Bitcoin-only custody at 0% fee, segregated on-chain wallets, euro loans against your stack, inheritance planning, and real bank accounts. All under a Dutch MiCAR license.
Blockrise is not an exchange. That is the first thing to understand, and it is the reason this Rotterdam company deserves its own review rather than a footnote in an exchange comparison.
Founded in 2017 by Jos Lazet, Blockrise is a Bitcoin-only platform for people who think in decades: custody, brokerage, asset management, Bitcoin-backed loans, inheritance planning, and since April 2026, real euro bank accounts embedded in the platform. In November 2025 the Dutch regulator AFM granted it a MiCAR license (number 41000029), putting Blockrise in the small group of Bitcoin-only companies allowed to operate across the entire EU under the new European framework.
I met Jos and part of his team at a Bitcoin-only side event during Blockchain Week Amsterdam. What struck me was not the pitch. It was the absence of one. He has been in Bitcoin since 2013, started his first company at fifteen, and talks about custody architecture the way engineers talk when they built the thing themselves. That earned Blockrise a proper look. Here is what the research found.
| Spec | Details |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2017, Rotterdam, Netherlands |
| Regulation | MiCAR license 41000029 (AFM, Nov 2025), DNB registration since 2022 |
| Bitcoin-only | Yes (full commitment since 2025) |
| Custody model | Semi-custodial: segregated on-chain wallets per client, HSM-secured keys |
| Rehypothecation | No, never. Collateral and custody assets are not lent out or pooled |
| Custody fee | 0% per year (since June 2026) |
| Brokerage fee | 0.50% per transaction |
| BTC withdrawal fee | 0.25% plus network fee |
| Bitcoin-backed loans | Yes, from €20,000 (business clients at launch), ~8% interest |
| Asset management | Yes ("Fundamentals" BTC/EUR strategy), 1.82%/yr incl. VAT, 0% performance fee |
| Euro bank account | Yes, embedded IBAN via bunq (Netherlands first, April 2026) |
| Account types | Personal, business, joint, parent-child |
| Inheritance planning | Yes (legacy arrangements for bitcoin) |
| Client assets | ~€100 million (late 2025) |
| KYC required | Yes (regulated financial institution) |
| Availability | EU-wide for core services via MiCAR passporting |
| Category | Score | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Custody Architecture | 9.5/10 | Segregated on-chain wallets per client, HSM key generation, foundation-based legal segregation, no rehypothecation ever |
| Regulation & Transparency | 9.5/10 | MiCAR license 41000029 with EU passporting, DNB registration since 2022, full published fee schedule, honest about what the license does not cover |
| Fees | 8.5/10 | 0% custody fee is rare and well-reasoned; 0.50% brokerage is mid-range; €999 recovery fee is steep |
| Product Range | 9/10 | Custody, brokerage, DCA, loans, asset management, inheritance planning, treasury services, and euro bank accounts in one regulated structure |
| Track Record & Maturity | 7.5/10 | Founded 2017, ~€100M client assets, but small public review footprint and several products (loans, bank accounts) launched within the last year |
| Overall | 8.8/10 | Best-in-class custody architecture and regulation; young public track record |
Most platforms in Europe compete on the same axis: buy bitcoin cheaply, fast, with a slick app. Blockrise competes on a different axis entirely: hold bitcoin securely for years, inside a regulated structure, with services around it that normally require a private bank.
Personal, business, joint, and parent-child accounts. That last one is rarer than it should be: a compliant way for parents to build a bitcoin position for their kids, with KYC handled properly.
Buy and sell bitcoin at 0.50% per transaction, funded from your own bank account. Easy Invest handles recurring purchases for DCA. Straightforward, not the cheapest in the market, and not trying to be.
The heart of the platform: segregated, on-chain verifiable wallets per client, with keys generated inside Hardware Security Modules. Covered in detail below.
