Speaking at this year's VI3NNA Congress, Teroxx founder and CEO Christoph Pliessnig argued that the financial system's central problem is no longer technological but temporal, and that regulation is not what slows the future down. It is what makes closing the gap possible.
The defining incongruity of contemporary finance is no longer the one most often debated. It is not whether digital assets belong inside the system, whether blockchain rails will eventually displace correspondent banking, or whether tokenization is a passing enthusiasm. Those debates are settling, and they are settling in roughly the same direction. The remaining incongruity is more elementary and harder to defend. The world now operates continuously. The financial system that serves it does not.
Streaming services do not close. Social platforms do not close. Artificial intelligence does not close. E-commerce processes transactions every second, every day, across every time zone. Finance, almost alone, still keeps office hours. Even after the move to T+1, settlement still takes a day. Markets close at the weekend. Cross-border transfers crawl through a patchwork of correspondent banks. For Christoph Pliessnig, founder and CEO of the Cyprus-based digital asset firm Teroxx, this temporal asymmetry is the gap that will define the next 25 years of the industry, and the force that closes it will be the one that most operators in the space still treat as an adversary.
That force is regulation.
A pattern, repeated
Pliessnig reads the present through a long view of financial history. Every major chapter has followed the same pattern. A new infrastructure layer arrives, a new framework of trust is built around it, and the category expands. Barter gave way to coins and gold. Coins and gold gave way to banking. Banking expanded into central banking and organized capital markets. Credit cards, ETFs, online banking, and mobile banking each defined a decade, and each became durable only when the trust architecture caught up with the underlying technology. The current chapter is the move from digital assets to full tokenization, and the same pattern is playing out on a compressed timeline.
The European Union's regulatory trajectory reflects this pattern more closely than its critics tend to acknowledge. The progression is not that of three unrelated rulebooks. The Electronic Money Directives (EMI and EMD2) formalized the rails for electronic money in the late 2000s. MiFID II reshaped traditional capital markets across the 2010s. MiCA, whose rollout ran from 2024 to 2026, now applies in full. Taken together, they constitute a single continuous build-out of trust infrastructure for digital finance, with each phase widening the perimeter. EMI brought electronic money inside. MiFID II did the same for investment services and securities markets. MiCA extends the perimeter to digital assets, stablecoins, asset-referenced tokens, security tokens, and the service providers that intermediate them. Placed side by side, the three frameworks do not look fragmented. They look like layered architecture.
The fork the industry would rather not see
Beneath the historical argument sits a more pointed one. Once a financial technology reaches a certain scale, the regulatory response narrows to two possible outcomes. The category is brought inside a framework, or it is prohibited. There is no permanent third option in which something large enough to matter is left ungoverned indefinitely. This is the fork digital assets have spent the past few years moving through, and the choice the European Union has made to regulate rather than prohibit is, in Pliessnig's view, the most consequential decision the category has yet faced.
The implication for operators is straightforward. Regulation is not a tax on the business. It is the condition under which the business is allowed to scale. Firms that built without that assumption are now spending this cycle playing catch-up. Firms that built with it are already positioning for the next one.
It is also the only force capable of resolving the temporal mismatch the industry quietly tolerates. The infrastructure for continuous settlement already exists. The technical capacity to run 24/7 markets is not a research problem. It is a deployment problem. What blocks deployment is the absence of a unified regulatory framework that enables continuous operation without fragmenting custody, market surveillance, and investor protection. Once that framework exists, the architecture follows. Within the European Union, MiCA constitutes most of that framework. Tokenized real-world assets, programmable settlement, atomic delivery-versus-payment, and continuous secondary markets all sit downstream of a single regulatory move.
Three pillars, and the order they sit in
What this implies for how firms will compete is less obvious. The industry's reflex has been to assume that the firm with the best technology wins. Pliessnig disagrees, and the disagreement is sharper than it first appears. Technology, in his framing, is no longer the differentiator. Three pillars now define how the next generation of financial firms will compete, and only one of them is technical.
The first is regulatory rails, the licensed perimeter inside which a firm is allowed to operate. The second is a unified experience, the ability to give a client a single interface across asset classes, jurisdictions, and product types. The third - and the decisive one - is the client relationship, the human layer that makes the first two trustworthy enough to use at scale.
The construction is not accidental. Technology scales systems. Relationships scale trust. A firm with strong infrastructure and no relationship layer can run a market, but it cannot run a portfolio of meaningful client wealth. A firm with strong relationships and weak infrastructure can hold attention for a while, but it cannot deliver on the experience that modern infrastructure now makes possible. The firms that compound across the next 25 years will be the ones that treat the three pillars as a single product rather than as three separate functions.
The deadline is generational
The strategic clock against which all of this will be tested is not corporate. It is demographic. The largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history is now underway, and the inheritors do not need to be persuaded that digital is the default. What they will not accept is the residue of the previous system. They will not accept monthly PDF reports as a form of communication with their wealth, and they will not accept opening hours as a feature of the system that holds it.
The cohort taking over family balance sheets and institutional mandates over the next 25 years has been raised inside continuous infrastructure. The expectation of permanent availability is not a generational preference. It is a default assumption about how systems work. A financial system that pauses for weekends will not be modernized by them. It will be replaced by them.
Regulation, in this reading, is not slowing the future down. It is what makes the future possible. The argument is meant to challenge the industry's current stance, not to defend it. The firms that take that challenge on now will be the ones building the infrastructure 25 years from now. The rest will be writing about why they should have.
Christoph Pliessnig is the founder and CEO of Teroxx. This article reflects the argument he made at the VI3NNA Congress 2026.
About Teroxx
Founded in 2018, Teroxx is a premier digital asset boutique serving affluent, institutional, and high-net-worth clients. Holding 8 of 10 MiCA CASP authorizations, Teroxx bridges the gap between traditional finance and the digital economy. With a leadership team expanded for global scale in 2026, Teroxx provides the compliance, custody, and risk management infrastructure that the future of finance demands.
