Reference

Glossary

The terms used across this site, in plain words. The same definitions appear as hover notes wherever a term shows up in a dossier or exercise.

English court procedure

freezing order: A court order stopping someone moving or hiding assets before judgment. Breaching it is contempt of court.
worldwide freezing order: A freezing order covering the defendant's assets wherever in the world they are.
proprietary injunction: An order preserving a specific asset the claimant says belongs to them — it attaches to the thing itself, not just the defendant.
Bankers Trust order: An order requiring a bank or exchange to hand over customer information so stolen funds can be traced.
Norwich Pharmacal order: An order requiring an innocent third party caught up in wrongdoing to identify the wrongdoer.
persons unknown: Defendants sued before they can be named — standard in crypto fraud, where at first only wallet addresses are known.
service out of the jurisdiction: The court's permission to serve proceedings on a defendant outside England and Wales.
gateway 25: The rule (Practice Direction 6B) that lets a claimant serve overseas parties with applications for information about stolen assets.
constructive trust: When the law treats whoever holds an asset as holding it for its true owner.
unjust enrichment: A claim to make someone give back a benefit they should not have kept.
conversion: The tort of treating someone else's goods as your own. Yuen v Li (2026) held it does not extend to crypto.
tracing: Following value through transfers, swaps and exchanges to show where it ended up.
dissipation: Moving or hiding assets so that a future judgment cannot reach them.
good arguable case: The threshold for interim orders like freezes — more than merely arguable, well short of proven.
without notice: An application made before the other side is told — used where warning them would defeat the order's purpose.
neutral citation: The court's own permanent reference for a judgment, e.g. [2022] EWHC 1723 (Ch). Cite this, not a news report.
civil forfeiture: A claim brought against the property itself rather than a person — the state proves the assets are tainted, no conviction needed.

Crypto & the ledger

seed phrase: The list of words that can recreate a wallet on any device. Whoever has it controls the funds.
private key: The secret number that signs transactions from an address. Possession of the key is control of the funds.
cold wallet: A wallet whose keys are kept on an offline device, out of reach of remote attackers.
NFT: A unique token on a blockchain. In D'Aloia the court allowed court papers to be served by placing one in the fraudster's wallet.
UTXO: An unspent transaction output — how Bitcoin records value. A wallet's balance is the sum of the outputs its keys can spend.
coinbase transaction: The transaction in each block that creates new coin as the mining reward, plus the block's fees.
confirmation: One block built on top of the block containing a transaction. More confirmations, more settled.
block height: A block's position in the chain, counted from zero at the genesis block.
transaction hash: The unique identifier of a transaction. Quote it and anyone, anywhere, can pull up the same record.
mixer: A service that pools many deposits so the visible link between sender and recipient is broken.
stablecoin: A token designed to track a currency, run by an issuer who can typically freeze balances — e.g. USDT or USDC.
unhosted wallet: A wallet controlled directly by its user rather than by an exchange.
external wallet: FINMA's term for a wallet held outside the supervised institution — the customer's own, or somebody else's.
omnibus wallet: One wallet in which a provider pools many customers' coins. Nothing on the chain shows whose is whose.
whitelisting: Checking an address once, then trusting it for later transfers without repeating the check.
satoshi test: Proving you control an address by sending a tiny amount from it, at an amount and time agreed in advance.
signed message: Proving you control an address by using its private key to sign a text you were asked to sign. No money moves.
time-boxing: Proving control by sending an agreed amount to an address the firm supplies, inside a short window it sets.
power of disposal: Being able to move what is in a wallet. Swiss supervisors ask firms to prove their customer has it (German: Verfügungsmacht).
VASP: Virtual-asset service provider — an exchange, custodian or similar business handling crypto for customers.
block explorer: A website for looking up transactions, addresses and blocks on a public blockchain.
smart contract: Code deployed on a blockchain that holds and moves funds according to its own rules.

