Bitcoin Seminar for Switzerland

Bitcoin's issuance follows rules written into its code, not a decision by a company or a central bank. The Bitcoin Core source sets the halving interval at 210,000 blocks, roughly four years, and rejects any total above 21,000,000 BTC. No other widely held asset, not a stock, a government bond or the Swiss franc, has a supply schedule fixed this way and enforced by thousands of independent nodes instead of a single issuer.

Switzerland's own market reflects how far this has moved into mainstream finance. By June 2026, the SIX Swiss Exchange listed 384 crypto products, 217 of them crypto ETPs across 23 underlying assets, on the same regulated exchange that lists Swiss blue-chip equities. That is a scale of listed product choice a purely speculative asset does not usually reach, and it puts bitcoin ETPs next to equity and bond ETFs on the same trading screen Swiss institutional investors already use.

FINMA sorts crypto-assets into payment, utility and asset tokens. Bitcoin falls into the payment token category, which FINMA treats as "synonymous with cryptocurrencies": subject to anti-money-laundering rules, but not classed as a security. That distinction shapes which license a Swiss provider needs to offer bitcoin services, and it is why bitcoin trading in Switzerland runs through anti-money-laundering-regulated intermediaries, not securities dealers.

The Swiss DLT Act entered fully into force on August 1, 2021. It created a license for DLT trading facilities and set rules for segregating crypto-based assets in the event of a custodian's bankruptcy, giving Swiss investors a legal basis for asset segregation that predates most other countries' crypto custody rules.

Zürcher Kantonalbank offers bitcoin and ether trading and custody directly in its e-banking and mobile app, holding the private keys for clients itself; Thurgauer Kantonalbank became the first bank to use that service for its own clients. PostFinance opened crypto trading and custody to its customers on February 21, 2024, partnering with Sygnum and keeping custody inside Switzerland. Cantonal and postal banks offering bitcoin custody directly, without a third-party app in between, marks a different level of mainstream banking access than most European markets currently have.

The absence of a central issuer that could smooth out supply also means demand shocks move the price with nothing to dampen them, which is the core of bitcoin's volatility. An IMF note found bitcoin showed little correlation with major stock indices before 2020, but that the correlation between bitcoin price volatility and S&P 500 volatility rose more than four-fold after the pandemic began.

The Basel Committee's standard for bank cryptoasset exposures, in force since January 1, 2025, puts bitcoin in Group 2, the category for unbacked crypto-assets, with a risk weight of up to 1250 percent and a total Group 2 exposure limit of 1 to 2 percent of a bank's Tier 1 capital. That treatment tells a Swiss investor how conservatively banks themselves are required to size any bitcoin exposure on their own balance sheet, a useful reference point for a portfolio allocation.

Finance Loop is the meeting place for people who work on bitcoin and digital assets across Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and connects the finance, IT and AI communities with events in Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin and Hamburg. Finance Loop's Bitcoin for Investors seminar is built for investors, finance professionals and advisors who want a grounded case for bitcoin as an asset class, not price talk, including custody models and how it fits a broader portfolio.

Related pages: bitcoin in Germany and crypto in Germany.

FINMA sorts crypto-assets into payment, utility and asset tokens. Bitcoin is a payment token, which FINMA describes as synonymous with cryptocurrencies generally: subject to anti-money-laundering rules but not treated as a security, unlike Switzerland's approach to some other token categories.

The DLT Act, fully in force since August 1, 2021, created a license category for DLT trading facilities and set rules for keeping crypto-based assets segregated from a custodian's own estate if that custodian becomes insolvent, a protection that predates equivalent rules in many other jurisdictions.

Yes. Zürcher Kantonalbank and PostFinance both offer bitcoin trading and custody through their own banking apps, with Zürcher Kantonalbank holding private keys itself and PostFinance partnering with Sygnum for custody kept inside Switzerland.

Custody and position sizing come before a trade. A Swiss investor now chooses between self-custody, a FINMA-supervised exchange, or a bank offering, each with a different mix of cost, control and legal protection under the DLT Act's segregation rules. Finance Loop's Bitcoin for Investors seminar works through these choices, along with position sizing and correlation with traditional assets, in detail.