Euro liquidity against your bitcoin without selling it, through group company Blockrise Lending B.V. Loans from €20,000, launched for business clients at around 8% interest, with a 1.5% origination fee and a 2% liquidation fee. Collateral sits in segregated wallets and is never rehypothecated.
A managed BTC/EUR strategy called Fundamentals at 1.82% per year including VAT. The performance fee is 0% with a lifelong high-water mark. You authorize a foundation (Stichting Blockrise) to manage the portfolio wallet; you keep ownership.
Inheritance arrangements for bitcoin, and balance-sheet services for companies. Both are underserved categories in Europe, and both are hard to do without a regulated counterparty. See our guide on Bitcoin inheritance planning for why this matters.
Since April 2026, Blockrise clients in the Netherlands get an embedded euro IBAN through a partnership with bunq, the first live use of bunq's Banking-as-a-Service platform. Fiat deposits are protected up to €100,000 under the Dutch Deposit Guarantee Scheme. Blockrise calls itself the first Bitcoin platform in Europe offering full bank accounts, and as far as our research goes, that claim holds.
This is where a Bitcoin.diy review has to be precise, because "you own your bitcoin" means different things to different companies.
Blockrise runs what it calls a semi-custodial model. Every client gets dedicated on-chain wallets, segregated per service and verifiable on the blockchain. The keys are generated inside Hardware Security Modules, physical vaults from which keys cannot be extracted. You access your bitcoin with a digital Blockrise key. Legal segregation through a Dutch foundation structure (Stichting Blockrise) means that if Blockrise the company went under, your assets stay yours and remain reachable. The company states flatly in its custody policy: no rehypothecation, ever. Your coins are not lent out, not pooled, not touched without explicit consent.
That is a serious, well-engineered design. It is also not self-custody. You do not hold a seed phrase. Our position has not changed: nothing replaces holding your own keys on a hardware wallet you control, stored properly in cold storage.
So the fair framing is this. Semi-custody at Blockrise is not competing with your Coldcard. It is competing with leaving six figures on an exchange, with bank safe-deposit thinking, and with the very real problem that pure self-custody creates for inheritance, for companies, and for anyone whose family cannot manage a seed phrase after they are gone. For those situations, verifiable segregated wallets inside a regulated Dutch structure is one of the strongest setups available in Europe today.
One more honest note: recovery through the Blockrise back-up service costs €999 per recovery action. Steep. Also a reasonable deterrent against treating recovery casually.
Blockrise publishes a complete fee schedule, which already puts it ahead of half the industry.
| Fee | Amount |
|---|---|
| Bitcoin custody | 0% per year |
| Brokerage (buy/sell) | 0.50% per transaction |
| Bitcoin withdrawal | 0.25% per withdrawal |
| Blockchain fee | Network dependent, passed through |
| Backup recovery | €999 per recovery action |
| Asset management | 1.82% per year (incl. VAT), 0% performance fee with lifelong high-water mark |
| Loan origination | 1.5% |
| Loan liquidation | 2% of liquidation amount |
The 0% custody fee deserves a paragraph. Until June 2026 Blockrise charged a percentage-based custody fee, the industry standard, sometimes reaching 1% per year elsewhere. Then it dropped the fee to zero across all accounts, arguing that securing a wallet costs the same whether it holds 1 BTC or 100 BTC, so charging a percentage punishes exactly the long-term conviction the company claims to serve. Incentives now sit on the client's side of the table: Blockrise earns when it does something for you, not because your stack appreciated. More platforms should copy this.
The 0.50% brokerage fee is mid-range. If your only goal is stacking sats at the lowest possible cost, a dedicated broker or exchange beats it; see our Bitvavo review for the cheapest regulated Dutch option. Blockrise is not selling cheap execution. It is selling everything around the position.
Blockrise Capital B.V. holds MiCAR license 41000029 from the AFM, granted 25 November 2025, covering custody, brokerage, and asset management across all 27 EU member states through passporting. The company had been registered with the Dutch central bank since 2022.
