Compliance appears in a crypto company’s accounts as a cost line, and most investors read it the way they would read a one-off systems upgrade. Something was built, it was expensive, and the expense will normalise.

That reading is wrong in a specific way. In this sector, compliance is not a project with a completion date. It is a permanent operating function whose cost moves with customer numbers and transaction volumes, which makes it behave less like capital expenditure and more like cost of sales.

The distinction has just become easier to test. The FCA’s authorisation window for UK cryptoasset firms opened at the end of September and closes in February, which gives shareholders a dated event against which to judge how…