Capital Markets in Highgate in 2025 🏛️

Five years ago when I joined Highgate Law & Tax, there were 4 of us lawyers (including a student). Through gradual organic growth, we were able to build a separate regulatory department, which today has 4 members. As a result of this, we not only started a number of new projects last year, but also successfully saw several of them through to completion as legal counsel. ✅

In 2025, we had the opportunity to represent clients in several proceedings before the National Bank of Slovakia, which resulted in:

✅ 2 authorisations for cryptoasset service providers (+ partial assistance with a third)
✅ 2 authorisations under the Collective Investment Schemes Act
✅ 2 approved base bond prospectuses, including one for tokenised bonds
✅ 1 registered SICAV

Besides, last year was “rich” for us, especially for the financial transaction tax 💸. Thanks to its legislatively failed link to payment services, it was a hard nut to crack for financial institutions doing business in Slovakia.

The trend for 2026, purely from the perspective of our legal services, is clearly cryptoasset services in financial regulation. While in other areas of financial regulation we see (unfortunately) more reticence from clients to set up new financial structures in Slovakia, in the area of cryptoassets Slovakia appears to be an interesting base for entering the European market. 🌍🇪🇺

For all the completed and still open projects in 2025, we thank our clients for their trust 🙏 and hope that 2026 will be at least as strong.

Special thanks to:
🤝 Peter Varga for his mentoring and leadership
🤝 Radoslav Gulassa for his intensive help and cooperation throughout the year
🤝 Filip Klučka, our newest addition, for accepting the challenge and not being afraid of crypto-asset law or capital markets