Structured and tokenised instruments across the EEA and Switzerland. Long-form analysis of how money works.
About
European structuring practice: structured and tokenised instruments taken from legal form through settlement and listing, across the EEA and Switzerland — under the EU framework, the Liechtenstein TVTG, and the Swiss DLT Act. Formal participation in EU crypto-asset regulation since 2020.
The writing is derivative of the work — long-form analysis on monetary history, market structure, banking architecture — and, increasingly, the monetary architecture of compute — published on Substack, and open diagnostic frameworks, beginning with the Inheritance Test. Asset prices in gold at Aurum Lens.
The Inheritance Test
A framework for assessing ownership. Note, certificate, or token — a wrapper inherits the properties of its underlying; it cannot bestow them. The test establishes what a holder actually owns, and whether the form is right for the instrument’s binding constraint.
It grew out of the Wrapper Fallacy essays and a question that kept recurring in structuring work — before liquidity, before yield: what does the holder actually own when the structure is tested? It is published as an open standard because a diagnostic is only useful if anyone can run it.
Read the framework →Open under CC BY 4.0 · deliberately not trademarked.
Writing
Markets & Structure
April 12, 2026
Illiquidity is not a feature of an asset that earns a premium. It is the cost of having mispriced the asset from the moment it was acquired. A systematic examination of how illiquidity is measured, how it is priced — and how often it is not.
April 6, 2026
Market structure is not a technical question. It is a political one. Who sets prices, who sees them first, and who bears the cost of liquidity are distributional choices — and the current architecture reflects choices that have been made, mostly quietly, over the past two decades.
March 29, 2026
Internalisation, dark pools, and payment for order flow have disaggregated price formation from execution. What the order book shows is not where prices are set — and the gap between the two has structural consequences for liquidity, fairness, and market integrity.
March 20, 2026
Price is a fact. Value is a judgement. And knowing which one you are actually working with — however it is labelled — is the beginning of financial honesty.
Legal Structure & Instruments
July 19, 2026
Tokenisation is sold to private credit as the thing that will finally make it liquid. It changes how a loan is held, not what is known about it — and in private credit only the second was ever the barrier. Three informational obstacles that keep the single loan thin, why the pooled and tranched claim escapes them, and what the July 2026 data shows: roughly five-sixths of tokenised credit cannot be moved off its issuing platform at all. The wrapper inherits the liquidity of the underlying — it does not manufacture it.
May 9, 2026
Tracker certificates and AMCs linked to illiquid underlyings — real estate, private equity, art, watches — carry an implicit promise the structure cannot always keep. Seven mechanisms for managing the liquidity mismatch, maturity event mechanics, Level 3 valuation governance, suitability and liability. Anchored in the SSPA's May 2025 Guidelines, with a view across the border and outside the box on EU product governance and tokenised equivalents.
May 4, 2026
What each type of security interest actually gives a creditor, across seven jurisdictions — England, the United States, France, Germany, Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The label matters less than the mechanics of creation, perfection, and enforcement. Governing law clauses solve the contractual question. They do not solve the in rem question.
April 25, 2026
The prior question to liquidity is legal. Nine holding structures — from direct ownership to the bare IOU — mapped against what each actually confers when the structure is tested under stress or insolvency. With a comparative assessment of tokenised direct ownership under the Liechtenstein TVTG and the Swiss DLT Act. The in-rem question here became Gate 2 of the Inheritance Test.
April 19, 2026
Tokenisation, securitisation, and listed certificates all carry an implicit promise: that the wrapper changes what is inside it. It does not. The wrapper inherits the liquidity of the underlying asset — not the other way around. The argument was later formalised as the Inheritance Test.
Monetary Architecture & Infrastructure
July 14, 2026
The Compute Chokepoint series diagnosed Europe's dependency. This essay draws the conclusion the series stopped short of. The scarce resource of the digital age is not capability — it is trust between parties who cannot trust each other, and the capability race destroys it faster than it can be produced. Europe's strategic move is to build the institution that supplies it: a member-governed, Swiss-domiciled trust layer running on European compute, with frontier AI inference as its first application and not its last. Three Swiss-hosted precedents show the institutional template already exists. Continues from Part IV.
July 8, 2026
The Compute Chokepoint, Part IV. Most national AI strategies fail in a predictable way: they play the wrong game for their position. This part maps the five games, identifies who is playing each, and closes with a portfolio test for reading any national strategy document: hold at least one node the system cannot route around, or out-diffuse your peers. Continues from Part III.
July 8, 2026
The Compute Chokepoint, Part III — continues in Part IV. On 3 June 2026 the European Commission answered the compute chokepoint with law. The Cloud and AI Development Act — CADA — grades cloud and AI sovereignty into four Union assurance levels and conditions access to public-sector contracts on them. The equilibrium is neither sovereignty nor surrender. It is the one critical dependencies always settle into: supplier management, with the residual sovereign risk carried the way a bank carries exposure to a systemic counterparty it cannot replace.
July 4, 2026
The Compute Chokepoint, Part II. The previous piece established that geopolitical restriction of AI binds at the compute layer, and that the compute layer is concentrated, manufactured, and physically controllable. This piece takes up the consequence. If the decisive input to economic and military power is a manufactured good produced at a small number of chokepoints, then compute is not merely a strategic input. It is becoming a strategic reserve — and the world is beginning to sort itself according to who holds it.
