The Swiss monetary regulator has issued two approvals for a national cryptocurrency investment fund and a national virtual asset custody service, just days after China’s central bank claimed that monetary and bitcoin blockchains posed a risk to economic stability.
The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) has officially approved the Crypto Market Index Fund, the first investment fund of its kind in Switzerland, after careful attention to its outlook to “facilitate serious innovation . . . in a way that is technologically neutral. “
In a similar development, SEBA Bank, a Swiss bank that specializes in virtual assets, said the regulator had granted it a new CISA license to act as an “institutional-grade custodian bank for Swiss collective investment plans. “
SEBA Bank CEO Guido Buehler said the new license will allow the Swiss mutual budget to offer investors direct and liquid exposure to cryptocurrencies, which they may do sooner due to the strict needs of fund managers to oversee custody solutions.
“Institutional investors, such as banks and insurance companies, are now in a position to invest in crypto assets,” Buehler, a former senior executive at UBS, the Swiss investment bank, told me in an email.
“They prefer to invest through a fund envelope that has a higher point in terms of security and regulation. There is an institutional call for crypto investments, but in the past there was no custodian bank solution until now. being closed, we expect the call to increase significantly. “
FINMA stated that the new Crypto Market Index Fund can only invest in “established crypto assets with a sufficiently large trading volume. “It will only be open to “qualified investors” and all activities of the fund will have to be carried out through “platforms and established counterparties that are founded in a member country of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF),” the intergovernmental firm created to combat money laundering.
SEBA’s virtual wallet, which is already open to personal and institutional clients outside of a fund wrapper, facilitates the trading of 11 cryptocurrencies: bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Stellar (XLM), USD Coin (USDC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Synthetix (SNX), Uniswap (UNI), Yearn. Finance (YFI), Chainlink (LINK) and Aave (AAVE).
The bank allows consumers to place their crypto assets in a bloodless room, a form of custody that involves exporting personal keys to hardware devices that are not connected to the web and cannot be hacked.
The gadgets are stored in a Faraday cage shielded from radio frequencies in a protected way through various biometric access controls.
Switzerland has one of the largest banking sectors in the world, accounting for around 25% of all cross-border asset control worldwide. The country also has the proportion of millionaires in the world, with 15% of its adult population valued at more than one million. Dollars.
I am an aviation journalist turned cryptojournalist whose paintings have appeared in The Guardian, The Economist, The New York Times, Flightglobal, African Business, Al Arabiya.
I am an aviation journalist turned cryptojournalist whose paintings have been in The Guardian, The Economist, The New York Times, Flightglobal, African Business, Al Arabiya.