A ‘tsunami’ of wealth is headed for crypto: Nansen’s Alex Svanevik

Nansen founder Alex Svanevik believes the crypto market is on the verge of an explosive few years.

“It’s like a tidal wave, you know, a tsunami that’s coming,” he tells Magazine, pointing to the trillions of dollars in assets held by older generations about to be transferred to their heirs.

“I think something like $100 trillion is going to be inherited in the next 20 years or so. There are all these kinds of forces that I think just drive crypto upwards,” says the Norwegian-born, Singapore-based crypto entrepreneur.

“It’s one of a bunch of reasons why I think crypto is fundamentally inevitable,” he declares, explaining that it opens the door for a younger generation far more willing to invest in digital assets.

Gen Z significantly more trusting than boomers

Svanevik says that the average boomer’s investment portfolio is crypto-lite compared to the average millennial’s, which has “quite a lot.” Gen Z are five times more trusting of crypto than boomers, according to a recent survey by crypto exchange OKX.

Svanevik points out the younger generation will not only be inheriting cash, but also real estate, stocks, and businesses. 

He said that if only 3% of those assets flow into crypto, the market could effectively double from its current $3.05 trillion market cap, with individual crypto asset prices surging far higher.

“They’re going to go up way more because of how pricing works in markets,” he explains.

He even thinks that forecasts could be too conservative. “If you just think of their investment preferences, a lot of that is going to go into crypto,” he says.

Svanevik reveals biggest challenge in crypto industry

One reason crypto has failed to widely win over older, more skeptical investors may be that the products are not yet good enough, according to Svanevik.

“The incentives have been to launch tokens,” he says, arguing that chasing token launches instead of building world-class products is a mistake. But he now believes the infrastructure is finally mature enough to build sophisticated products.

“The product we have built could not have been built two or three years ago because the infrastructure wasn’t there,” he says. “The wallet technology wasn’t good enough,” he says.

Nansen is an onchain analytics platform launched by Svanevik with co-founders Lars Bakke Krogvig and Evgeny Medvedev in 2020. It has expanded its analytics capabilities over the years, but only recently have traders been able to both gain insights and execute trades on the same platform.

“I think the number one problem is like, we have to build better products, and when we do that, we will get more users, we’ll get more traction, and it’ll be more sustainable than, you know, punting on the next meme coin.”

He stresses it isn’t a talent problem, emphasizing that the crypto industry is full of talent. 

Who is Alex Svanevik? 

Svanevik stumbled across Ethereum in 2017 and within a year knew he wanted to join crypto full-time. He joined CoinFi as chief data scientist in 2018, but the crypto crash that year cut that stint shorter than he anticipated. However, it was the perfect setup to start developing Nansen with his co-founders Krogvig and Medvedev.

He named the platform after Norwegian scientist and explorer Fridtjof Nansen. “I think of people in crypto as kind of like explorers. They’re going to places where no one’s ever been, yeah? And they’re venturing out into the unknown. They’re taking a lot of risks,” he says.

“I think having an idol who embodied those values of courage, curiosity, transparency, speed, and moving fast makes a lot of sense,” he adds.

Svanevik says he isn’t in crypto to make mega bucks and keeps life fairly simple — he doesn’t even own a car.

“I think the thing that motivates me is that vision to basically create the future of finance, you know, where every asset is tokenized. Billions of people are owners, and blockchains are the financial fabric of the future,” he says.

“Frankly, it sounds cheesy, but like, literally, that is the motivation,” he says.

Svanevik has been in the tech industry since graduating from the University of Bergen with a Bachelor of Cognitive Science in 2009.

In August 2010, he co-founded his first data analytics company, Codeus Ltd, where he developed an end-to-end analytics solution for an electrical engineering company.

In May 2014, he began a 4-year stint at Schibsted Media Group, where he started as a data scientist and rose the ranks quickly within the company.

Crypto market may be too aligned with Trump administration 

Svanevik is worried crypto is becoming too connected to US politics.

“The current administration has aligned itself very closely with crypto,” he says, arguing that “it is almost like if that administration is popular, that’s correlated with crypto doing well because, and conversely, if it’s less popular, that’s bad for crypto.”

Svanevik points out that uncertainty over the next election could be adding to the jitters. 

While Svanevik says that there have been many “positive drivers” for crypto from regulations to adoption, at the same time, from a markets perspective it has “been quite weak” in recent times.

“If we look at 2025, it was a very strange year, because there were a lot of really positive things to happen in crypto, but at the same time, prices were relatively depressed, and we didn’t get kind of the altcoin market. Meme coins did poorly and so on and so forth,” he says.

However, he says that once the CLARITY Act passes through Congress, it will lead to a “new era for crypto in the US.”

“The rest of the world is going to follow. That’s one big factor,” he says.