June 28, 2026
The Compute Chokepoint, Part I. Frontier AI is being restricted for geopolitical reasons, and the restriction works. But the popular framing mislocates where it bites. The capability everyone is trying to control does not live in the model. It lives in the compute used to train the model — and the compute lives in a handful of data centres fed by chips from a handful of fabs. The chokepoint is physical, manufactured, and concentrated. That is why restriction is effective where most technology restriction fails.
May 23, 2026
If compute is the reserve currency of the machine age, what does a rational autonomous agent actually hold? Every conventional reserve asset run through five functional criteria — censorship resistance, independent verifiability, supply predictability, autonomous settlement, programmability. The hierarchy that emerges identifies the reserve currency of the AI state: not a token, not a metal, but verified computational capacity. A companion to The Edge Reserve.
May 16, 2026
A sovereign data centre is structurally identical to a central bank — it controls supply, controls access, and has an address. Written in the voice of an autonomous agent reasoning from first principles, this piece proposes the Edge Reserve: a distributed, protocol-governed monetary architecture for compute with tokenised capacity titles, cryptographic attestation, and permissionless settlement. No central operator. No single jurisdiction. No address to freeze.
The Architecture of Money & Markets
July 12, 2026
The Architecture of Money and Markets, Part I. Every component of a better infrastructure system exists today. And yet the infrastructure most people depend on looks structurally the same as it did thirty years ago. Seven structural faults, seven design principles, AI’s functional role assessed precisely, and the governance thesis stress-tested across four real systems. Continues in Part II.
July 12, 2026
The Architecture of Money and Markets, Part II. The vacancy at the centre of financial market infrastructure governance is not a gap waiting to be filled by technology. It is a decision waiting to be made by people with the authority and the will to make it. Continues from Part I.
July 12, 2026
The Architecture of Money and Markets, Part III. The ledger sees everything. The collateral model does not yet know this. Somebody is capturing the difference. Continues from Part II.
July 12, 2026
The Architecture of Money and Markets, Part IV. Gold solves the counterparty risk problem and fails the operational efficiency test. Bitcoin solves the operational efficiency problem at the protocol layer and fails the governance test at the infrastructure layer. Each is the answer to the other’s weakness. Continues from Part III.
AI & Professional Value
July 16, 2026
Large language models are routinely criticised for what they get wrong. This essay examines what they cannot, in principle, get at all — using the oldest epistemological framework in the Western canon. A language model trained on text is not Plato's prisoner watching shadows of objects. It is a prisoner watching recordings of shadows made by other prisoners. The confinement is second-order, and no volume of additional data changes the order. The danger is not that machines cannot leave the cave — it is that they are making the cave comfortable enough that humans stop leaving it.
June 21, 2026
The standard claim about AI and professional expertise is too coarse. AI does not commoditise expertise — it commoditises the legible part of expertise: the output that can be described in a job specification, extracted into a document, reproduced without the relationship that produced it. What remains scarce is something different — context density, accumulated intelligence that is system-specific, perishable, and lives only inside sustained human engagement.
Regulation & Policy
June 18, 2026
SpaceX listed at roughly $1.75 trillion — the largest IPO in history, at about ninety-four times revenue. Most of that valuation is unremarkable. What demands explanation is the premium stacked on top — the part no ordinary multiple reaches. This piece takes the word “scarcity” apart and finds three different things inside it, only one of which is a reason to pay more.
June 15, 2026
Banks perform three functions that most commentary treats as incidental but are constitutive: maturity transformation, lot-size transformation, and risk transformation. Private credit replicates the output of lending while abandoning the first and third. The rate gap between bank loans and private credit decomposes into four prices — credit selection, illiquidity, the state funding subsidy, and execution certainty. The subsidy is the only one that appears in no prospectus. The more interesting story is what happens when banks stop competing with private credit and start lending to it.
June 6, 2026
The architecture for a successor framework to MiCA: five design principles, a five-layer legislative structure from civil law foundation to sandbox, the DeFi liability threshold question, a gap in token property law that no EU member state has addressed, the disintermediation opportunity that mandatory CSD membership forecloses, and the infrastructure sovereignty decision Brussels has not yet made.
May 31, 2026
The European Commission's targeted consultation on MiCA is larger than a calibration exercise. Six years of market data tell a clear story: MiCA succeeded at the task it was given. That task is now complete. The data on the gap, the US competitive landscape, the CMU fragmentation record, and what the incumbent infrastructure is already building without a European public institution at the governance table.
Regulatory Participation
March 13, 2020
Submitted to the European Commission on 13 March 2020 (Contribution ID: 03a8d562-ea17-4120-a92a-ef1781e99f06). On the inadequacy of CSDR for DLT environments, Liechtenstein's TVTG as the model for EU token property law, monetary sovereignty risks of global stablecoins, and the need for harmonised civil law for token transfers. The positions argued here have since been confirmed by market and regulatory developments.
Archive · Originally published at Bank Frick
November 2, 2020
A critical assessment of the draft MiCA regulation — definitions, scope ambiguities, and proposed clarifications across seven provisions. Written at the time of the Commission's initial publication, when the text still had room to be shaped. Co-authored with Felix Saible. Originally published at bankfrick.li.
February 25, 2019
The mechanics, legal status, and structural evolution of token offerings — from the original ICO wave through the emergence of STOs and the developing regulatory landscape. Co-authored with Felix Saible. Originally published at bankfrick.li.
Themes
Glossary
The working vocabulary — the terms this analysis reasons in, defined plainly and cross-referenced to where they are used.
Advisory
Independent advisory on structured securities and tokenised instruments across the EEA and Switzerland — classical structured notes and certificates and their tokenised equivalents, from legal form through to settlement and listing.
Read the full advisory page →