TBW - Tobias Seidl (Stokr): "We have proven that Bitcoin can serve as a serious capital markets infrastructure"
Let's start with a quick look back. How did Stokr come about, and where does it stand today?
STOKR was founded in 2018 in Luxembourg. Our initial focus was on SME financing through digital securities issuances. Over time, our product-market fit shifted toward the Bitcoin ecosystem.
A substantial part of that shift is owed to the success of the Blockstream Mining Notes (BMN) in 2021. The BMN is a securitised hashrate product we launched together with Adam Back and Samson Mow at Blockstream, and one of the first genuinely tokenised real-world assets. It established our track record and attracted Bitcoin-native investors, family offices, and high-net-worth individuals.
You're known for being very close to the Bitcoin ecosystem and to Tether. Can you tell us more about those ties?
We have deep, long-standing relationships across the Bitcoin ecosystem, including with Bitfinex and Tether. Our most recent funding round, which closed in September 2024, was led by Fulgur Ventures, a firm closely aligned with the Bitcoin philosophy.
Our thesis is straightforward: Bitcoin functions both as a store of value and as a high-performance settlement layer. That combination is unprecedented. We view it as the foundational infrastructure for institutional-grade digital capital markets, and that's what we're building on.
You operate out of Luxembourg, a major hub for asset management. What's your regulatory standing with the local authority?
STOKR has been registered with the CSSF as a Virtual Asset Service Provider since 2022, which makes us one of the first VASP-registered digital securities platforms in the EU. We're also ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified for information security management.
We have filed an application for a Crypto-Asset Service Provider (CASP) licence under MiCA, covering custody and transfer of crypto-assets. That process is underway with the CSSF. All issuance vehicles for tokenised securities on STOKR are domiciled in Luxembourg.
Do you need the EU's DLT Pilot Regime for what you do?
The DLT Pilot Regime is designed for trading venues operating DLT-based market infrastructures. STOKR is not a trading venue; we're an issuance and servicing platform for digital securities. Our operations are covered by the regulatory authorisations we already hold.
That said, the DLT Pilot Regime is creating interesting infrastructure on the secondary market side. We're already integrated with regulated exchange venues outside the EU for secondary trading of our digital securities, and we're actively exploring partnerships with DLT Pilot Regime entities within the EU. Those venues complement our primary issuance capabilities and provide additional liquidity channels for our users.
What digital assets do your clients primarily use to invest on the platform?
Primarily stablecoins and Bitcoin.
Liquid seems to be your go-to infrastructure, but Bitcoin remains fairly isolated from the rest of the DeFi ecosystem, which is dominated by the EVM. How do you handle that fragmentation?
On our side, we have demonstrated strong results issuing digital securities purely on a Bitcoin sidechain: $1.9 billion in cumulative issuances, $1.33 billion in live distributed asset value, all on the Liquid Network. That's a track record, not an experiment.
Where we're focused now is cross-liquidity. Our strategy involves integration with centralised exchanges that hold securities licences, enabling our digitally issued instruments to be traded on regulated venues. In parallel, we are working with institutional vault and custody infrastructures to ensure our assets can be held, pledged, and mobilised within the workflows institutional allocators already use. The goal is to meet the market where it operates, while remaining anchored to the settlement layer with the deepest liquidity and the strongest institutional momentum.
>> Discover our Bitcoin dashboard
One of your flagship products is the BMN. For a traditional investor, what exactly is it? A basket of assets, or a pure exposure play?
The BMN is a structured note providing direct exposure to Bitcoin mining hashrate. Getting into the technical weeds a bit: the underlying is a hashrate contract, where a mining operator commits to delivering a fixed allocation of computing power (measured in petahash per second) over a defined term, typically four years.
At maturity, the investor receives all Bitcoin mined by that allocated hashrate. Sure, as network difficulty increases over the contract period, Bitcoin production per petahash tends to decline, but the return profile remains compelling on a risk-adjusted basis. On BMN1, investors realised a 103% return in US dollar terms, and a 32% Bitcoin alpha over a simple buy-and-hold Bitcoin position. That outperformance, generating more BTC than a direct purchase would have yielded, is what drives institutional interest in the product.
We're seeing a lot of miners pivot toward AI and high-performance computing these days. Are you noticing a shift in demand for hashrate products?
Yes, the shift is real and we're seeing it directly. Bitcoin's price has been relatively range-bound, and network hashrate and hashprice are going through a volatile phase. That combination compresses miner margins and forces strategic decisions.
We observe two clear movements. First, miners are diversifying infrastructure toward AI and high-performance computing data centres. Second, and this is arguably more significant for the mining economics, miners are pursuing vertical integration with energy infrastructure. Energy is the single largest operating expense in mining, and securing long-term, predictable power costs through owned or co-located generation fundamentally changes the risk profile of hashrate production.
Both trends create new structuring opportunities. BMN2 remains our flagship, with $1.12 billion in AUM and a ranking as the fourth-largest digitally issued investment globally. But we'll be launching additional variations of hashrate-backed products on STOKR, designed to reflect these evolving infrastructure models and give institutional investors more targeted exposure across the mining value chain.
What numbers define Stokr's activity today? What's your real footprint in the RWA space?
As of April 2026, STOKR has serviced $1.9 billion in cumulative digital securities issuances across 17 completed offerings. Our live distributed asset value, as tracked by RWA.xyz, is $1.33 billion, with monthly transfer volume exceeding $506 million. BMN2 alone accounts for $1.12 billion in AUM.
Beyond mining, our platform hosts private debt funds, Bitcoin-collateralised lending products, and the Goldstream Fund, which provides exposure to Tether's XAUT (digitally issued gold) and generates yield through an arbitrage between gold lending rates and Bitcoin-collateralised borrowing. To date, we have facilitated over $283 million in payout flows to investors.
What investor profile are you targeting, and what's your geographic reach?
STOKR focuses exclusively on professional and institutional investors, with a standard minimum commitment of $100,000. Through certain brokerage arrangements, lower thresholds are available, but our core base consists of institutional allocators, family offices, and high-net-worth individuals. Geographically, we accept qualified investors from over 130 jurisdictions. We're not servicing US markets at the moment.
You mentioned Morpho earlier. Why the focus on this French DeFi protocol in particular?
Morpho is an excellent example of institutional-grade DeFi done right on EVM. Our reasoning is simple: if you have a tokenised asset yielding 11% on a risk-adjusted basis, everyone would like to use it as collateral for lending or borrowing. The challenge is finding the right approach. STOKR has been a pioneer in the regulated digital securities space, with eight years of operational track record. Morpho has established itself as a leading protocol for institutional on-chain lending and borrowing.
We are following closely how institutional players like Bitwise and Apollo are using Morpho's infrastructure, and it validates the direction of the market.
That said, the market for institutional-grade on-chain lending against digitally issued assets is still in its early stages. We expect to see significant strategic collaborations emerge across this space in the near term, and STOKR is well positioned in that evolution. More to come soon.
What are your big priorities for 2026?
Three areas. First, scaling our fund offerings, particularly money market funds. We're seeing significant demand from some of the largest names in the European fund ecosystem.
Second, a recent and very encouraging development: the CSSF now permits UCITS funds to hold stablecoins as ancillary assets. That decision will accelerate the adoption of stablecoin-based settlement across European asset management. As a CSSF-registered platform at the centre of Luxembourg's digital securities ecosystem, STOKR is positioned as the infrastructure partner to facilitate that transition.
Third, completing our CASP licensing under MiCA and continuing to deepen our regulatory standing. For institutional allocators, regulatory credibility is not a differentiator; it's a prerequisite. We intend to keep raising that bar.