By mid-2026, nearly half the Swiss population (over 4 million people) will be active users of cryptocurrency (Statista, 2025). That level of adoption doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it’s actually the result of a government that has treated crypto not as a risk to manage, but as an opportunity to structure. The Swiss model proves that structure and innovation aren’t at odds: they’re interdependent. When rules are clear, businesses build. When protections are credible, adoption follows.
Two Roads Diverged: Regulated Giants vs. Blockchain-Native Challengers
Switzerland’s digital banking landscape is split between two distinct models. On one side are licensed banks like Sygnum and AMINA, fully regulated by FINMA and offering crypto services, custody, staking, and tokenization within traditional financial architectures. Sygnum, with billions under management, has even launched its own stablecoin, the Digital Swiss Franc (DCHF), for real-time settlement. AMINA provides similar institutional-grade infrastructure, validating how legacy-compatible innovation can scale. On the other side, a new wave of challenger banks is emerging, built from scratch with blockchain at the core, prioritizing smart contracts, token-native infrastructure, and compliance by design.
But not everyone is layering new capabilities onto old frameworks. Monerys AG, a Swiss company founded in 2018, is pursuing the second, more foundational route. Rather than adapt an existing bank, it is building one from scratch. With plans to transition from an SPV to a fully licensed bank under the name Artus Bank (NewCo), Monerys is creating a financial institution born from blockchain principles: asset tokenization, programmability, and end-to-end digital infrastructure.
Reconstructing the Financial Stack for a Tokenized World
Where Sygnum and AMINA bring digital assets into traditional workflows, Monerys aims to redefine the workflows themselves. Its founders believe that the market and regulation have finally caught up to the original idea. As CEO Gavin Nathan explains, “We’re not tweaking banking; we’re reimagining it for the next 100 years.” His view is shaped by years of watching the industry lag behind innovation, waiting for regulation to catch up. With Switzerland’s frameworks now mature and tokenization moving into real-world applications, Monerys believes the timing is right to build the kind of institution that future financial systems will require.
That philosophy is showing up in the bank’s design. Instead of retrofitting blockchain into legacy infrastructure, Monerys is integrating tokenization and programmable money from the start. It wants to offer services that don’t just hold crypto but allow clients, both retail and business, to interact with money differently. The roadmap includes digital accounts, real-world asset tokenization, and compliance built into code, not layered on after the fact.
Where Monerys stands out is in its conviction that finance needs to be rebuilt, not rebranded. Its founder speaks openly about the psychological challenge of building a bank in one of the toughest regulatory environments on earth and doing so from zero. But the company’s culture, by design, is built for that challenge. As with any transformative endeavor, there’s an element of faith involved — the belief that the systems you’re building today will stand the test of tomorrow. “Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and trust the process — and even if things don’t work out now, it doesn’t mean they never will,” says Nathan. “I see myself as a puzzle master. My job is to bring together the people and systems that complete the picture. That’s what this bank will be: a complete picture of where finance is heading.”
But building from scratch still requires a stable foundation. Switzerland’s legal and institutional architecture is what makes such bold experimentation viable.
How Switzerland Turned Regulation into a Launchpad for Financial Innovation
From the early foundations of the 2019 DLT draft law to the landmark DLT trading license awarded to BX Digital this year, Switzerland has steadily constructed one of the most comprehensive crypto ecosystems in the world. Regulation here is systemic, built into the architecture of how financial services operate. The regulatory backbone is FINMA, with whom I’ve had many direct engagements going back to 2022 as a policy advisor for the Crypto Council for Innovation. FINMA has integrated crypto oversight into the broader financial system (FINMA, 2025), which means exchanges, wallet providers, and DLT platforms are all subject to full AML and CFT regulations. All crypto intermediaries must be part of a Self-Regulatory Organization (SRO), submit to annual audits, and follow mandatory reporting protocols for suspicious activity.
In a major policy development, Switzerland approved the Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI) for crypto assets. Beginning in 2026, the country will begin exchanging crypto-related financial data with 74 partner jurisdictions (Coinspeaker, 2025). This is aimed squarely at enhancing tax transparency and closing cross-border loopholes. The first data transfers are expected in 2027, signaling crypto’s formal entry into the realm of international financial cooperation.
Swiss banks are already piloting blockchain-based solutions to streamline cross-border transactions. UBS’s Digital Cash project is designed to improve liquidity and settlement efficiency (UBS, 2025). “UBS Digital Cash going forward aims to enable our clients to make cross-border payments in a much more efficient and transparent way,” said Andy Kollegger of UBS. That vision is already in motion: UBS, Sygnum, and PostFinance recently completed the first binding interbank payment using a public blockchain, a milestone in mainstream adoption.
This momentum is no accident. It’s backed by coordinated support across sectors. The Swiss Blockchain Federation, along with the Crypto Valley Association and Bitcoin Association Switzerland, released a 12-point manifesto to keep the country at the forefront of blockchain innovation (FinTech Switzerland, 2025). The overarching goals are to facilitate smarter regulation, support for stablecoins, and a consistent policy environment that invites growth.
This regulatory maturity has created space for a deeper transformation, one where the limitations of the past are replaced not with incremental fixes, but with systems rebuilt for what’s next.
The Future of Finance Won’t Be Patched — It Will Be Rebuilt
Right now, the finance system is riddled with friction: legacy infrastructure slows innovation, compliance is reactive and burdensome, and trust has eroded as institutions struggle to keep pace with technology. Monerys sees these issues not as isolated failures but as symptoms of a deeper structural mismatch between outdated models and new capabilities. Its solution is a clean-sheet bank, built from the ground up with tokenization, programmable capital, and regulation embedded into the code itself.
Monerys presents a bold thesis: trust can be rebuilt not by mimicking legacy banking, but by rewriting its assumptions. “This is our David versus Goliath moment,” says Nathan. “We’re going up against giants. But we’re not trying to beat them at their game. We’re building a new one entirely.”
Over the following years, companies like Monerys AG could shift the reference point for what a bank can be: not just a place to store value, but an operating system for programmable capital, available to all.
