Tesseract Unveils MiCA-Compliant Vaults for Institutional Crypto Investors
Finnish MiCA-licensed crypto asset manager Tesseract has launched Dedicated Client Vaults for institutional and professional investors.
Each vault is a segregated smart contract tied to a single client, letting institutions retain 100% ownership of vault tokens while meeting MiCA custody rules.
CEO James Harris says pooled yield vaults like Morpho's could be treated as collective investment schemes under MiCA, exposing users to unlicensed securities risk.
Finnish crypto asset manager Tesseract Investment Oy, one of the first firms to secure a full MiCA license in the European Union, has launched a new on-chain yield platform called Tesseract Dedicated Client Vaults aimed squarely at institutional and professional investors. The offering is designed so that each vault is an independent smart contract dedicated to a single client and managed by Tesseract, rather than a shared pool of capital. Clients deploy the vaults from their own wallets, hold 100% of the vault tokens representing their assets, and keep segregated custody accounts that satisfy MiCA's requirements for client asset segregation and safekeeping.
In a recent LinkedIn post outlining '5 key things institutions need from onchain vaults,' Tesseract CEO James Harris drew a sharp line between custody vaults and pooled yield vaults, warning that the latter may fall under EU rules for collective investment undertakings. 'We see MiCA as an opportunity, not a burden,' Harris said in a separate interview on Alt Funds Network, adding that institutions 'look at DeFi through a lens of regulation, segregation and control - not just APY.' He pointed to popular pooled structures such as Morpho vaults as examples of products that could be treated as collective investment schemes under MiCA's guidance, bringing them into the orbit of UCITS or AIFMD-style rules if their yield tokens represent a stake in pooled capital with a defined investment strategy.
MiCA pushes vaults toward segregated structures
The European Securities and Markets Authority's final report on MiCA guidelines notes that a crypto asset should be classified as a unit in a collective investment undertaking if it 'represents a stake in a pooled investment with the objective of generating a return for investors in accordance with a defined investment policy.' Harris argues that many pooled DeFi yield products fit that description, which could make their yield tokens unlicensed securities when marketed to EU investors. By contrast, Tesseract's Dedicated Client Vaults keep each institution's assets in its own smart contract, with no pooling of capital or sharing of returns between different investors, aligning more clearly with MiCA's crypto-asset service provider regime rather than fund regulation.
Tesseract's MiCA authorization, granted by Finland's Financial Supervisory Authority in 2025, allows the Helsinki-based firm to offer portfolio management, custody and asset transfer services for both retail and professional clients across the EU.
Institutions hunt safer yield as old trades vanish
The launch of Dedicated Client Vaults comes as traditional crypto basis trades have lost much of their appeal. A recent note cited by Gate.io observed that the annualized yield on the once-popular Bitcoin cash-and-carry arbitrage has collapsed from more than 17% to around 5%, barely above the roughly 3.5% yield on one-year U.S. Treasury bills. 'The era of easy, near-risk-free institutional money in crypto is decisively over,' Harris said in that piece, characterizing current conditions as 'a tactical reset' rather than a full institutional exit.
