be issued by a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), christened the RIV Capital DAO. The RIV DAO is thus the only real party responsible for issuing the tokens and is an orphan and nonprofit foundation that guarantees the pledge on the real assets in exclusive favor of the users of the tokens. In other words, the RIV Coin is the first real crypto that excludes by definition and a priori the so-called “rehypothecation,” i.e., the possibility for anyone to reuse the funds and/or digital assets as collateral for their own transactions: i.e., what has occurred to date in glaring cases of fraud such as for FTX (see here a previous article by BeBeez). The nodes validate transactions and participate in the governance of the DAO, which in this case will not only be software, but will also have a legal dress and will in fact be structured as a foundation..
This is because, Mr. Rivera further explained, “we want this cryptocurrency to be regarded as the most secure in the world in terms of the reliability of its structure and compliance with international regulations. We have built with integrity an infrastructure to serve users exclusively.” Without going into more complex technical discussions, the Zero Knowledge Proof protocol can be summarized by highlighting how a central role is played by the validation and notarization on blockchain of values determined in real time by third-party, independent and external counterparties.
Now, Mr. Rivera added, “once the pre-sale of the validator nodes is finished, the possibility of buying RIV Coin will open up, first in presale and then on both centralized and decentralized exchanges.” In Italy RIV Capital, through its Italian subsidiary RIV Digital srl, already has authorization to operate as a VASP, being enrolled in the Register of Providers of Services in Virtual Currencies, managed by the Organismo Agenti e Mediatori (OAM), i.e., the ‘list in which natural or legal persons offering services related to virtual currencies, such as exchange, storage and conversion from or to legal currencies must enroll.
After the summer break, RIV Digital itself, like other companies, will proceed with the regulatory adjustments already provided for in the Official Gazette Decree Law No. 95 of June 30, 2025 (Omnibus Decree), which by Art. 10 extended the transitional regime for operators registered in the VASP Registry and thus of the deadline for adaptation to the European MiCAR authorization regime (see here a previous article by BeBeez). VASPs, therefore, can continue to operate, for the time being, according to the current national regulations until next December 30 and will be able to continue their activities until June 30, 2026, provided they: apply for authorization as CASPs by December 30, 2025, in Italy or in another EU state or are part of a group that submits such an application by the same date.
On the subject of meeting MiCAR requirements, as of July 7 there were already 53 institutions, including major stablecoin issuers and cryptocurrency providers, that have been granted MiCAR authorization. Among this, however, are major absentees such as Tether, the USDT issuer, which, having not yet complied with MiCA requirements, has been removed from several EU-based exchanges, including Coinbase and Crypto.com (see here CryptoState).
Mr. Rivera goes on to ask, “How is it possible that Tether continues to print billions of USDT without a proper independent audit and without any regulatory authority seriously intervening, while far more transparent projects are continually obstructed?”
RIV Capital’s Italian subsidiary, RIV Digital, led by ceo Alvise Di Stefano, a former lawyer and co-founder of J-Invest, a well-known name in Italian finance, will be the one who will file the application with Consob and is the same company through which RIV Capital acquired WeChain srl, founded by Davide Cortese and specialized in educating professionals and companies in the field of blockchain, decentralized finance and practical applications such as NFT and security tokens, offering a revolutionary teaching method via video pills (see here a previous article by BeBeez). RIV Digital then also achieved official trainer status by obtaining EFA and EFPA certifications for each of the courses.
“In a crypto landscape still dominated by regulatory opacity and ambiguity, RIV Coin proposes itself as a clean break with the past: the choice to exclude a priori rehypothecation, to guarantee a real underlying validated by independent third parties, and to base the entire issuance on a legally structured DAO represents a radical statement of intent: to restore trust where others have compromised it,” Mr. Rivera concluded.
