Crypto Valley in Switzerland

Crypto Valley names the cluster of crypto and blockchain companies, foundations and banks based in and around the canton of Zug, a half-hour drive south of Zurich. The name traces back to February 2014, when the Ethereum Foundation chose Zug as its seat, a decision that drew developers and other blockchain projects to the canton in the years after. In 2016, the municipality of Zug ran a pilot that let residents pay small amounts of local government fees in bitcoin, a step that gave the Crypto Valley name wider currency in the press.

The ecosystem has since spread past Zug's borders. Zurich holds the country's largest concentration of licensed crypto banks and the SIX Swiss Exchange, Geneva is home to custody and tokenization firms such as Taurus, and the southern city of Lugano runs its own Plan ₿ program, under which bitcoin and other crypto assets settle municipal fees and taxes and hundreds of local shops accept them at the till. Liechtenstein, a separate country bordering the canton of St. Gallen, has its own token law, the Token and Trustworthy Technology Service Provider Act, in force since January 2020 and often named alongside Crypto Valley for its similar approach to blockchain regulation.

FINMA, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, published its first guidelines on initial coin offerings on February 16, 2018, and sorted tokens into three categories: payment tokens (a means of payment, with bitcoin as the example), utility tokens (digital access to an application) and asset tokens (an economic function similar to a share, bond or derivative). A supplement published in September 2019 extended the same reasoning to stablecoins, judging each project by its economic function, not its name.

The Federal Act on the Adaptation of Federal Law to Developments in Distributed Ledger Technology, known as the DLT Act, entered fully into force on August 1, 2021. It added "DLT securities" as a category of ledger-based securities that can be transferred only through a distributed ledger, and created a FINMA license for DLT trading facilities, a market infrastructure separate from a stock exchange license. BX Digital, part of the Boerse Stuttgart Group, holds one of the first such licenses; renamed SeturionX, it settles its trades on Seturion. Switzerland regulates crypto banking through the ordinary banking license: FINMA granted full banking licenses to two crypto-focused banks in August 2019, the first of their kind in the country.

Two Zug-founded banks hold full FINMA banking licenses for digital assets: Sygnum Bank and AMINA Bank (until 2024 named SEBA Bank), both licensed in August 2019 for deposit-taking, lending, custody and trading in crypto assets under full prudential supervision. SIX, which runs the Swiss stock exchange, received FINMA approval in May 2026 to fold its digital exchange SDX into its central securities depository SIX SIS and to offer crypto custody through that same regulated infrastructure used for equities and bonds.

Zürcher Kantonalbank lets clients trade and hold bitcoin and ether directly in its e-banking and mobile app, keeping the private keys itself. PostFinance opened crypto trading and custody to its customers in February 2024, partnering with Sygnum and keeping custody inside Switzerland. 21Shares, founded in Zurich in 2018, listed the world's first physically backed crypto exchange-traded product on the SIX Swiss Exchange in November 2018 and now lists its products on SIX, BX Swiss and other European exchanges. Bitcoin Suisse, founded in Zug, offers brokerage, custody, staking and lending in digital assets under a self-regulatory organization recognized by FINMA. Taurus, founded in Geneva in 2018, builds infrastructure banks use to issue, custody and trade tokenized assets.

The Ethereum Foundation remains registered in Zug, where it was set up in 2014 to support the Ethereum protocol after a public token sale that ran from July to September of that year. Other blockchain foundations followed it to the canton, among them the Web3 Foundation (Polkadot) and the Solana Foundation. The Swiss National Bank, the Bank for International Settlements and SIX have run Project Helvetia since 2020, a pilot that settles tokenized bonds on the SIX Digital Exchange using a wholesale central bank digital currency; the project has been extended to at least mid-2027, with six digital bond issuances totaling 750 million Swiss francs settled through it by mid-2025.

Crypto Valley and Germany's own crypto center in Frankfurt are linked in practice: German banks and asset managers use Swiss-licensed custodians such as Sygnum and AMINA for regulated crypto custody, and 21Shares lists several of its crypto ETPs on both the SIX Swiss Exchange and Deutsche Börse's Xetra, so an investor in either country can buy the same product on a local exchange. Switzerland sits outside the European Union and its Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, so a Swiss crypto license does not by itself allow a firm to serve EU clients; see MiCA regulation for how the EU's own rulebook works and crypto in Germany for how BaFin licenses providers there.

Crypto Valley traces to the Ethereum Foundation's move to Zug in 2014, and two of its banks, Sygnum and AMINA, hold full FINMA banking licenses for crypto assets, under the same prudential supervision as any other Swiss bank. The DLT Act gave digital securities a legal category of their own in 2021, separate from the older securities law.

No. Crypto Valley is the ecosystem itself: the banks, exchanges, foundations and companies described above. The Crypto Valley Association is a separate nonprofit association that uses the Crypto Valley name in its own branding. It publishes its own reports and runs its own events, and it speaks for its members only.

Some do. Sygnum and AMINA both hold additional licenses or subsidiaries in other markets, and 21Shares lists its ETPs on several European exchanges beyond SIX. A Swiss FINMA license on its own covers business conducted from Switzerland; a firm serving clients inside the European Union separately needs to meet MiCA, the EU's own crypto rulebook, which Switzerland sits outside of.