Investigation & sanctions

travel rule: The requirement that sender and recipient identity data accompany crypto transfers between providers (FATF Recommendation 16).
SDN list: The main US sanctions list. US persons are prohibited from dealing with listed people and addresses.
designation: The act of adding a person, entity or address to a sanctions list, on a stated date under a stated legal power.
attribution: A claim about who is behind an address. Never a ledger fact — always cite who made the claim and when.
corroboration: Checking the same fact in two independent sources before relying on it.
chain of custody: The record of who held a piece of evidence and when — what makes an exhibit usable later.
SAR: Suspicious activity report — the report a bank or other regulated firm must file with the national FIU when it suspects money laundering.
FIU: Financial intelligence unit — the national office that receives and analyses suspicious activity reports. The UK's sits in the NCA; Switzerland's is MROS.
MROS: Money Laundering Reporting Office Switzerland — the Swiss financial intelligence unit, inside the federal police. It analyses reports and passes them on; it does not investigate or prosecute.
smurfing: Breaking one large payment into many small ones to stay under the level at which a firm must check who you are.

Regulation & market access

FATF: The Financial Action Task Force — the inter-governmental body, created by the G7 in 1989, whose Recommendations set the global anti-money-laundering standard. Not a law-maker: its power runs through peer review and its lists.
mutual evaluation: FATF's peer-review mechanism: member states inspect each other's AML systems against the Recommendations and publish graded reports.
grey list: FATF's list of jurisdictions under increased monitoring. Being placed on it triggers extra due diligence from the world's banks — the market consequence that makes FATF standards bite.
deference: One regulator relying on another's rules and supervision instead of applying its own — the mechanism at the heart of the UK–Swiss Berne Agreement.
mutual recognition: Two states agreeing by treaty that each other's regulation achieves equivalent outcomes, so firms can operate cross-border under home rules.
equivalence: A unilateral finding by one jurisdiction that another's rules are good enough for a specific purpose. Granted — and withdrawn — at the deciding side's discretion.
wholesale clients: Professional and institutional counterparties — banks, funds, large corporates — as opposed to retail consumers. Cross-border access regimes are usually limited to them.

