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Crypto lending

We built K33 Loans, a fully regulated way for Europe's high-net-worth clients to borrow against their Bitcoin and Ethereum, joining decentralised protocols to the custody and compliance a licensed brokerage has to meet.

Client
K33 (formerly Arcane Crypto)
Duration
8 to 12 months
K33 Loans
( the K33 Loans dashboard, cash against crypto without selling it )

Services

Discovery and scopingMVP LightMVP EnterpriseTechnical due diligenceWebsite/App and Digital Profile

Domains

Compliance Ensuring products and processes meet applicable laws, rules and industry requirements. Blockchain A distributed, cryptographically secured ledger where transactions are verified without a central intermediary. DeFi Decentralized finance - financial services built on blockchain without traditional intermediaries. MiCA Markets in Crypto-Assets - the EU regulation for issuing and trading crypto-assets. DORA Digital Operational Resilience Act - the EU regulation for digital operational resilience in the financial sector. Custody

Tooling

  • Solidity
  • Smart contracts
  • Ethereum
  • Bitcoin
  • On-chain monitoring
  • Custom ledger

Result

  • ( r1 ) Clients across Europe can borrow fiat against their Bitcoin and Ethereum without selling a thing.
  • ( r2 ) Built to meet MiCA and fully auditable end to end, shaped alongside Norway's foremost legal experts on digital-asset regulation.
  • ( r3 ) K33 runs the whole loan book from one admin dashboard on a custom ledger.
  • ( r4 ) A leader in compliant digital-asset lending for Europe's high-net-worth clients.
( 01 - background )

K33, the publicly regulated Norwegian brokerage formerly known as Arcane Crypto, wanted to let clients unlock cash from their crypto without selling it. Simple to say, hard to do: use Bitcoin and Ethereum as collateral for ordinary fiat loans, with all the custody, auditability, and regulatory rigour a licensed brokerage is held to.

Two worlds that do not usually meet

Decentralised finance and a regulated brokerage pull in different directions. One is open, fast-moving, and built on smart contracts. The other answers to auditors, capital rules, and the strictest reading of the law. K33 needed a platform that lived in both at once, so a client could post crypto as collateral and K33 could still prove every position to a regulator.

Rules that were still being written

Lending against digital assets sits in a landscape regulators are still mapping. There was no settled playbook, so we worked closely with Norway's foremost legal experts on the area and treated compliance as part of the architecture rather than a checkbox at the end.

( 02 - inside the system )

A platform that speaks both languages: smart contracts and on-chain collateral on one side, a custom ledger and a full audit trail on the other. We built it iteratively, turning each legal review into architecture as the rules took shape.

( the product ) Borrow against Bitcoin and Ethereum, without selling

A client posts Bitcoin or Ethereum as collateral and draws a fiat loan against it, keeping their exposure to the asset while getting real liquidity. Underneath, the platform joins decentralised protocols to traditional custody standards, so the crypto is held to the same bar as any other asset a regulated brokerage looks after. The loan calculator lays out the terms before anyone commits.

( the loan calculator, collateral and terms clear up front )
( compliance · audit ) MiCA compliance, built in rather than bolted on

Because the regulatory ground kept shifting, we changed course several times as legal reviews came back, folding each round of feedback into the platform's design. The result meets the requirements of MiCA, Europe's framework for crypto assets, and is auditable end to end. Nothing happens on the platform that K33 cannot later show a regulator, line by line.

( every loan, open or closed, on the record and auditable )
( operations · ledger ) One admin dashboard, one custom ledger

K33 runs the whole loan book from a single admin dashboard built on a custom ledger. It gives them full visibility of every loan, the state of its collateral, and the client behind it, so they can monitor activity, handle client needs, and keep operations transparent. The ledger is the source of truth the audit trail is drawn from.

( 03 - result )

A regulated lending platform, live and compliant.

( the team on the project )
( next project ) Photosynthetic by Rift Labs The software behind Photosynthetic, Rift Labs' dynamic grow-lighting system for indoor farming and controlled-environment agriculture.