Who holds what
Legal ownership and practical control lined up, and written down while everybody still agrees.
Finance and crypto
Structuring digital assets.
Holding digital assets is mostly a question of who really controls them and what happens when that person is no longer available. The legal position tends to be discovered late, at the point where somebody has left, died, fallen out or been asked an awkward question by a bank.
What this looks like when it goes wrong
The commonest version is a business holding assets in a way nobody wrote down. The company owns them in the sense that everybody agrees it does, and the means of access sit with a founder personally. There is no document recording the arrangement, and if the relationship ever changes, so does everybody's memory of what was agreed.
The next is an arrangement that survives everything except a death. Access depends on something only one person has. None of the ordinary machinery for passing property on works if nobody else can reach the asset, and the people entitled to it are left holding an entitlement they cannot exercise.
Then there is the activity that turned out to be a regulated one. A business that thought it was building a product finds that something in what it does resembles a service the law treats differently, or that the way it described itself publicly engaged rules nobody had considered. This is usually discovered when a bank asks, when an investor's advisers ask, or when a regulator does.
The quietest version is banking. Nothing is wrong, nothing is alleged, and the business simply cannot get or keep an account. Explaining a business to an institution managing its own risk is a different exercise from being compliant, and being right is not the same as being able to show it.
What actually decides it
Control is the practical question. Whoever can move the asset has it, whatever the register of members or the accounts say. Structuring is largely about making legal ownership and practical control match, and about deciding now what happens when they come apart because somebody leaves, dies, is dismissed or simply stops co operating.
What the asset actually is matters more than what it is called. Some are held outright. Some amount to a claim against a business holding something for you, which exposes you to that business as well as to the asset. Some are contractual rights dressed in the language of ownership. Reading what was genuinely agreed with a platform or an issuer is unglamorous, and it decides where you stand if that platform fails.
The regulatory perimeter in this area has been moving for some time and continues to move in the United Kingdom, including around promotion, custody and the treatment of particular kinds of token. Nothing here should be taken as a statement of what any current rule requires. What can be said is that whether an activity falls inside a regime is fact specific, is answered on what a business does rather than on what it calls itself, and is far cheaper to answer before launch than after.
Then there is everything sitting alongside. Tax treatment is a matter for your accountants and it is not an afterthought. Accounting, audit, insurance and, where the business handles assets belonging to other people, the duties that come with that all follow from how the holding is arranged. Arrangements built for one purpose in isolation tend to be expensive to unpick later.
What we do
Access and succession
What happens to assets when a key holder leaves, dies or cannot be reached.
Reading the platform terms
What was actually agreed with a custodian or issuer, and what it means if that business fails.
The perimeter question
Whether what you do engages a regime, asked before launch rather than after somebody else asks it.
Explaining it to a bank
The business set out in a form an institution can assess without defaulting to refusal.
With your other advisers
Tax, accounting and regulated advice delivered by the right specialists, co ordinated rather than fragmented.
When to spend nothing
A personal holding that is modest, kept simple and separate from any business does not need a structure. Much of what is sold as structuring in this area answers a question the holder does not have, and every additional entity brings cost, filings and complexity that outlive the reason for it. What is worth doing costs nothing: write down what is held, where, in whose name, and how somebody else could reach it if you could not.
The other thing not worth buying is a structure built to solve a problem nobody has defined. If the purpose is tax, that is a conversation with a tax adviser first. If the purpose is to make an activity look like something it is not, it will not survive being examined, and the money is better spent on changing what the business actually does.
Before anything is sent
Positions harden the moment the other side takes advice, and the quiet routes stop being available once a demand has gone out. While nothing has been sent, everything is still open.