How the ultra-wealthy are using bitcoin to fund their yacht upgrades and Cannes trips

Let’s say an investor has a house in Switzerland and a beach house in Miami. They’re worth, perhaps, $10 million. But what they are 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 finance, they might be able to approach their bank and use those assets to secure a flexible, short-term loan. However, if a substantial part of the investor’s assets is in crypto, it’s likely much harder.

And it seems there are a large number of ultra-rich people who made their fortunes in crypto. In 2025 alone, a survey by Henley & Partners found that the global population of crypto millionaires had reached 241,700, up 40% from the previous year.

So how do these crypto-rich investors use their fortune to supplement their lavish lifestyle? Their traditional bank likely won’t even touch crypto, and if selling those crypto assets is out of the question, where do they turn?

This is when a sophisticated decentralized finance (DeFi) lending strategies comes into play, said Jerome de Tychey, the founder of Cometh, a DeFi-for-businesses facilitator that recently became one of the few firms in France to gain a Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) license.

For someone who is crypto native, they could simply take their ether ETH$2,937.59 tokens, add them to a lending platform like Aave and withdraw stablecoins. However, for someone who made their fortune by just buying crypto and watching it grow, and who is not familiar with the DeFi process, it can be bewildering, de Tychey said.

“This is still a bit too complicated and too sophisticated for the layman, and so it’s typically the kind of thing we do to help family offices, for example, who 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 day-to-day 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 the pledge of assets such as stocks, bonds, or investment portfolios. They allow borrowers to access cash quickly 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 objective is to keep their assets stable while funding their lifestyle and expenses at the lowest rate possible.

De Tychey, who is also the founder of the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC), said his firm adds a DeFi component to the equation that could involve bitcoin BTC$88,605.45 on Aave, USDC on Morpho, or perhaps providing liquidity on ether ETH$2,937.59 to BTC on Uniswap, for example.

DeFi vs TradFi loans

Borrowing using crypto assets also offers perks, such as a faster lending process. For example, a loan backed by bitcoin could be processed in as little as 30 seconds on some platforms, whereas a Lombard loan, using traditional assets as collateral, at a private bank might take up to 7 days.

Also, traditional loans 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 in some platforms), so anonymity is an additional perk for those who seek it.

It also has some drawbacks. 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 smart contract or code could automatically liquidate a borrower’s collateral.

However, it all comes down to using an investor’s crypto asset to secure a loan through a faster, more seamless process, rather than going to a traditional bank, where crypto might not be considered an asset to borrow against.

‘Tradfi-cation of DeFi’

Having snagged 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 holding Tesla shares, for instance, ISIN-based codes need to be held in a dedicated fund, de Tychey said.

“We are looking at these sorts of approaches done through dedicated private debt products that anyone with a title account can access. So that’s a way of doing tokenization but the other way around; it’s really a kind of ‘tradfi-cation’ of DeFi,” de Tychey said.

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