DAC8 reporting applies to Cyprus and Malta crypto-asset service providers on the same terms as everyone else. Here is the minimum data model to start capturing before the first cycle.
For a firm that holds crypto assets, the quality of your custody technology is no longer just a security question — it is an insurability question. Insurers and, increasingly, regulators want specific technical evidence of how client assets are secured, and firms consistently struggle to produce it. The gap between “our custody is secure” and …
Stablecoins and tokenised deposits are converging on the same use — money that moves on a ledger — from opposite regulatory starting points, and the technology decisions a firm makes early determine which obligations it inherits. This is a governance question before it is a product question. A firm that designs the token first and …
Tokenising a real-world asset — a fund unit, a share, a bond — is one of the genuinely promising moves in regulated finance, and Luxembourg is one of the places it is happening fastest. But the pitch decks understate a hard truth: the early technology choices are difficult to reverse. Tokenising a fund is not …
A crypto firm operating in one jurisdiction implements the Travel Rule once. A firm operating across several implements it several times, differently, and then has to make the versions coexist in a single platform. The FATF Travel Rule — the requirement to send originator and beneficiary information alongside a crypto transfer — is a global …
Most of the public MiCA conversation has been about the licence: who has one, in which member state, and how long it took. That conversation is closing. The transitional period that let legacy providers keep operating has now run out across most of the EU — the longest national windows ended on 1 July 2026, …
More than 60 jurisdictions now require VASP registration or licensing, and the pattern across all of them is consistent: registration was only ever the first hurdle. What regulators are actually auditing now is whether the transaction monitoring behind the registration is functioning in practice, not just documented in a policy. FATF’s June 2025 Targeted Update …
A study of 75 centralised exchanges operating in Europe, examining 143 legal documents against MiCA and DORA requirements, found just seven exchanges with formal security certifications — ISO 27001, PCI DSS, or SOC — despite widespread claims of security compliance across the sample. The gap between what exchanges claim and what an audit actually finds …
MiCA, VARA, and MAS all require licensing, fit-and-proper assessments, capital requirements, and AML controls — which invites the assumption that they’re converging variants of the same regime. They’re not. A firm applying to all three is making three different commitments to three different regulators with three different theories of what a licensed crypto firm should …
“Centralised exchange” describes a business model, not a technical architecture free of smart contracts. Custody wallets built on multi-party computation, DeFi bridges used for liquidity, and treasury automation modules increasingly run on smart contract logic — and a traditional infrastructure security review, focused on servers, networks, and access control, routinely misses this specific attack surface …