Blockstories
Blockstories is a Berlin publisher whose own line is "Strategic insights on digital assets. Built for institutions." It writes for the people inside banks, asset managers and market infrastructure who have to decide what their institution does about tokenized assets, stablecoins and the rules around them, and it says of its own week: "Every week, we talk to the executives, regulators, and builders shaping digital assets."
If you want the reporting itself, the whole archive sits in the Blockstories research section, sorted into articles, interviews, analysis, reports and briefings. Two newsletters carry the week: the Institutional Briefing on Thursday and the Crypto Briefing on Friday, both free, which Blockstories describes as "Read by 15,000+ professionals across the world."
What Blockstories publishes
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, which is unusual in a free newsletter.
Beyond the briefings sit four more formats. Articles report single 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: which European banks do what
The part of Blockstories that no newsletter replaces is its Banking Tracker, 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.
Blockstories states its sourcing rule openly: 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 and not a sum of the past. 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: the event series
Blockstories runs its own event program under the name Blockstories Horizon, which it calls "Europe's largest institutional event series on digital assets." 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, which puts Blockstories in the same two cities where much of the European work on this subject happens. Earlier series ran summits in Frankfurt, London and Zurich and a dinner in Paris. The subjects on stage are the operating questions, not the headlines: fund tokenization, onchain privacy, next-generation custody, stablecoin consortia, onchain vaults and onchain corporate treasury.
Who is behind Blockstories
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 named as editorially responsible in the Impressum. He 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. Named bylines on every briefing are part of how Blockstories presents itself: the reader can see who wrote the piece and which practitioners were quoted in it.
What does Blockstories do?
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.
Where can you read the Blockstories research?
The research section is at https://www.blockstories.io/research and holds the full archive. It 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.
Is Blockstories a German publisher?
Yes. Blockstories UG (haftungsbeschränkt) is registered in Berlin and its Impressum follows German law under § 5 TMG. The reporting language is English and the subject is European and global, which is why its event series runs in Frankfurt, London, Zurich, Paris and Barcelona, not in Germany alone. For the German market itself, the context sits on digital assets in Germany.
How does the Banking Tracker classify a bank?
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.
Blockstories and Finance Loop
Finance Loop and Blockstories work on the same subject from two sides. Blockstories writes down what banks and asset managers in Europe are doing with digital assets, and Finance Loop puts the people doing it in one room at its events in Frankfurt and other German cities. A Finance Loop member who reads the Institutional Briefing on Thursday meets the practitioners it quotes at the next meetup.
Finance Loop members who follow this field also use the Finance Loop reports and the pages on institutional crypto and digital assets in Frankfurt. Blockstories runs a Frankfurt summit in its Horizon series, in the city where Finance Loop holds most of its own events.
Finance Loop is a professional network and has the goal of driving the adoption of emerging technologies in finance, such as AI, tokenization, stablecoins, and DeFi. Finance Loop helps its members build skills and personal networks in these fields: Investment & Digital Assets, Payments & Digital Money, Digital Infrastructure & Sovereignty, and Risk & Compliance.