Let’s say an investor has a house in Switzerland and a beach house in Miami. They might be worth $10 million. But what they’re really looking for right now is a line of credit for some time on the slopes at St. Moritz, a trip to the Cannes Film Festival and a few upgrades to the yacht.
In traditional financing, they may be able to approach their bank and use these assets to secure a flexible, short-term loan. However, if a significant portion of the investor’s assets are in crypto, it is likely to be much more difficult.
And it seems that there are a large number of ultra-rich people who have made their fortunes in crypto. In 2025 alone, a study by Henley & Partners showed that the global population of crypto millionaires had reached 241,700, a 40% increase over the previous year.
So how do these crypto-rich investors use their wealth to supplement their lavish lifestyles? Their traditional bank probably won’t even touch crypto, and if selling these crypto assets is out of the question, where do they turn?
That’s when a sophisticated decentralized financial (DeFi) lending strategy comes into play, said Jerome de Tychey, the founder of Cometh, a DeFi-for-business facilitator that recently became one of the few firms in France to receive 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. But for someone who made their fortune by simply buying crypto and watching it grow and who is unfamiliar with the DeFi process, it can be confusing, de Tychey said.
“This is still a bit too complicated and too sophisticated for the layman, so it’s typically the kind of thing we do to help family offices, for example, that have a good amount of crypto and want a credit line,” he said in an interview at the CfC St Moritz crypto conference.
On a daily basis, wealthy clients often use collateral loans, also known as Lombard loans or Lombard credit, to secure loans against their assets. These are flexible, short-term loans secured by pledging assets such as shares, bonds or investment portfolios. They allow borrowers to quickly access cash without selling their investments, thereby avoiding capital gains tax and retaining benefits such as dividends.
Typically, these clients have wealth in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, and their goal is to keep their assets stable while financing their lifestyles and expenses at the lowest possible interest rate.
De Tychey, who is also the founder of the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC), said his company is adding a DeFi component to the equation that could involve bitcoin on Aave, USDC on Morpho, or maybe raise liquidity on ether to BTC on Uniswap, for example.
DeFi vs TradFi loans
Loans using crypto-assets also offer benefits such as a faster lending process. For example, a loan backed by bitcoin can be processed in as little as 30 seconds on some platforms, whereas a Lombard loan backed by traditional assets in a private bank can take up to 7 days.
Traditional loans also require credit checks and tax returns, while DeFi loans are permissionless (where code is the law and it doesn’t care who the borrower is on some platforms), so anonymity is an added advantage for those seeking it.
It also has some disadvantages. For example, crypto loans depend on counterparty risk and can 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 can automatically liquidate a borrower’s security.
But it’s all about using an investor’s crypto asset to secure a loan through a faster and more hassle-free process rather than going to a traditional bank where crypto might not be considered an asset to borrow against.
‘Trafficking of DeFi’
Having obtained a MiCA license in France, Cometh is also working on ways to use DeFi strategies for stocks, bonds and derivatives using their identifying International Securities Identification Numbers (ISIN).
To access debt using an account with Tesla shares, ISIN-based codes, for example, must be kept in a dedicated fund, de Tychey said.
“We’re looking at the kind of approaches that are done through dedicated private debt products that anyone with a title account can access. So it’s a way of doing tokenization, but in reverse; it’s really a kind of ‘tradfication’ of DeFi,” de Tychey said.