MiCA & EU crypto-asset regulation

LEI: Legal Entity Identifier — the 20-character code that names a legal entity unambiguously in filings and registers. Registers record legal entities; firms market brands, and the LEI is how the two are matched.Defined in CDR (EU) 2025/421 — identifiers in the tagged white paper ↗
VFA: Virtual Financial Asset — the category of Malta's pre-MiCA national framework. VFA licences fed the MiCA transition: grandfathering and a simplified application for firms already licensed.Defined in MFSA Circular on the Authorisation Process for MiCA Applicants ↗
over-collateralisation: Holding reserve assets worth more than the tokens they back — a buffer against falls in the reserve's value, sized by rule rather than by comfort.Defined in EBA Final Report EBA/RTS/2024/10 (draft — not law) ↗
de-pegging: A stabilising token losing its promised link to the value it references. Every ART and EMT issuer's recovery plan must carry an indicator tracking this risk.Defined in EBA Guidelines on recovery plans (EBA/GL/2024/07) ↗
mutatis mutandis: Applied with the necessary changes — a legal instruction to reuse one set of rules in a second context, adjusting only what the new context requires. Art 55 uses it to hand Title III's recovery-and-redemption chapter to EMT issuers.Defined in Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, Art 55 ↗
CASP: Crypto-asset service provider — a firm authorised under MiCA to provide one or more of the ten listed crypto-asset services in the EU. One home-state authorisation covers the whole Union.Defined in Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, Art 3(1)(15) ↗
ART: Asset-referenced token — a crypto-asset claiming to hold a stable value by referencing anything other than exactly one official currency: a basket, gold, another asset. MiCA checks e-money tokens first; ART is the stablecoin residual (Title III).Defined in Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, Art 3(1)(6) ↗
EMT: E-money token — a crypto-asset claiming a stable value by referencing exactly one official currency, such as the euro. Only credit institutions and e-money institutions may issue them (MiCA Title IV).Defined in Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, Art 3(1)(7) ↗
RTS: Regulatory technical standard — detail an EU authority drafts and the European Commission adopts as a delegated regulation. Until adoption, scrutiny and publication it is a draft, not law.
ITS: Implementing technical standard — the forms-and-procedures sibling of an RTS, adopted as an implementing regulation on a faster track without the scrutiny period.
delegated regulation: A European Commission act filling in detail a regulation empowered it to add. Parliament and Council get a scrutiny period before it can enter into force.
implementing regulation: A European Commission act setting uniform procedures or forms for applying EU law. No scrutiny period, so it can reach the Official Journal within days of adoption.
guideline: A supervisory authority's published position on how rules should be applied. EU guidelines bind authorities on a comply-or-explain basis — they are not themselves the law.
order book: The live list of buy and sell orders on a trading venue, by price and size. MiCA's record-keeping standards prescribe how a crypto trading platform must keep it.Defined in CDR (EU) 2025/416 (order-book records) ↗
ISO 20022: The international standard for structured financial messages. MiCA's reporting standards reuse its message formats, so crypto-asset reporting speaks the same language as securities reporting.Defined in ESMA order-book message specifications ↗
iXBRL: Inline XBRL — machine-readable tags embedded in an ordinary web page, so one document is readable by both people and systems. MiCA white papers must be drawn up this way.Defined in CIR (EU) 2024/2984, Art 2(1) ↗
reverse solicitation: The narrow exemption letting a non-EU firm serve an EU client who approached it entirely on their own initiative. Construed narrowly and factually — a disclaimer cannot outweigh contrary facts.Defined in Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, Art 61 ↗
white paper: The disclosure document MiCA requires before most crypto-assets are offered to the public or admitted to trading — contents prescribed, liability attached, notified to the regulator.Defined in Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, Arts 4–15 ↗
grandfathering: A transitional permission to keep operating under old national rules while a new regime phases in. Under MiCA it ran at most to 1 July 2026, and many states chose shorter.Defined in Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, Art 143(3) ↗
passporting: Providing services across every EU/EEA state on one home-state authorisation, after a notification. A licence in one member state opens the whole single market.Defined in Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, Art 65 ↗
STOR: A suspicious transaction or order report — what a platform files with its authority when trading looks like market abuse. The template is prescribed down to the fields.Defined in CDR (EU) 2025/885 (Art 92 RTS), Annex ↗
programme of operations: The business plan filed with a MiCA application — services, clients, geography, outsourcing, forecasts. You are supervised against it afterwards, so it is a commitment, not marketing.Defined in CDR (EU) 2025/305, Art 2 ↗
qualifying holding: A stake of 10% or more of capital or voting rights, or one giving significant influence. Buying one in an authorised firm triggers its own regulatory assessment.Defined in Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, Art 3(1)(36) ↗
comply-or-explain: How EU guidelines bind: each national authority must say whether it complies, and explain publicly if not. Pressure on authorities — not a rule that binds firms directly.
inside information: Precise, unpublished information that would move a crypto-asset's price if known. It must be disclosed properly, and nobody holding it may trade on it.Defined in Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, Art 87 ↗
own funds: The firm's own capital — the money that absorbs losses before anyone else's. MiCA sets floors and can require more.Defined in Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, Art 67 ↗
reserve of assets: The pool an asset-referenced token issuer must hold so the token can always be redeemed. Its composition and liquidity are regulated separately from the issuer's own money.Defined in Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, Art 36 ↗
scrutiny period: The window after the Commission adopts a delegated act in which Parliament or Council can object before it becomes law. One reason delegated acts reach the Official Journal slower than implementing acts.
consultation paper: An authority's draft rules, published for public comment with a deadline. The one stage where anyone — firm, association, individual — can formally shape the text.
final report: The document in which ESMA or the EBA answers the consultation and hands its final draft to the Commission. The draft inside it is settled — but it is still not law.
competent authority: The national regulator a member state designates to supervise under an EU regime — the licensing and supervision counterpart. Often shortened to NCA.Defined in Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, Art 3(1)(35) ↗
NCA: National competent authority — the member-state regulator that authorises and supervises under an EU regime. For MiCA that means bodies like Malta's MFSA or Austria's FMA.Defined in Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, Art 3(1)(35) ↗
management body: The board — the people who direct the firm and answer for it. MiCA assesses them one by one and as a collective.Defined in Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, Art 3(1)(27) ↗
PPAET: A person professionally arranging or executing transactions — the market-abuse regime's word for platforms and dealers who must watch order flow. Who counts as one was a genuinely argued consultation question.Defined in Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, Art 92 ↗
ESMA: The European Securities and Markets Authority — the EU-level supervisor that drafts most of MiCA's detailed rules and keeps its registers. It drafts; the Commission adopts.Defined in esma.europa.eu — MiCA hub ↗
EBA: The European Banking Authority — ESMA's banking-side sibling, responsible for MiCA's stablecoin rulebook. It drafts; the Commission adopts.Defined in eba.europa.eu — markets in crypto-assets ↗

