Let’s say an investor owns a house in Switzerland and a beach house in Miami. They’re worth maybe $10 million. But what they’re looking for right now is credit to spend time on the slopes of St. Moritz, a trip to the Cannes Film Festival and some upgrades on the yacht.
In traditional finance, perhaps they could go to their bank and use those assets to get a flexible, short-term loan. However, if a substantial portion of the investor’s assets are in crypto, this is likely much more difficult.
And it seems like a lot of ultra-rich people have made their fortunes in crypto. In 2025 alone, a survey by Henley & Partners found that the global population of crypto millionaires reached 241,700, a 40% increase from the previous year..
So how do these wealthy crypto investors use their wealth to complement 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?
This is where a sophisticated decentralized finance (DeFi) lending strategy comes into play, said Jérôme de Tychey, founder of Cometh, a DeFi enabler for businesses that recently became one of the few companies in France to obtain a crypto asset markets (MiCA) license.
For someone who is crypto native, they might just take their ether tokens, add them to a lending platform like Aave and withdraw stablecoins. However, for someone who made a fortune simply buying crypto and watching it grow, and who is unfamiliar with the DeFi process, it can be confusing, de Tychey said.
“It’s still a bit too complicated and too sophisticated for the layman, and so it’s usually the sort of thing we do to help family offices, for example, who have a good amount of crypto and want a line of credit,” he said in an interview at the CfC St Moritz crypto conference.
On a daily basis, wealthy clients often use secured loans, also called Lombard loans or Lombard credit, to secure loans against their assets. These are flexible, short-term loans secured by the collateral of assets such as stocks, 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 assets in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and their goal is to maintain the stability of their assets while financing their lifestyle and expenses at the lowest possible 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 perhaps provide liquidity on Ether to BTC on Uniswap, for example.
DeFi vs TradFi Loans
Borrowing using crypto assets also offers benefits, such as a faster lending process. For example, a Bitcoin-backed loan could be processed in just 30 seconds on some platforms, while a Lombard loan, using traditional assets as collateral, from a private bank could take up to 7 days.
Additionally, traditional loans require credit checks and tax returns, while DeFi loans are permissionless (where code is law and doesn’t care who the borrower is on certain platforms), so anonymity is an added benefit for those seeking it.
This also has some disadvantages. For example, crypto loans depend on counterparty risk and could be more volatile depending on the price of the crypto asset. For example, if the price of a digital asset suddenly drops, the contract or smart code could automatically liquidate a borrower’s collateral.
However, it all comes down to using an investor’s crypto asset to obtain a loan through a faster and more transparent process, rather than going to a traditional bank, where crypto might not be considered an asset to borrow against.
“DeFi Traffic”
Having obtained a MiCA license in France, Cometh is also working on ways to use DeFi strategies for stocks, bonds and derivatives using their international securities identification numbers (ISIN).
To access debt using an account holding Tesla stock, for example, ISIN codes must be held in a dedicated fund, de Tychey said.
“We’re looking at this type of approach through dedicated private debt products that anyone with a securities account can access. So it’s a way of doing tokenization, but conversely, it’s really a kind of DeFi ‘traffic,'” de Tychey said.