Two nuances the marketing of most platforms would skip, and we will not.
First, Bitcoin-backed loans are provided by Blockrise Lending B.V., a group company, and are not regulated under MiCAR, because MiCA simply does not cover lending yet. Blockrise is upfront about this and structures the loans within its supervised environment, restricting them to business clients at launch to stay inside the lines. Lazet has said publicly he expects MiCA's scope to extend to lending, mining, and payments over time. Until then: the license covers the custody of your collateral, not the loan contract itself. Know the difference.
Second, the euro bank account is not Blockrise becoming a bank. It is bunq's banking license underneath Blockrise's interface. Your euros sit under the Dutch Deposit Guarantee Scheme up to €100,000 through bunq; your bitcoin sits in Blockrise's segregated custody. Two regulated layers, two different protections. Clean construction, worth understanding.
Bitcoin.diy is Bitcoin-only, so we checked: Blockrise historically offered Ethereum alongside bitcoin. In 2025 the company made the full commitment to Bitcoin-only, dropping everything else, with Lazet citing Bitcoin's dominance, its relative stability, and the clarity a single-asset proposition gives clients.
We treat that as a conversion, not a stain. Plenty of the strongest Bitcoin companies in the world started broader and narrowed down once they understood the asset. The commitment is now written into everything from the product architecture to the company tagline.
The loan product is worth a direct comparison, because euro-denominated Bitcoin-backed loans inside a regulated EU group are still rare. Blockrise's own April 2026 research on LTV survival across every bitcoin market regime since 2016 recommends conservative initial LTV (their study puts 95% historical survival for 12-month terms at 28.5% initial LTV). That is proper primary work, not content marketing.
| Feature | Blockrise | Firefish | Ledn | Unchained |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loan currency | EUR | EUR | USD / USDC | USD |
| Minimum loan | €20,000 | ~€2,000 | $500 | $150,000 |
| Interest rate | ~8% (launch, Nov 2025) | ~7–12% | 10.4–11.4% | ~14.2% |
| Origination fee | 1.5% | Included in rate | 2% | 0–1% |
| Collateral kept out of lending markets | Yes, segregated wallets, never rehypothecated | Yes, multisig escrow | Yes (Custodied loans) | Yes, 2-of-3 multisig |
| Collateral verifiable on-chain | Yes, dedicated client wallets | Yes, escrow address | No, omnibus custody view | Yes, you hold a key |
| EU regulated group | Yes (MiCAR license; loans outside MiCAR scope) | Yes (MiCA-registered, CZ) | No (Canada/global) | No (US) |
| Open to private individuals | No, business clients at launch | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Blockrise wins for EU companies and treasuries that want euro liquidity inside a regulated Dutch group with segregated, verifiable collateral. Firefish wins for European private individuals with smaller positions. Ledn and Unchained serve dollar borrowers, with Unchained's multisig model the gold standard for custody-conscious US clients. For the full landscape, see our Bitcoin-backed loans guide and the loan platform comparison.
Blockrise is building the thing European Bitcoiners kept saying should exist: a regulated, Bitcoin-only institution that treats holding as the core activity, prices custody at zero, keeps wallets segregated and verifiable, and bolts real banking onto the side rather than pretending to replace it. It will not convert self-custody maximalists, and it should not try. For corporates, family wealth, inheritance, and anyone who needs a regulated counterparty for a large position, it is one of the most coherent offerings in Europe right now.
What keeps the score below 9: the public track record is young, the loans sit outside MiCAR and are business-only at launch, and the bank account is Netherlands-only for now. None of these are structural flaws. All of them are things we will re-check as the products mature.
If you want pure self-custody, start with a hardware wallet. If you want the cheapest regulated Dutch on-ramp for stacking, see Bitvavo. If you want a regulated European home for a serious long-term position, with loans, inheritance planning, and a euro IBAN around it, Blockrise is the strongest candidate we have reviewed.
