TBW - Nicolas Louvet (Coinhouse): "We'll need to acquire companies, get acquired, merge"
Coinhouse ticks a lot of operational boxes: MiCA authorisation in progress, over 50 employees, significant assets under management. Few French players show this level of maturity. How do you explain it?
First, let's add some nuance. There are a few French players of meaningful size. Bitstack, for instance, is in a broadly similar range to us in terms of assets under management. But I have a fairly clear picture of the European rankings by revenue — give or take some uncertainty around Switzerland — and the takeaway is stark: purely French players are lagging behind their counterparts in other European countries.
I'd actually flip the question: why doesn't France have a player at least on par with the local champion in Spain, the Netherlands, or Germany? Platforms like Bit2Me in Spain or Coinmerce in the Netherlands are significantly larger than us, despite remaining very local. You might not have heard of them outside their home market, and they probably have virtually zero market share in France. But on their own turf, they dominate.
In our case, what explains our size is above all track record. Coinhouse is one of France's legacy players, alongside Paymium. And that first-mover advantage shows up in concrete numbers: over 800,000 accounts have been created on Coinhouse. Not all of them completed the process and bought crypto on our platform, but it means we've reached 800,000 people. For comparison, Binance had roughly 1.3 million accounts in France.
The momentum hasn't stopped, either. Last year, around 300,000 people simply started the process — downloaded the app, began onboarding — without even completing account opening. That's the result of the awareness campaigns we ran, combined with the incumbency effect. All things considered, our size is respectable, but it's not yet where it needs to be.
Your 2026–2027 budget is described as stable. Have the major structural investments already been made, or is this more of a tactical pause before a new phase?
You have to look at both sides of the ledger. On the revenue side, we're forecasting slightly less than 2025, because we're clearly in a bear market. Generating revenue under these conditions is tough.
On the cost side, we've pulled back in line with those expectations. It's not that we don't want to invest — there's actually plenty we should be doing, and ideally we'd invest more. But it's a balancing act between a treasury that's comfortable but needs protecting, and a market that's declining. The priority is to avoid ending up in a sustained negative EBITDA position.
And I'll be straightforward about one thing: we are not profitable today. We have been in the past, and we do turn a profit on a month-by-month basis from time to time. But across the full years of 2024, 2025, and likely 2026, we won't break even.
Coinhouse has historically served both retail and institutional clients. What's the split between those two segments today?
First, a clarification: on the business side, these are mainly SMEs. The corporate segment accounts for between 30% and 45% of our monthly revenue, depending on the month. The rest is retail.
And within retail, there's an important distinction: premium clients — those who pay a subscription — versus everyone else. Premium retail accounts for between 25% and 35% of revenue. So, year in, year out, corporates and premium retail combined represent a small fraction of clients by volume but around 70% to 75% of our revenue.
It's a Pareto distribution, only more concentrated than the classic 80/20 rule. For us, it's closer to 10% of clients generating 80% of revenue.
French banks are picking up the pace on digital assets. Do you see them as potential partners, competitors, or a distribution channel for your infrastructure — white-label solutions, for example?
Honestly, all three. We could serve as a distribution partner for them, and we've responded to RFPs in the past. Some banks made different choices: one of them decided to build its solution in-house. I don't know what the total cost ended up being, or how much longer it'll take to reach a competitive standard, but I believe the investment exceeds €100 million. In my view, buying beats building. But over the long run, I see us as competitors. And in fact, it's our own model that's being challenged.
You don't believe in the current crypto platform model. What needs to change?
I think crypto platforms, in their current form, all risk disappearing if they don't evolve toward radically different infrastructures and approaches. Either the banking model, the asset management model, or the infrastructure model — and by infrastructure, I mean a genuine market infrastructure.
Take D2X, for example. It's a Dutch crypto derivatives platform operating under EMIR and MiFID. D2X doesn't serve retail, which makes sense. Even I can't source directly from them: you need to go through a player with institutional or MiFID qualification — a broker — who sometimes routes through yet another intermediary. That's exactly how traditional financial markets work. As an individual, you don't buy your shares directly from Euronext and you don't go through Euroclear. You go through a broker.
I believe those kinds of infrastructures need to emerge in crypto. Exchanges have to choose: either they go client-facing and become true brokers — that's the path Bitpanda took — or they pivot entirely toward institutional and build the liquidity infrastructure on behalf of institutional clients. The mixed model, where an 18-year-old and an institutional player doing €500 million in monthly volume are clients of the same platform, makes no sense. I don't buy it for a second.
And I'll go further: I don't believe in my own model long-term either. If Coinhouse didn't change, I think we'd be dead within a few years because of the competition.
"My real model is a Trade Republic or Revolut, but tokenised"
In concrete terms, what is Coinhouse evolving toward?
We've never been an exchange, so pure infrastructure wouldn't make sense for us. Our direction is providing investment services and digital wealth management to clients. I need to be able to offer life insurance to my clients. It's essential. One day, life insurance will be tokenised. Products accessible via tokenisation already exist — certain money market funds, certain interesting vehicles. We need to build simple bridges for people.
My real model is a Trade Republic or Revolut, but tokenised. We're getting there step by step. And the moment you say that, you immediately notice that those players are banks, or are heading toward the banking model. Our true model is what I've been calling since 2019 the "crypto-bank": a player that genuinely manages your money, your investments, your savings. Everything related to wealth management, but running on blockchain-based rails.
Is a banking licence the future for Coinhouse?
Yes, in the very long term. I can't say when exactly. And never alone. We'll never get there on our own. We'll need to acquire companies, get acquired, merge. Build-up operations, consolidation, strategic partnerships. Maybe with banks — though I'm not overly optimistic about that — but certainly with other players in the space.
Oddo BHF is a significant shareholder in Coinhouse. What does that relationship concretely bring you on this trajectory?
I have a lot of respect for Oddo. Their representative on our board is someone with exceptional foresight, very capable, who is a real asset and genuinely helps us think through strategy. The same goes for Claire Calmejane and the other board members. It's a relationship I particularly value at the governance level.
Do you have a stablecoin strategy?
All I can say is that if we were to launch a euro stablecoin, we wouldn't do it alone. The approach would be consortium-based.