Swiss supervision

FINMA: The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority. It licenses firms, inspects them and can shut them down — but it cannot fine anyone.
FINMASA: The Financial Market Supervision Act of 2007 (SR 956.1) — the statute that created FINMA and lists what it may do. In German, FINMAG.
GwG: The Swiss Anti-Money Laundering Act of 1997 (SR 955.0). Says who must do money-laundering checks and who supervises them. Often written AMLA in English.
AMLO-FINMA: FINMA's own Anti-Money Laundering Ordinance (SR 955.033.0) — the detailed rules under the GwG. In German, GwV-FINMA.
SRO: A self-regulatory organisation. A private body, recognised by FINMA, that supervises money-laundering compliance at firms FINMA does not supervise itself. Eleven exist.
self-regulatory organisation: A private body, recognised by FINMA, that supervises money-laundering compliance at firms FINMA does not supervise itself. Eleven exist in Switzerland.
parabanking: The Swiss term for financial businesses that are not banks — money changers, money transmitters, crypto firms, trustees. They are supervised by SROs, not by FINMA.
ordinance: A rule made by the government or a regulator under a power given by an Act. Binding law, but below the Act.
circular: A FINMA document explaining how it will apply the law. It binds FINMA itself. FINMA says a circular needs no express statutory hook but must trace back to a higher rule.
FINMA guidance: A short notice to supervised firms (German: Aufsichtsmitteilung). FINMA says it is not a regulatory instrument and is aimed at practical effect, not legal effect.
Aufsichtsmitteilung: German for FINMA guidance — a short notice to supervised firms. FINMA states it is not a regulatory instrument.
decree: An individual, binding order made by a Swiss authority to a named party (German: Verfügung). It can be appealed to a court, which can quash it.
Verfügung: The German term for an individual binding order by a Swiss authority. Appealable to court; a court that quashes one removes its legal effect from the start.
consultation: The stage where a draft law or rule is published for comment before it is adopted — the one moment arguments can still shape the text. National systems name it differently; Swiss practice says Vernehmlassung for statutes, Anhörung for regulators' rules.
Fedlex: The Swiss government's free official website for federal law. It shows each Act and ordinance as consolidated to a stated date.
Federal Council: The seven-member Swiss executive. It makes ordinances and decides when laws come into force.
Federal Administrative Court: The Swiss court that hears appeals against FINMA decisions. Its judgments are where FINMA's legal positions get tested in public.
Federal Supreme Court: Switzerland's highest court, in Lausanne. Last stop for an appeal against a FINMA decision.
disgorgement: Taking back a profit somebody made from breaking the rules. It strips the gain; it is not a fine, so no profit means no payment.
industry ban: An order stopping a named individual from holding a senior role at a supervised firm — up to five years under FINMASA Art. 33.

Bank capital & crisis

CET1: Common Equity Tier 1 — the strongest layer of a bank's capital, essentially ordinary shares and retained profit. The CET1 ratio compares it to the bank's risk-weighted assets.
AT1: Additional Tier 1 — bonds a bank can write off or convert to shares if it gets into trouble. Investors get a higher return for taking that risk.
liquidity coverage ratio: How much easily-sellable assets a bank holds against the cash it could be asked for over 30 stressed days. Above 100% means it holds more than the test requires.
viability event: The trigger written into an AT1 bond's terms that lets it be written down — usually capital falling too far, or the bank needing state support to survive.
write-down: Cancelling what is owed on a bond, in part or entirely. The holder is not paid back.
Basel Core Principles: The global checklist for whether banking supervision is any good, issued by the Basel Committee. The IMF grades countries against it.
suspensive effect: An order pausing a decision while an appeal against it is heard. Nothing changes on the ground until the appeal is decided.
partial decision: A judgment settling some issues in a case and leaving others open (German: Teilentscheid). The case is not over.
sovereign immunity: The rule that a state normally cannot be sued in another country's courts, unless what it did was commercial rather than governmental.

See the terms in use:

Blockchain & Travel Rule Practice exercises