Institutional Access to Yield on Digital Assets

Our Partner, Florian Ducommun, Head of the Technology practice, published an article on Institutional Access to Yield on Digital Assets.

Read the article in full by downloading it in pdf.

The institutional demand for on-chain yield is no longer theoretical.

With approximately 30% of all ETH now staked, fully-staked exchange-traded product structures becoming the European norm, and the institutional staking services market projected to reach USD 33 billion by 2031, regulated financial institutions are actively seeking pathways to deploy capital into decentralised finance (“DeFi”) yield strategies — lending, staking, restaking, and structured vaults — on behalf of their clients.

Yet the critical bottleneck is not technological. It is legal.

Institutions require answers to fundamental regulatory questions before committing capital: who is authorised to move assets to on-chain yield vaults? How are assets protected in the event of insolvency? What classification applies to yield-bearing tokens? And can the service be delivered across borders?

This paper examines why the combination of Switzerland’s Distributed Ledger Technology Act (“DLT Act”) and its SRO-based financial intermediary regime, together with the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (“MiCA”), provides the most comprehensive regulatory foundation available today for structuring and operating institutional DeFi yield services. It analyses the legal treatment of custody-agnostic models, the insolvency protections available under both jurisdictions, and the strategic considerations for service providers establishing a dual-jurisdiction presence.