We will update this review after hands-on testing of the onboarding and app, and as the loan product and bank account roll out beyond the Netherlands.
Bitcoin-only. 0% custody fee. Segregated verifiable wallets. MiCAR-licensed across the EU.
Bitcoin.diy has no affiliate relationship with Blockrise at the time of publication. If that changes, this disclosure will be updated. Our review standards are the same either way: we publish what we find.
Yes. Blockrise Capital B.V. holds MiCAR license 41000029, granted by the Dutch AFM on 25 November 2025 and valid across all 27 EU member states through passporting. The company had been registered with the Dutch central bank (DNB) since 2022. Note that Bitcoin-backed loans run through a group company, Blockrise Lending B.V., and fall outside MiCAR’s current scope because MiCA does not yet cover lending.
Yes, since its full Bitcoin-only commitment in 2025. No altcoins, tokens, or staking products are offered. The company previously also offered Ethereum and dropped it, citing Bitcoin’s dominance and the clarity a single-asset proposition gives clients.
Blockrise uses a semi-custodial model. Keys are generated and held inside Hardware Security Modules (HSMs), physical vaults from which keys cannot be extracted. Your wallets are segregated per client, visible on-chain, and legally separated through a Dutch foundation (Stichting Blockrise). You access your bitcoin with a digital Blockrise key, but you do not hold a seed phrase yourself. It is not self-custody.
Bitcoin custody is free (0% per year since June 2026). Buying or selling costs 0.50% per transaction, and bitcoin withdrawals cost 0.25%. Asset management costs 1.82% per year including VAT with a 0% performance fee. Loans carry a 1.5% origination fee. A backup recovery action costs €999.
Business clients can borrow euros from €20,000 against bitcoin collateral, launched in November 2025 at around 8% interest with a 1.5% origination fee. Collateral sits in segregated wallets and is never rehypothecated. The loans launched for business clients only; private individuals should verify current availability directly with Blockrise.
Client bitcoin sits in segregated, on-chain verifiable wallets that are legally separated from the company through a Dutch foundation structure (Stichting Blockrise). If Blockrise the company failed, the assets would remain yours and reachable. This is exactly the architecture that was missing at Celsius and FTX.
Bitcoin sits in segregated HSM-secured wallets that remain yours even in an insolvency. Euro balances in the embedded bank account are protected up to €100,000 under the Dutch Deposit Guarantee Scheme via bunq. No custody arrangement is risk-free, and semi-custody is not self-custody, but the structure is among the strongest available in Europe.
Yes. Since April 2026, Blockrise clients in the Netherlands get an embedded euro IBAN through a partnership with bunq, the first live use of bunq’s Banking-as-a-Service platform. Fiat deposits are protected up to €100,000 under the Dutch Deposit Guarantee Scheme. Rollout beyond the Netherlands has no public timeline yet.
Blockrise offers personal, business, joint, and parent-child accounts. The MiCAR license covers all 27 EU member states through passporting, so EU residents and companies can onboard. KYC is required for every account; Blockrise is a regulated financial institution.
Bitvavo is a trading exchange: cheap execution, 400+ assets, built for buying and selling. Blockrise is a Bitcoin-only platform built around long-term holding: segregated custody, asset management, loans, inheritance planning, and bank accounts. If you want the cheapest regulated Dutch on-ramp, Bitvavo wins. If you want a regulated structure around a large long-term position, Blockrise is the different tool for that different job.
How borrowing against bitcoin works, the real liquidation risks, and which lenders to compare.
The cheapest MiCA-regulated Dutch exchange for stacking. The trading counterpart to Blockrise.
European P2P Bitcoin loans via multisig escrow, open to private individuals from ~€2,000.
Self-custody Bitcoin with a euro IBAN and Visa card. The everyday-spending angle on Bitcoin banking.
Why a seed phrase in a safe is not an estate plan, and how to pass bitcoin on properly.
The self-custody path: how to hold your own keys securely for the long term.