Blockstories

Blockstories separates its output by the reader it is written for. The Institutional Briefing follows what banks, asset managers and supervisors do, and recent editions covered the first live customer transactions with tokenized deposits at large UK banks and a Lloyds settlement with Visa in USDC over a weekend. The Crypto Briefing follows the native market: exchange licensing, protocol changes, the MiCA review. Each briefing names the practitioners quoted in it, with their institution.

Beyond the briefings, Blockstories publishes four more formats, including articles on individual developments. Interviews run with named executives, among them the WisdomTree exemption for round-the-clock mutual funds and the Figure co-founder on public equities onchain. Analysis pieces take one market question at a time, such as the shifts at the largest DeFi lending protocol. Reports run from 18 to 58 pages, and the one Blockstories wrote itself for the start of the year gathered 25 expert outlooks across tokenization, digital money, asset management, regulation and infrastructure.

The Banking Tracker from Blockstories is a weekly updated matrix of what major European banks run across five verticals: custody, trading, stablecoins, tokenized deposits and tokenization. Each cell carries one of three states. Live means the service has regulatory approval and clients can reach it, including where distribution is limited to selected institutional segments. Pilot means the initiative is announced, running in a regulatory sandbox, or a partnership with a defined launch path. The third state is no identified activity.

Under the sourcing policy of Blockstories, every public data point is corroborated against at least two independent sources before publication, drawing on bank disclosures, regulatory filings, partner press releases and reporting from established industry publications. Entries marked with a bird icon come from its own interviews with bank representatives, partners and regulators and are not available through public channels. Discontinued projects leave the overview and move to the activity timeline of the bank profile, so the matrix shows the present state. Banks on the list are invited to submit corrections against the same verification standard.

Two more datasets sit next to it. A report library holds 172 reports from 133 publishers in 16 categories, each with a short Blockstories assessment of why it is worth the time, and a MiCA registration tracker follows who holds which authorization under the European MiCA regime.

Blockstories Horizon is the publisher's European event series for banking and asset management professionals. A series travels across Europe over eight weeks and combines four formats, and Blockstories runs three series a year across four cities each, with around 800 attendees per series and eight partners.

The formats differ by room size and by what happens in the room. A summit brings 100 to 130 senior decision-makers from banking, asset management and market infrastructure together for eight keynote theses of seven minutes each, followed by audience questions and a reception. A dinner seats 34 people with the seating curated across traditional finance, DeFi and regulation, and each guest introduces themselves between courses. A webinar reaches 200 or more practitioners with three to four case study presentations. A workshop runs 60 minutes on one category, led by a practitioner, and goes through real architectures and operational choices. Attendance is invitation-only or approval-only, under a principle Blockstories states as quality over quantity.

The 2026 fall series includes a Frankfurt summit and a London summit. Earlier series ran summits in Frankfurt, London and Zurich and a dinner in Paris. Subjects include: fund tokenization, onchain privacy, next-generation custody, stablecoin consortia, onchain vaults and onchain corporate treasury.

The legal entity is Blockstories UG (haftungsbeschränkt), Mühlenstraße 8a, 14167 Berlin, Germany, registered at the Amtsgericht Charlottenburg under HRB 251395 B. Maximilian Vargas is the managing director and is responsible for the editorial content. Maximilian Vargas signs the briefings as founder and chief executive.

Two research leads carry the weekly work with him. Louis Tellier is Lead Institutional Research and co-writes the Institutional Briefing; The Big Whale lists him in that role. Fiodar Yuzhyk is Lead Crypto Research and co-writes the Crypto Briefing. Every briefing names its authors and quoted practitioners, so readers can identify who wrote the piece and contributed comments.

Blockstories publishes research, interviews and market data on digital assets for financial institutions, and runs the Blockstories Horizon event series in European cities. The written work sits in its research section as articles, interviews, analysis, reports and briefings. The data work is the Banking Tracker on European banks, a report library of 172 reports from 133 publishers, and a MiCA registration tracker. The two weekly briefings are free, and a paid subscriber tier called Blockstories Intel opens the full dataset with detailed activity logs.

The research section is at https://www.blockstories.io/research and holds the full archive. The research archive is split into five content types, and each piece names its author and the practitioners quoted in it. The newsletters come separately: the Institutional Briefing on Thursday and the Crypto Briefing on Friday, both free after a sign-up that asks for the email address and, optionally, role, institution and location.

Blockstories UG (haftungsbeschränkt) is registered in Berlin and publishes reporting in English and covers European and international markets. The event series includes Frankfurt, London, Zurich, Paris and Barcelona. For the domestic market, see digital assets in Germany.

Each bank gets a state per vertical: live, pilot, or no identified activity. Live means the service has regulatory approval and clients can reach it. Pilot means the initiative has been announced publicly, operates in a regulatory sandbox, or is a partnership with a defined launch path. Where a bank runs several initiatives in one vertical, the tracker shows the entry closest to production as the primary marker and counts the rest in a badge next to it. The priority order Blockstories uses is live, then live from its own intelligence, then pilot, then pilot from its own intelligence.