Building a Digital Assets Company: The 2026 Reality
- 29 minutes ago
- 1 min read
Although many digital asset firms still treat compliance as a separate legal topic, in reality, it directly defines whether a business can operate or innovate at all. This is a classic mistake I have seen: companies spend months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to perfect an idea, and even when it is completely legal, if the bank sees even a tiny opportunity for a mistake, the whole project fails at onboarding.
Digital assets grew in a period where regulatory gaps and jurisdictional differences allowed flexible structures, however in 2026 this flexibility is shrinking.
Today, no business can ignore how banks think and how money moves internationally. There is still room for innovation, just much less than it was before, but this also means that these companies can operate in a much safer environment, and not necessarily because of the regulation, but because there are global banking rules which everybody needs to keep.
Digital assets are already difficult to structure and operate, but if the most vulnerable operational bottleneck, which is payment and banking, remains ignored from the beginning, the business has no real chance of long term survival.
