Let’s say an investor has a house in Switzerland and a beach house in Miami. They are worth, perhaps, 10 million dollars. But what they’re really looking for now is a line of credit to spend some time on the slopes in St. Moritz, a trip to the Cannes film festival and some upgrades to the yacht.
In traditional finance, they could approach their bank and use those assets to obtain a flexible short-term loan. However, if a substantial portion of the investor’s assets are in cryptocurrencies, it is probably much more difficult.
And it seems there are a lot of ultra-rich people who made their fortunes in cryptocurrencies. In 2025 alone, a Henley & Partners survey found that the global population of crypto millionaires had reached 241,700, up 40% from the previous year..
So how do these rich cryptocurrency investors use their fortune to complement their lavish lifestyle? Your traditional bank probably doesn’t even touch cryptocurrencies, and if selling those crypto assets is out of the question, where do they turn?
This is where a sophisticated decentralized finance (DeFi) lending strategy comes into play, said Jerome de Tychey, founder of Cometh, a DeFi facilitator for businesses that recently became one of the few companies in France to obtain a Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) license.
For someone who is crypto native, they could simply take their ether. tokens, add them to a lending platform like Aave and withdraw stablecoins. However, for someone who made their fortune simply buying cryptocurrencies and watching them grow, and who is unfamiliar with the DeFi process, it can be disconcerting, de Tychey said.
“This is still too complicated and too sophisticated for the layman, so this is normally the kind of thing we do to help family offices, for example, that have a good amount of cryptocurrencies and want a line of credit,” he said in an interview at the CfC St Moritz cryptocurrency conference.
On a day-to-day basis, wealthy clients often use collateral loans, also known as Lombard loans or Lombard credits, to secure loans against their assets. These are flexible short-term loans guaranteed by the pledge of assets such as stocks, bonds or investment portfolios. They allow borrowers to quickly access cash without selling their investments, thus avoiding capital gains tax and retaining benefits such as dividends.
These clients typically have wealth in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and their goal is to keep their assets stable while financing their lifestyle and expenses at the lowest rate possible.
De Tychey, who is also the founder of the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC), said his company adds a DeFi component to the equation that could involve bitcoin. on Aave, USDC on Morpho or perhaps providing liquidity in ether to BTC on Uniswap, for example.
DeFi vs TradFi Lending
Borrowing using cryptoassets also offers advantages, such as a faster lending process. For example, a bitcoin-backed loan could be processed in as little as 30 seconds on some platforms, while a Lombard loan, using traditional assets as collateral, at a private bank could take up to 7 days.
Additionally, traditional loans require credit checks and tax returns, while DeFi loans are permissionless (where code is the law and it doesn’t matter who the borrower is on some platforms), so anonymity is an added benefit for those seeking it.
It also has some drawbacks. For example, crypto loans depend on counterparty risk and could be more volatile depending on the price of the crypto asset. For example, if the price of a digital asset suddenly drops, the smart contract or code could automatically liquidate the borrower’s collateral.
However, it all comes down to using an investor’s crypto asset to obtain a loan through a faster and smoother process, rather than going to a traditional bank, where cryptocurrencies might not be considered an asset to borrow from.
‘DeFi Transaction’
After obtaining a MiCA license in France, Cometh is also working on ways to use DeFi strategies for stocks, bonds and derivatives using its international securities identification numbers (ISIN).
To access debt using an account with Tesla shares, for example, ISIN-based codes must be kept in a dedicated fund, de Tychey said.
“We’re looking at these types of approaches done through dedicated private debt products that anyone with a security account can access. So that’s a way of doing tokenization, but in reverse; it’s really a kind of ‘tradfi-cation’ of DeFi,” de Tychey said.
