Legal support for crypto and digital-asset businesses

The first question is not which licence to buy, but whether the activity is regulated at all, and by whom. The same product can be inside the crypto-asset regime, inside the payments regime, inside both, or outside both depending on how custody, settlement and fiat legs are arranged.

We map the activity against the perimeter first and put the answer in writing. Where an authorisation is required, we run the application: the business plan the regulator expects, the governance and compliance framework behind it, the fit-and-proper file for the people who will hold the roles, and the correspondence until the decision.

Digital assets do not behave like cash in an accounting system. Recognition, measurement at reporting date, client assets held on behalf of users, on-chain movements between own wallets, staking and fee income each need a policy that is set once and applied consistently.

Most of the remediation work we see starts with a bookkeeper who treated wallet movements as revenue, or who never separated client assets from company assets. That is expensive to unwind and it is exactly what an auditor and a supervisor look at.

Banking is where crypto businesses stall, and the reason is rarely the business itself. It is the evidence pack: ownership and control traced to named people, source of funds, the flow of funds through the product, and the compliance framework that governs it.

We prepare that pack before the application rather than after a refusal, and we match the profile to providers whose policy actually admits it, instead of spending months on institutions that were never going to onboard the sector.

Anti-money-laundering duties, the officer who signs them off, sanctions screening, data protection, consumer-facing disclosure and marketing rules apply in parallel and each carries its own deadlines. They are usually discovered one at a time, under pressure.

We set out the full list once, say which ones bind this company today and which ones bind it after the next milestone, and take the recurring ones on retainer where the company has nobody in-house to hold them.

Brand abuse in this sector is not theoretical: cloned exchanges, fake token sales and impersonation accounts appear as soon as a name gets traction, and enforcement is far easier with a registered trademark in the right classes than without one.

The same is true of the contract layer: user terms, custody and listing agreements, token documentation and supplier contracts are the documents a dispute is decided on, and they are written long before the dispute exists.