Founder Of The Week: Rico Van Der Veen

• Rico van der Veen is the Co-Founder and CEO of Programmable Credit Protocol (PCP) by SemiLiquid, building infrastructure that makes institutional lending programmable and automated.
• He first entered the blockchain space in 2014 after buying Bitcoin, later becoming inspired by the innovation that emerged during the 2020 DeFi boom.
• Through PCP, he is developing a non-custodial credit infrastructure that sends automated instructions to regulated custodians without ever holding assets itself.
• He founded PCP to tackle global collateral inefficiency, where trillions in high-quality assets remain underused due to slow and manual financial systems.

Tell Me About Yourself and PCP

I’m Rico van der Veen, Co-Founder and CEO of Programmable Credit Protocol (PCP). I began learning about blockchain when I bought my first Bitcoin in 2014. I was drawn in by the idea that ledger technology could eliminate expensive intermediaries. Then DeFi Summer happened in 2020, and I saw early smart-contract experiments build on each other, unlocking entirely new financial models. Smart contracts are automated agreements on a blockchain that execute themselves when conditions are met.

But, as the industry merges with traditional finance, my belief is that DeFi cannot serve institutional capital markets without the guardrails those markets require. PCP bridges that gap. We’re a non-custodial credit infrastructure that sends deterministic lock, unlock, margin, and liquidation instructions to regulated custodians, without ever touching assets. Think of us as SWIFT for secured credit: a messaging infrastructure that makes secured lending programmable, instant, and enforceable across any custodian, asset or blockchain.

What Inspired You To Start PCP, and What Problem Were You Trying To Solve?

In DeFi, a $50 million loan can be originated, collateralised, and enforced programmatically in under five minutes. In traditional finance, the same transaction can take weeks of legal negotiation, cost thousands in operational overhead, and rely on manual processes that have not fundamentally changed in decades.

I realised that DeFi’s core innovation, programmable collateral control, could be applied to institutional markets, provided the logic layer was separated from custody and supported by a legal framework. That’s the insight behind PCP: you do not need to hold assets to control the collateral. You just need deterministic instructions that custodians trust and execute. We are solving the $4 trillion collateral inefficiency problem, where high-quality assets sit idle because the infrastructure to mobilise them is too slow, too expensive, and too manual.

What Has Been Your Biggest Challenge So Far, and How Did You Overcome It?

The biggest challenge has been getting the first custody partner to say yes. As a new entrant building institutional infrastructure, you face a chicken-and-egg problem: banks want to see custody integrations before they engage, and custodians want to see bank demand before they commit. Breaking through that required finding a partner willing to bet on the vision early, and I am genuinely grateful to the Zodia Custody team (Sahil Sood) for placing their trust in us at the very beginning.

That first partnership changed everything. Once we were embedded in a live custody stack, the conversation shifted from, “Who are you?” to “When can we go live?” Now, as we expand into additional Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) providers and hold direct conversations with major banks, clearing houses, and asset managers, the dynamic is completely different. PCP is a feature inside custody systems that institutions already trust. We inherit that credibility. The hardest sale was the first one. Everyone after that compounds.

Can You Describe a Pivotal Moment That Significantly Shaped the Direction of PCP?

The moment we realised we should not be building another DeFi/token-based protocol. Early on, we were designing PCP as yet another onchain lending protocol: smart contracts, liquidity pools, the full DeFi playbook. However, every conversation with institutional players hit the same wall: they wanted the automation, but they could not use infrastructure that sat outside their custody and compliance frameworks. The pivotal shift was separating the logic from the custody.

Instead of building a protocol that holds assets, we built a messaging layer that talks to custodians who already hold them. That single architectural decision: non-custodial, off-chain instruction engine, working with regulated custody, unlocked every partnership we have today. From the biggest banks to the clearinghouses that are building tokenised asset infrastructure, none of it would have happened if we had stayed on the DeFi path. Sometimes the biggest breakthrough is realising what not to build.

How Do You Define Success?

