The Big Whale

The research team of The Big Whale publishes reports and benchmarks on how European financial institutions adopt digital assets. The benchmark on French banks, fintechs and asset managers of April 2026 surveyed around twenty players: every bank in the sample raised its digital asset budget, about 300 positions were open across the banking sector, 45 percent of them in compliance, and most institutions named tokenized money market funds as their first tokenization priority. The study also contains an onchain analysis of EURCV, the euro stablecoin of SG-Forge.

The German edition of June 2026 asked decision-makers at 22 banks and fintechs in Germany, which the report calls the largest crypto market in Europe with 4.9 million users and 54 CASP licenses. In that survey 78 percent saw tokenization as the future of finance, and 44 percent named the integration of legacy systems as their main obstacle. A September 2026 benchmark on the digital asset budgets of 22 European banks and providers expects that market to reach about 700 million euros by 2027.

Earlier reports dealt with the tokenization barometer of 2025, bitcoin treasury companies, crypto derivatives and the convergence of DeFi with traditional finance. Grégory Raymond, Maxime Coniglio and Aleksandar Bukovski wrote the 2026 benchmarks.

The weekly briefing of The Big Whale arrives every Wednesday by email and carries editorial coverage, analysis of selected news and interviews with leaders of the digital asset sector. Articles appear in four sections named business, finance, regulation and technology, and in formats such as scoops, analyses, op-eds and interviews. Interviews in 2026 included executives of Janus Henderson, BitGo, Fireblocks, Deutsche Bank and Circle.

In its early years the outlet was financed by reader subscriptions of 25 euros a month and did without advertising and sponsoring. Today The Big Whale sells annual company plans with access for the whole organization and one, up to five or up to ten strategic users, and none to individuals.

The Big Whale covers crypto markets from the angle of institutional investors, with a Monday market brief on bitcoin and a market debrief on Fridays. Lead analyst Aleksandar Bukovski writes on stablecoins, tokenized finance, DeFi protocols and bitcoin mining and hosts the recurring Market Call. Scoops in 2026 dealt with France as the last MiCA option of Binance in Europe and with a euro yield product that the French app Bitstack launched with Spiko and the asset manager Amundi.

The Geneva Summit is the two-day conference of The Big Whale for 300 selected decision-makers from banks, asset managers, payment networks and supervisors, held at the Hotel President Wilson in Geneva under the Chatham House Rule. Its program covers six fields: regulation from MiCA to Basel III and DORA, stablecoins and cross-border settlement, custody, the tokenization of real assets, AI agents in regulated finance and the capital strategy of institutions.

Speakers come from firms such as Fidelity International, Franklin Templeton, SG-Forge, CACEIS and Ripple, and corporate members of The Big Whale get priority access. Paris Europlace, the Crypto Valley Association, the Geneva Chamber of Commerce and the Capital Markets and Technology Association support the summit in the financial center of Geneva.

Corporate members of The Big Whale meet at a closed breakfast series on ten mornings a year, each with up to 90 senior executives under the Chatham House Rule. A panel from the newsroom opens each morning, and the 2026 topics ranged from onchain cash management for treasurers in Paris to the offer that banks need for digital assets in Milan. Editions in Miami, Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi took the format outside Europe.

The Big Whale counts 4,500 opt-in decision-makers in its network and more than 1,000 people met in person over 18 months, 72 percent of them from the C-suite or senior leadership. Recent speakers came from J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, BNY, Worldline, Coinbase and Qivalis, the euro stablecoin joint venture of European banks.

Raphaël Bloch is chief executive and co-founder of The Big Whale and covered financial markets for Reuters before he wrote for Les Echos and L'Express. Grégory Raymond, co-founder and head of research, has reported on regulation, institutions and technology in digital assets since 2017 and wrote the book Bitcoin & Cryptos: L'enjeu du siècle (Talent Éditions, 2025). The third co-founder, Dimitri Granger, is chief operating officer and was managing director of Publicis Consulting.

The team also includes Maxime Coniglio as head of market intelligence, Hugo Panczak as head of agentic AI and Arthur Weis as head of product. The Big Whale names more than ten analysts around the world on its team.

The MiCA mapping of The Big Whale tracks crypto-asset service providers and issuers of e-money tokens and asset-referenced tokens that hold an authorization under MiCA, filtered by country, sector and origin. It shows banks such as Deutsche Bank next to crypto-native firms, so that a user can check the CASP license of a counterparty.

Together with the DEC Institute, The Big Whale offers two certification paths that follow the ESMA guidelines on knowledge and competence: MIC with 80 hours for staff who inform clients about crypto-assets and MAC with 160 hours for advisers. Crypto-asset service providers in the EU had to meet these staff requirements by 28 July 2026.

The Big Whale SAS was registered in Paris on 18 March 2022 under company number 911 651 859 and has its office at 9 rue des Colonnes in the 2nd arrondissement. Grégory Raymond is president and publication director, while Raphaël Bloch and Dimitri Granger are registered as managing directors of the company, whose share capital is 43,250 euros.