Switzerland's DLT Securities Market: Issuers, Instruments, and the Tokenisation Outlook

Switzerland’s DLT securities market is the world’s most legally mature tokenised asset market. Built on the statutory foundation of the Swiss DLT Act (effective February 2021) and the regulatory infrastructure of SIX Digital Exchange (the world’s first DLT trading facility), the Swiss market has moved well beyond concept and pilot into operational reality. By 2024, total DLT securities issuance in Switzerland reached an estimated CHF 500 million and growing — modest by the standards of Switzerland’s CHF 1.5 trillion domestic bond market, but significant as the world’s deepest pool of legally certain, regulated, exchange-traded tokenised securities.

This article maps the Swiss DLT securities market: who is issuing, what is being tokenised, how the market compares with international peers, and where the global tokenisation trajectory points for Switzerland’s competitive position.

The Issuers: Who Is Active in Swiss DLT Securities

Sygnum Bank is the most active issuer and custodian in Switzerland’s DLT securities market. Sygnum holds a Swiss banking licence and a securities dealer licence — it was one of the first two entities globally to receive a banking licence from FINMA with a specific mandate to serve digital asset clients (the other being AMINA Bank, formerly SEBA Bank). Sygnum’s activity in DLT securities spans primary issuance, custody for institutional clients, and the provision of banking services — loans, repo, and structured financing — against DLT securities as collateral.

Sygnum’s August 2024 transaction illustrates the expanding sophistication of Swiss DLT market activity: a $50 million Bitcoin-backed syndicated loan, structured using DLT-native instruments, with multiple banking counterparties participating. This was not a simple tokenised bond — it was a complex structured credit product executed entirely within the Swiss DLT legal framework, demonstrating that the Swiss market has moved beyond vanilla DLT bond issuance into genuinely novel financial product territory.

AMINA Bank (formerly SEBA Bank) holds a parallel Swiss banking and securities dealer licence and operates across multiple jurisdictions including Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Abu Dhabi. AMINA issues DLT securities, provides DLT securities custody for institutional clients, and structures tokenised financial products for its client base of asset managers, family offices, and institutional investors. AMINA’s multi-jurisdictional presence positions it to bridge Swiss DLT securities markets with institutional demand from Asia and the Gulf.

SIX Digital Exchange functions as the regulated market infrastructure — the exchange and settlement platform — rather than as an issuer in its own right. However, SIX Group AG, SDX’s parent company, has itself issued tokenised bonds on the SDX platform. The issuance by the exchange operator of instruments on its own exchange was a deliberate demonstration of institutional confidence in the SDX infrastructure and the DLT Act’s legal framework.

Swiss commercial banks — including UBS and Julius Baer — have issued tokenised bonds on SDX, participating as both issuers and as distributors of DLT securities to their institutional client networks. These issuances are significant because they represent Switzerland’s largest banks using SDX not as an experiment but as an alternative issuance channel for conventional debt instruments.

The World Bank issued a bond on SDX — the first supranational bond on a regulated DLT trading facility globally. The World Bank’s participation signals that international financial institutions are prepared to use Switzerland’s DLT market infrastructure for real funding transactions, not merely tokenisation pilots.

Asset Classes: What Is Being Tokenised

Corporate bonds are the dominant asset class in the Swiss DLT securities market. The bond structure maps naturally onto the DLT securities legal framework: a fixed-term debt instrument with defined coupon payments and a maturity redemption date translates straightforwardly into the parameters of a Registerwertrecht. Coupon payments can be automated via smart contract logic. Transfer and settlement are atomic and final. The operational cost savings relative to traditional bond issuance and custody are clear and measurable.

Structured products — certificates, warrants, and other structured instruments — are the second most active segment. Julius Baer has issued tokenised structured products on SDX, testing the appetite for DLT-native structured finance among SDX’s institutional participant base.

Private equity and fund units represent the highest-growth opportunity. Switzerland’s extensive private markets ecosystem — family offices, private equity managers, and alternative investment funds concentrated in Geneva and Zurich — creates natural demand for DLT-based mechanisms to create liquidity in otherwise illiquid private company stakes. The DLT Act’s treatment of DLT securities is technology-neutral with respect to the underlying economic asset — there is no statutory impediment to tokenising private equity interests or fund units as DLT securities, provided applicable fund law requirements are met.

Real estate tokenisation remains nascent in Switzerland but represents a significant long-term opportunity. Switzerland’s cantonal land registries are the legal infrastructure for real property rights, and their integration with DLT-based ownership records is technically and institutionally complex. Several Swiss PropTech initiatives are exploring DLT-based real estate financing structures, but direct real estate tokenisation under Swiss law remains a work in progress as of 2026.

Landmark Transactions

The Swiss DLT securities market’s development can be traced through a series of landmark transactions that progressively demonstrated the capabilities of the Swiss DLT legal and regulatory framework:

UBS tokenised bond on SDX was among the first major Swiss bank issuances on the SDX platform, demonstrating that a systemically important financial institution was prepared to use DLT market infrastructure for real debt issuance.

Julius Baer tokenised structured product on SDX extended the market beyond vanilla bonds into the structured products segment that is commercially important for Swiss private banks and their high-net-worth clients.

