How Phil Sham Quietly Built An Institutional Crypto Infrastructure Powerhouse

From Canadian trading floors to more than $130 billion in digital asset volume, the Aquanow co-founder built a global liquidity and infrastructure business by standing his ground

Phil Sham does not sound like a founder trying to sell a revolution.

He sounds like someone who has spent years watching how markets actually work.

Ask him about Aquanow, the digital asset infrastructure and liquidity provider he co-founded in 2018, and he does not begin with slogans about disruption. He talks about market structure, liquidity, inefficient spreads, technology, risk and the discipline required to build through cycles.

That discipline has helped Aquanow grow from a Vancouver-founded market maker into a global infrastructure business that has processed more than $130 billion in volume, serves clients across more than 50 countries, supports more than 300 institutional clients and has grown to a team approaching 200 people globally. The company operates with licenses and registrations across key markets, with additional regulatory work in progress.

Its role has also become more visible through publicly announced relationships with institutions such as Visa and Emirates NBD’s Liv. Visa partnered with Aquanow to expand stablecoin settlement capabilities across Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Emirates NBD’s Liv introduced crypto services on the Liv X app through a partnership with Aquanow, with Aquanow operating the brokerage behind the offering.

Those names help explain Aquanow’s relevance. But they do not fully explain Phil Sham.

Canadian-born, with family roots in Hong Kong, Sham came up through a financial industry where access, trust and credibility were earned in demanding rooms. Canadian trading floors were still shaped by old networks and old habits. Sham’s route through them was not built on self-promotion, but on technical fluency, market knowledge and the ability to understand how trading systems actually work.

That background would later shape how he saw crypto.

Before founding Aquanow, Sham worked across equities, electronic trading and quantitative markets. When he first started looking at crypto in 2013 and 2014, it was not because he saw a movement to join. It was because he recognized a market structure opportunity.

Some of the same technologies used in high-frequency trading were appearing in crypto mining. Later, as digital assets became more visible around 2017 and 2018, Sham saw something familiar: a young market with fragmented liquidity, immature infrastructure and wide spreads.

“At the time, trading Bitcoin was the same as trading stocks,” he says. The difference was that crypto’s market structure was far less developed.

For a trader, that mattered. For a builder, it mattered even more.

In traditional asset classes, launching a new trading or infrastructure business required significant capital, institutional access and scale from day one. Crypto was different. It was early, inefficient and more open.

“Everyone was kind of on a level playing field,” Sham says.

Aquanow began with a practical idea: make the market more efficient. Sham, together with co-founders Andy Leung and Jae Moon, initially saw an opportunity to bring more sophistication to digital asset markets, particularly in Canada, where spreads were wide and infrastructure was still immature.

“Back then, it was just to make the market more efficient,” Sham says.

As the market evolved, so did Aquanow.

The team began to see that the larger opportunity was not simply trading digital assets. If crypto was going to mature into a serious financial market, institutions would need more than access to Bitcoin. They would need liquidity, technology, custody, payments capabilities, operational support and infrastructure designed for a more complex environment.

In other words, they would need building blocks.

That idea became central to Aquanow’s evolution. Rather than build around one narrow use case, the company focused on the components institutions would need as digital assets moved closer to mainstream finance.

“We’re basically building the building blocks,” Sham says.

It is a simple phrase, but it captures the company’s strategy. Banks, brokerages, payment companies, fintechs and enterprises do not all come to digital assets with the same objective. Some need liquidity. Others need execution, settlement, wallet infrastructure, crypto payments support or stablecoin capabilities. Many want access to digital asset markets without carrying the full burden of technology, market connectivity, compliance workflows and operational risk themselves.

Aquanow’s job is to absorb that complexity and give clients a clearer path to market.

That client-first discipline matters because in institutional finance, digital assets are only useful when they can be made reliable, controlled and operational inside real financial systems.

The company’s growth has also been shaped by what it chose not to do.

Crypto rewards speed, risk and attention. Sham’s approach has been more restrained. He talks about survival as an operating discipline, not a default outcome.

“Crypto is also about survival,” he says. “You have to go back to first principles and ask what risk is actually being taken. When everyone else appears to be moving faster or looking more competitive, that’s when you have to stand your ground.”

That pressure was especially clear during periods when competitors offered unusually high yields or aggressive growth products. Clients could see higher numbers elsewhere. Competitors appeared to be moving faster. Internally, the temptation to chase the market was real.

But if the market justified one level of return and another platform was offering far more, Sham believed something else had to be happening. Growth may have been subsidized by investor capital, or hidden risk may have been moving through the system.

For Aquanow, standing its ground became part of the company’s operating discipline: remain open-minded, but do not become reactive; adapt to the market, but do not let the market dictate your standards.

That same principle has shaped Aquanow’s culture. Sham does not present leadership as performance.

“I don’t lead in the conventional sense,” he says. “We’re trying to build something great together. We’re all sharing the risk.”

That sentiment says a lot about how Aquanow has been built. The company’s culture is not about a founder-centric hierarchy. It is about trust, ownership and responsibility in a market where both euphoria and fear can distort judgment.

For Sham, trust means people taking accountability, understanding each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and staying steady when the market changes. It also means caring enough about clients to avoid easy answers when those answers carry risks they may not see.

As digital assets move from speculative conversation into institutional strategy, Sham’s original thesis feels increasingly relevant: the opportunity was never just crypto as an asset class, but the infrastructure required to make it useful inside financial systems.

That infrastructure is built slowly. It requires judgment, restraint and the ability to keep building when the market is either euphoric or discouraged.

“Not many people have the ability to be patient,” Sham says.

For Aquanow, that patience may be its most important advantage. In an industry often defined by noise, Sham’s story suggests the next phase of crypto will be led by companies making digital assets work quietly, reliably and at scale.