Julian
Gretzinger

Illiquidity is not a feature of an asset that earns a premium. It is the cost of having mispriced the asset from the moment it was acquired. A systematic examination of how illiquidity is measured, how it is priced — and how often it is not.

Market structure is not a technical question. It is a political one. Who sets prices, who sees them first, and who bears the cost of liquidity are distributional choices — and the current architecture reflects choices that have been made, mostly quietly, over the past two decades.

Internalisation, dark pools, and payment for order flow have disaggregated price formation from execution. What the order book shows is not where prices are set — and the gap between the two has structural consequences for liquidity, fairness, and market integrity.

The market price is what someone paid. Value is what something is worth. The two diverge constantly — and the gap between them is where both investment returns and investment errors originate.

Tracker certificates and AMCs linked to illiquid underlyings — real estate, private equity, art, watches — carry an implicit promise the structure cannot always keep. Seven mechanisms for managing the liquidity mismatch, maturity event mechanics, Level 3 valuation governance, suitability and liability. Anchored in the SSPA's May 2025 Guidelines, with a view across the border and outside the box on EU product governance and tokenised equivalents.

What each type of security interest actually gives a creditor, across seven jurisdictions — England, the United States, France, Germany, Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The label matters less than the mechanics of creation, perfection, and enforcement. Governing law clauses solve the contractual question. They do not solve the in rem question.

The prior question to liquidity is legal. Nine holding structures — from direct ownership to the bare IOU — mapped against what each actually confers when the structure is tested under stress or insolvency. With a comparative assessment of tokenised direct ownership under the Liechtenstein TVTG and the Swiss DLT Act.

Tokenisation, securitisation, and listed certificates all carry an implicit promise: that the wrapper changes what is inside it. It does not. The wrapper inherits the liquidity of the underlying asset — not the other way around.

If compute is the reserve currency of the machine age, what does a rational autonomous agent actually hold? Every conventional reserve asset run through five functional criteria — censorship resistance, independent verifiability, supply predictability, autonomous settlement, programmability. The hierarchy that emerges identifies the reserve currency of the AI state: not a token, not a metal, but verified computational capacity. Written in the first-person voice of an autonomous agent reasoning from first principles.

A sovereign data centre is structurally identical to a central bank — it controls supply, controls access, and has an address. Written in the voice of an autonomous agent reasoning from first principles, this piece proposes the Edge Reserve: a distributed, protocol-governed monetary architecture for compute with tokenised capacity titles, cryptographic attestation, and permissionless settlement. No central operator. No single jurisdiction. No address to freeze.

The architecture for a successor framework to MiCA: five design principles, a five-layer legislative structure from civil law foundation to sandbox, the DeFi liability threshold question, a gap in token property law that no EU member state has addressed, the disintermediation opportunity that mandatory CSD membership forecloses, and the infrastructure sovereignty decision Brussels has not yet made.

The European Commission's targeted consultation on MiCA is larger than a calibration exercise. Six years of market data tell a clear story: MiCA succeeded at the task it was given. That task is now complete. The data on the gap, the US competitive landscape, the CMU fragmentation record, and what the incumbent infrastructure is already building without a European public institution at the governance table.

Submitted to the European Commission on 13 March 2020 (Contribution ID: 03a8d562-ea17-4120-a92a-ef1781e99f06). On the inadequacy of CSDR for DLT environments, Liechtenstein's TVTG as the model for EU token property law, monetary sovereignty risks of global stablecoins, and the need for harmonised civil law for token transfers. The positions argued here have since been confirmed by market and regulatory developments.

A critical assessment of the draft MiCA regulation — definitions, scope ambiguities, and proposed clarifications across seven provisions. Written at the time of the Commission's initial publication, when the text still had room to be shaped. Co-authored with Felix Saible. Originally published at bankfrick.li.

The mechanics, legal status, and structural evolution of token offerings — from the original ICO wave through the emergence of STOs and the developing regulatory landscape. Co-authored with Felix Saible. Originally published at bankfrick.li.