Reference
Glossary.
The working vocabulary of disruptive-technology capital markets, defined in the institutional register. Terms are stated the way the firm uses them in mandates and documentation.
Merchant bank
A financial institution that combines advisory work with principal investment — committing its own capital alongside its clients' rather than only advising on theirs.
Mandate
The formal engagement under which a firm acts for a client on a transaction or standing basis. The unit of trust in advisory work.
Tombstone
The formal record of a completed transaction — parties, role, and date — published in the restrained register of an annual report's back pages.
League table
A ranking of financial institutions by transaction volume or count within a defined market. No credible league table yet exists for disruptive-technology capital markets.
Capital structure
The full stack of a company's financing: common and preferred equity, convertible instruments, debt of every seniority, and — increasingly — tokenized instruments.
Principal capital
A firm's own money, invested from its balance sheet, as distinct from capital it advises on or manages for others.
Public market entry
The family of routes by which a private company becomes publicly traded: initial public offering (IPO), reverse takeover (RTO), or direct listing.
Reverse takeover (RTO)
A route to public markets in which a private company is acquired by, and takes control of, an existing listed entity — often faster than a conventional IPO, common on Canadian exchanges.
Direct listing
A public market entry in which existing shares list for trading without a new capital raise.
Private credit
Debt provided directly by non-bank institutions to companies, negotiated bilaterally rather than syndicated through public bond markets.
Structured credit
Debt engineered around the specific assets, cash-flow timing, and covenant reality of a borrower rather than a standard template.
Convertible instrument
A security that begins as debt and can convert to equity — bridging the gap between debt pricing and equity upside.
Mezzanine
Financing that ranks between senior debt and equity, typically carrying both yield and equity participation.
Recapitalization
Restructuring a company's capital stack — refinancing debt, changing leverage, or reorganizing ownership — to fit the business it has become.
Co-investment
Direct participation by an allocator in a specific transaction alongside a lead investor, outside a blind-pool fund.
Secondaries
Purchases of existing stakes in private companies or funds from current holders, providing liquidity before an exit.
Sum-of-the-parts (SOTP)
A valuation method that prices each of a company's businesses against its own comparable set, then adds them. The mechanism by which a technology venture inside an incumbent changes the parent's multiple.
Re-rating
A change in the multiple a market applies to a company's earnings — the largest single act of value creation available to most incumbent boards.
Allocator
An institution or principal that decides where capital is deployed: pension funds, sovereign funds, endowments, family offices.
Family office
The private investment institution of a single family or principal. Family offices underwrite on judgment and move faster than committee-governed capital.
Treasury strategy
The management of a company's balance-sheet assets — cash, instruments, and increasingly digital assets — as a deliberate source of value rather than idle reserves.
Digital asset treasury company
A company whose strategy includes holding digital assets on its balance sheet as a primary or significant treasury position, and whose market valuation reflects that position.
Digital asset
An asset whose ownership and transfer are recorded on a distributed ledger. The institutional term for the asset class; this firm does not use the retail vocabulary.
Distributed ledger
A database maintained across independent participants whose entries, once confirmed, cannot be unilaterally altered — the settlement infrastructure underlying digital assets.
Tokenization
The representation of an asset — equity, debt, real estate, commodities, funds — as a transferable digital instrument on a ledger, carrying its ownership rights and transfer restrictions in the instrument itself.
Real-world assets (RWA)
Conventional assets — credit, property, funds, commodities — issued or mirrored in tokenized form. The segment of digital asset markets institutions entered first.
Token economics
The design of a token's supply schedule, incentive structure, treasury policy, and governance — the discipline that determines whether a token economy holds together after launch. A named specialty of GDA since 2016.
Token financing
A capital raise in which the instrument sold is a token or token-linked right rather than conventional equity — structured, documented, and placed to institutional standard.
Market infrastructure
The plumbing of any capital market: exchanges, custody, settlement, market making, transfer agency, and compliance systems.
Custody
The safekeeping of assets by a qualified institution. Institutional digital asset custody — segregated, insured, audited — is a precondition for allocator participation.
Market maker
A firm that quotes continuous buy and sell prices in an instrument, supplying the liquidity that makes a market usable at institutional size.
Over-the-counter (OTC)
Transactions negotiated directly between counterparties rather than on an exchange — the standard venue for institutional-size digital asset trades.
Stablecoin
A digital instrument engineered to hold a fixed value against a reference currency, used institutionally for settlement and treasury movement.
Smart contract
Self-executing code on a distributed ledger that enforces the terms of an instrument or agreement without an intermediary.
Decentralized finance (DeFi)
Financial services — lending, exchange, market making — operated by smart contracts rather than intermediated institutions. Institutionally relevant as infrastructure, evaluated with the same credit discipline as any counterparty.
Prediction market
A market in which participants take positions on the outcome of defined events. As an engagement mechanism, prediction attaches to scheduled real-world calendars and demonstrates user judgment — see the firm's research on rewards economics.
Applied AI
Artificial intelligence deployed against a specific commercial function with measurable output — as distinct from research capability. The basis of the firm's AI sector coverage.
Agent-as-a-Service
An enterprise AI operating model that prices completed work — per task or outcome — rather than software seats. Subject of GDA Research, March 2025.
Compute infrastructure
The data centres, chips, and orchestration layers on which AI systems run — a capital-intensive asset class with utility-like economics.
Post-quantum security
Cryptography designed to withstand quantum computers — a requirement for any institution carrying long-duration confidentiality risk.
Corporate venture building
Creating a new operating company inside or alongside an established business — structured, capitalized, and staffed as a real company with its own path to market. GDA has done this more than seventy times.
Venture studio
An organization that originates and builds companies from its own theses and balance sheet, taking founder positions rather than passenger stakes.
Mandate-backed venture
A venture that holds a contracted build-out mandate from an established corporation before raising institutional capital — contracted revenue before the round, not after it. The core asset of GDA's India Corridor 3.
GIFT City
Gujarat International Finance Tec-City — India's international financial services centre, offering a regulated domicile for funds and cross-border vehicles serving Indian markets.
Know Your Customer / Anti-Money-Laundering (KYC/AML)
The counterparty identification and monitoring standards required of financial institutions. Applied by GDA to every onboarding, in every jurisdiction.
Special purpose vehicle (SPV)
A legal entity created for a defined transaction or holding — the standard wrapper for co-investment and structured access.
Suitability
The regulatory requirement that an investment be appropriate for the specific investor to whom it is offered — the gate on every allocator intake this firm operates.