World Bank bond on SDX was the first supranational DLT securities issuance on a regulated global DLT trading facility — a transaction that attracted significant international institutional investor interest.

Sygnum’s $50M Bitcoin-backed syndicated loan (August 2024) represented the market’s most sophisticated transaction to date: a complex credit product using DLT-native collateral, demonstrating the depth of financial engineering possible within the Swiss DLT legal framework.

Project Helvetia: Central Bank Money for DLT Settlement

The most significant infrastructure development supporting Switzerland’s DLT securities market has been the Swiss National Bank’s Project Helvetia — the exploration of a wholesale digital Swiss franc (d-CHF) for DLT securities settlement.

The fundamental challenge for institutional DLT securities markets is settlement currency. In traditional markets, securities settle against central bank money — funds held in accounts at the central bank, which carry no credit risk because the central bank cannot default on its own currency. If DLT securities settle against commercial bank money — deposits at private banks — the cash leg of the settlement carries bank credit risk, undermining one of the DLT’s fundamental attractions as a settlement mechanism.

Project Helvetia demonstrated, in a production-environment test, that the SNB could issue d-CHF directly onto the SDX blockchain, enabling DLT securities transactions to settle against central bank money on-chain — the optimal settlement architecture. The SNB settled real tokenised bond transactions using d-CHF, making Switzerland the first country where central bank money settled DLT securities in an operational (not merely experimental) context.

The SNB’s ongoing assessment of a permanent wholesale d-CHF is among the most consequential policy decisions for Switzerland’s DLT market infrastructure. A permanent wholesale CBDC for DLT securities settlement would remove the remaining credit risk from the cash leg of SDX transactions and further differentiate Switzerland’s DLT market infrastructure from alternatives globally.

International Comparison: Switzerland in the Global Tokenisation Market

The Swiss market’s CHF 500 million in DLT securities issuance exists within a rapidly growing global tokenisation landscape.

BlackRock’s BUIDL fund — launched in March 2024 on the Ethereum public blockchain — reached $500 million in assets under management within weeks of launch, becoming the largest tokenised money market fund globally. BUIDL operates under a US regulatory framework that treats the tokenised fund units as conventional securities registered under US securities law, with tokenisation being an operational choice rather than a distinct legal category.

Franklin Templeton’s BENJI fund predates BUIDL as the first US-registered tokenised money market fund, operating on the Stellar and Polygon blockchains with the fund register maintained on-chain.

JPMorgan Onyx operates a permissioned blockchain network for institutional repo and intraday liquidity management — processing billions of dollars in intraday repo transactions using tokenised collateral.

The global tokenised asset market — across money market funds, bonds, repo, and other instruments — exceeded $10 billion in 2024. But this figure includes a wide range of instruments with varying degrees of legal certainty and regulatory clarity.

What distinguishes Switzerland’s CHF 500 million from the broader global figure is the quality of the legal and regulatory framework. Swiss DLT securities are legal securities under Swiss law — their transfer, custody, pledge, and insolvency treatment are all governed by clear statutory provisions. The global majority of tokenised assets operate in frameworks where the relationship between the on-chain record and the off-chain legal right remains ambiguous.

The 2030 Outlook

The major global consultancies have reached a consensus projection for the tokenised asset market: significant, if not transformative, growth over the next five years. Citi Research projects a tokenised asset market of $4 trillion to $5 trillion by 2030. McKinsey’s estimate ranges from $2 trillion to $4 trillion. Boston Consulting Group has published projections up to $16 trillion — a figure that assumes much more aggressive adoption of tokenised real estate, equities, and fund interests than current market activity suggests.

For Switzerland, the question is what share of a $4-16 trillion global tokenised asset market flows through Swiss legal and regulatory infrastructure. The Swiss DLT Act’s permanent statutory framework, SIX Digital Exchange’s operational regulated venue, the SNB’s CBDC infrastructure work, and the established presence of Sygnum and AMINA as institutional DLT banks collectively position Switzerland to capture a disproportionate share of the institutional tokenised securities market — particularly in bonds, structured products, and private market instruments — if the secondary market liquidity challenge can be resolved.

Secondary market liquidity remains the key constraint. A tokenised bond that can only be sold to other SDX participants represents less useful collateral and a less liquid investment than an equivalent traditionally settled bond. Expanding the SDX participant base, developing SDX Connect’s interoperability with traditional infrastructure, and progressing the wholesale d-CHF project are the three developments most likely to drive secondary market volume growth in the near term.

Related Coverage

• SIX Digital Exchange: The World’s First Regulated DLT Securities Exchange
• Issuing Digital Bonds in Switzerland: The Registerwertrecht Framework and Step-by-Step Process
• The Swiss DLT Act: A Complete Analysis of the World’s Leading DLT Legislation
• Tokenisation: Definition and Asset Types
• The Swiss DLT Act at Three: Impact Assessment and Market Development

Donovan Vanderbilt is Editor of ZUG DLT, published by The Vanderbilt Portfolio AG, Zurich. This analysis is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal or investment advice. See our full Disclaimer.