When I hear the word “accountant,” I picture a quiet person with a laptop, reconciling numbers in a back office long after the money has moved. Then I sat down with Jeremie Vaislic at Money 20/20 Europe and realised I had the timing exactly backwards. His company, Ledger Rocket, is built on a simple, almost confrontational idea: the year-end audit is too late. By the time the accountant finds the problem, the money is already gone.
| What You Need to Know |
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| 1Interview recorded on the opening day of Money 20/20 Europe 2026, 2 to 4 June at the Amsterdam RAI. |
| 2Jeremie Vaislic is a co-founder of Ledger Rocket, a real-time core banking ledger and accounting platform for regulated entities, including crypto firms. |
| 3Each event is matched to its accounting treatment before it hits the ledger, so balances are correct in real time and there is nothing to reconcile later. |
| 4Vaislic's framing: "You can't stop bad actors, but you can put guardrails in place so management knows something is wrong the second it goes wrong." |
| 5For crypto firms the payoff is staying provably compliant, which is how they keep their licences as MiCA tightens across Europe. |
Vaislic, a co-founder of the firm, describes Ledger Rocket as a real-time core banking ledger and accounting platform for regulated entities, a category that now firmly includes crypto companies. That is a dry sentence for a sharp product. What it really sells is the ability to know that something is wrong the second it goes wrong, rather than two months or one financial year later. For an industry that has watched more than one platform collapse because nobody could see the hole in the balance sheet until it was too late, that is not a feature. It is the whole point.
“What’s on your balance sheet, and why”
I asked Vaislic to explain in plain terms what his platform does. His website says it tracks the flow of money; I wanted the human version. His answer hinged on one word that most accounting tools quietly skip: why.
“The platform lets entities understand what’s in their balance sheet and, most importantly, why it’s in their balance sheet. You’d be surprised how many businesses record money flows but don’t understand why something sits in a specific part of the balance sheet. Then they have to do a forensic job to figure it out.”
The technical move underneath that is elegant. In most systems, transactions pour into the ledger and a team later does the painful work of reconciliation, sorting out what each entry was and where it belongs. Ledger Rocket flips the order. Every event is matched to its correct accounting treatment before it touches the ledger, so it lands in the right place automatically. The downstream forensic work that eats finance teams alive simply does not need to happen because the meaning of each transaction was defined up front. If you want the conceptual background, the difference between this and a traditional batch-reconciled ledger is the difference between knowing your position now and discovering it next quarter.
You can’t stop bad actors. You can catch them instantly.
This is where the conversation got pointed because the crypto market has a specific, expensive version of this problem. Plenty of companies record their money flows but ignore the discipline of proper accounting treatment, and the consequences are not abstract. As I put it to him, in this industry, that ends with people running away with other people’s money. How does a platform like his actually prevent that?
Vaislic was careful and honest in his answer, and it is worth quoting:
“You can’t stop bad actors. But you can put guardrails in place, so the management of the company knows something is wrong the second it goes wrong, instead of waiting a month, two months, or the end-of-year audit to figure out, oh wait, this was not supposed to be this way.”
The system, he explained, makes it impossible for transactions to be booked any way apart from the rules predefined. Nobody can arbitrarily decide to do something they should not. The result is real-time visibility of the balance sheet plus a full audit trail of every transaction, which changes the auditor’s job entirely. Instead of checking every transaction, the auditor checks whether the accounting was set up correctly; if it was, the software guarantees the rest, and there are no lost entries that nobody can explain.
You do not have to look far for why this matters. The collapse of FTX, where US regulators later charged its founder over the misuse of customer funds, was in large part a story of a balance sheet nobody could see in time. Real-time, rule-bound ledgers are the unglamorous answer to exactly that failure mode.
Why crypto firms specifically need this now
For crypto companies, Vaislic argued, the benefit is not just internal hygiene. It is survival. A firm that can prove, in real time, that its transactions are what it says they are can keep the regulator on its side, and keeping the regulator on side is how it keeps its licence and its banking relationships. The more guardrails and controls you build into your accounting, he added, the safer it is for customers to bank with you or use you as a service provider.
The timing could hardly be sharper. Europe’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation is moving from transition into full force, with crypto-asset service providers across the bloc needing to be properly authorised as the transitional windows close in 2026. Authorisation is not a one-time hurdle; it is an ongoing obligation to demonstrate that your books are clean, and your controls are real. A ledger that produces a provable, real-time audit trail is, in that environment, close to a compliance prerequisite rather than a nice-to-have. Vaislic was at the show as a sponsor, and the pitch lands precisely because the regulatory deadline is no longer theoretical.
Taking on the legacy players
I closed with the question I ask everyone: what’s next? Vaislic did not hedge. Ledger Rocket serves three kinds of client, crypto firms, payments companies and banks, and in each vertical the ambition is the same: to be the best, and to displace the legacy incumbents.
“We want to disrupt those markets. We want to take over the legacy players because technically the solution is way more advanced. We’re here to prove it. So bring it on.”
It is a bold thing to say about core banking infrastructure, a corner of finance famous for moving slowly and trusting only the old guard. But the argument has a logic to it. The legacy systems were built for a world of overnight batch processing and annual audits. Crypto, with its instant settlement and twenty-four-seven markets, does not live in that world, and neither, increasingly, does regulated finance. A ledger built for real time from the first line of code starts with an advantage, the incumbents have to retrofit.
Why this is relevant for the Dutch and European reader
For anyone running or banking with a crypto or fintech business in the Netherlands or across Europe, the lesson here is about a shift in what “good” looks like. The old standard was a clean audit at the end of the year. The new standard, the one regulators are quietly moving toward under MiCA, is provable correctness in real time. The gap between those two is where customer funds go missing and licences get pulled.
Vaislic’s company is a bet that this shift is permanent, and on the evidence of his pitch, it is a reasonable bet. Whether or not Ledger Rocket is the firm that wins, the direction is clear: in European finance, the ability to show your work as it happens is becoming the price of staying in business. The year-end audit, as he put it, is simply too late.
This interview was recorded live at Money 20/20 Europe 2026 at the Amsterdam RAI. For more conversations with the people building trustworthy crypto finance, watch the full Cryptofocus series, and read our companion interview with Tothemoon on crypto payments and the MiCA push.