For your business: Success is when programmable credit and tokenised assets operate as invisible infrastructure. While the industry is still explaining the technology, the real milestone is when a bank can originate a secured loan against tokenised treasuries, stocks, or any tokenised asset, and the entire lifecycle; origination, collateral lock, margin calls, liquidation, runs automatically through PCP-enabled triggers, without anyone thinking about it.

Like SWIFT for payments or FIX for trade execution: nobody talks about the protocol, they just use it. The metric is simple. When every major CaaS provider ships with PCP embedded by default, and lending desks treat programmable collateral control as a given rather than an innovation, we have won.

As a founder: Building something that outlasts me. PCP is not a product, it’s an infrastructure layer. If we get this right, programmable credit becomes a standard, not a feature. Personally, success means having built a team and a system that does not depend on any single person, including me. And proving that you don’t need an Ivy League pedigree or a traditional finance background to build infrastructure the world’s largest financial institutions rely on every day.

By just relentlessly focusing on learning and executing on what you think the world is moving towards. The 2014 version of me buying my first Bitcoin would find this pretty surreal.

What Advice Would You Give To Someone Thinking About Launching Their Own Startup?

Build for the problem, not the technology. I’ve seen hundreds of crypto projects fail because they are caught up in their own architecture instead of the pain point they were solving. The market doesn’t care how clever your design is. It cares whether you make something cheaper, faster, or safer.

Additionally, learn the language of your customer. If you are selling to banks, understand their regulatory constraints, their capital models, their operational workflows. We only started gaining real traction when we stopped saying “blockchain” and started saying: “95% cheaper than tri-party, origination and settlement in under five minutes, with deterministic collateral enforcement that eliminates the counterparty risk keeping your compliance team up at night.” Same product, completely different reception. Meet your customer where they are, not where you think they should be.

What’s Next for PCP? Any Exciting Developments We Should Watch Out For?

A lot is converging at once. In May, we go live with our first product: overcollateralised digital asset lending with institutional-grade settlement rails via our lead custody partner. Real market participants, real assets, real custody: our proof of concept in action.

Through Q2 2026, we expand to additional chains, tokenised assets and participants.

The bigger milestone comes in Q4 2026: bank-to-client lending against tokenised US Treasuries and major ETFs, as the world’s largest securities depositories bring their assets on-chain. That’s when PCP moves from digital-native collateral to the most systemically important asset class in the world.

In parallel, we’re collaborating with central counterparties for central clearing and running pilots with major market infrastructure providers to prep for interbank repo in early 2027. In short: we start with crypto collateral, graduate to tokenised Treasuries, and scale into the institutional repo market, each phase funding and validating the next.

Founder’s 5 with Rico Van Der Veen

Here’s TechRound’s exclusive Founder’s 5 with

Favourite business tool

Slack. Everything runs through it: custody partner coordination, bank onboarding threads, engineering sprints, even investor updates. When you’re building infrastructure that sits between custodians, banks and clearing houses across multiple time zones, speed of communication is everything. Email is where deals go to die.

One lesson you learned the hard way?

Do not mistake interest for intent. Early on, we had major institutions telling us they loved the concept, requesting follow-up meetings, introducing us to internal teams. We treated every warm conversation as a pipeline. It isn’t. Until there’s a signed agreement or a live integration, it’s simply enthusiasm. Learning to distinguish the two saved us from building to the wrong signals.

One future trend you’re watching?

Tokenised deposits vs. stablecoins. Banks currently pay 0.2% on deposits, while stablecoins offer higher yield, rewards, and instant utility. The next wave will be tokenised bank money: first deployed internally to optimise treasury and collateral operations, then offered externally to compete with stablecoins on real utility. Banks that make deposits work harder will pass yield to clients; those that don’t risk seeing funds walk out the door.

One quote you live by

“Move fast, but break nothing.” We are not building a consumer application. We are building plumbing for institutional credit markets. Speed matters, but so does precision. One bad instruction to a custodian and trust evaporates overnight.

One book/podcast you recommend

“The Lords of Easy Money” by Christopher Leonard. It explains how the Fed’s monetary plumbing actually works, and why the infrastructure underneath credit markets matter more than most people realise. To see why we’re building this, start here.

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