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MiCA and the AIFMD-light regime are often confused, yet they regulate entirely different things. In short, MiCA concerns crypto services and the issuance of crypto-assets, whereas the AIFMD-light regime concerns the manager of an investment fund. For an investor that distinction is no detail: it determines who supervises what. What MiCA regulates The European Markets…

Bitcoin is the first and by far the largest cryptocurrency: a digital asset that operates outside banks and governments. Holding bitcoin does not give you a claim on an institution, but a position on a public, global ledger that no single party controls. At the heart of the story is scarcity. There will only ever…

Anyone investing in digital assets soon encounters the distinction between on-chain and off-chain. It determines where a transaction is actually recorded, what it costs and to what extent it can be verified. For a high-net-worth investor, that is no technical detail. It touches on settlement, costs and control over one’s own capital. In short, on-chain…

For anyone building a substantial position in digital assets, attention shifts quickly from the purchase to the safekeeping. Storing crypto is not a secondary matter but the core of the risk. Unlike a bank balance, there is no institution that administers the holding or reverses a transaction when something goes wrong. Whoever has access to…

Crypto moves more violently than almost any other asset class. Swings of tens of percent within a week are no exception, and sometimes such a move plays out within a single day. For a wealthy investor the question is therefore not whether crypto is volatile, but why crypto is so volatile, and what those fluctuations…

An altcoin is any cryptocurrency other than bitcoin. The term is a contraction of ‘alternative coin’, the alternative that appeared on the market after bitcoin. For an investor the essence is simple: anything that is not bitcoin falls under the heading of altcoin, from established networks to obscure projects with no meaningful track record. That…

A crypto exchange is a trading platform where you buy and sell digital currencies such as bitcoin and ethereum and convert them into euros. The platform brings buyers and sellers together and, on the basis of supply and demand, sets the price at which a transaction takes place. For a high-net-worth investor, what matters is…

A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency designed to hold a steady value, usually pegged to an official currency such as the dollar or the euro. Where bitcoin and ethereum fluctuate sharply, a stablecoin ideally tracks the currency it is tied to. For an investor, such a coin serves above all as a point of calm within…

Anyone who moves crypto almost always pays a fee to the network. These crypto transaction costs do not go to a bank or an intermediary, but to the parties that verify and record the transfer. For a wealthy investor they represent a real friction: negligible on a single transaction, noticeable as soon as positions are…

DeFi stands for decentralized finance. It is a collective term for financial services that operate without a bank or intermediary, directly through software on a blockchain. Borrowing, lending, saving and trading do not run through an institution, but through computer code that executes the agreements automatically. In theory, anyone with an internet connection and a…

Anyone who invests in digital assets soon encounters two terms: proof-of-work and proof-of-stake. Both describe the same problem, yet solve it differently. They determine how a network without a central party establishes which transactions are valid. Bitcoin runs on proof-of-work, ethereum on proof-of-stake since 2022. For an investor that is no technical detail. It bears…

A crypto wallet stores no coins, only keys. That may sound like a detail, yet it touches the very core of what digital ownership means. Anyone who holds crypto in fact holds control over a private key with which transactions on the blockchain are signed. The coins themselves are recorded on the network; the wallet…