Swiss Tokenised Asset Market Tracker: Issuances and Market Development 2025

Switzerland has emerged as one of the most productive jurisdictions globally for tokenised asset issuance, combining a permissive yet rigorous regulatory framework with world-class financial market infrastructure. The Swiss DLT Act, enacted in August 2021, created the Registerwertrecht — a new category of ledger-based security — and established the legal foundation for DLT trading facilities such as SIX Digital Exchange. This tracker provides a systematic overview of issuance activity, market structure, and growth trajectory as of 2025.

Market Size: Estimated Tokenised Assets Outstanding in Switzerland

Total tokenised assets outstanding in Switzerland are estimated in the range of CHF 5 to 8 billion as of early 2025, depending on the scope of instruments counted. This figure encompasses:

• SDX-issued digital bonds: the most easily quantifiable segment, with primary issuances by systemically important banks and supranational institutions totalling approximately CHF 2.5–3 billion since 2021
• Private placements via Taurus EXPLORER and similar platforms: estimated CHF 500 million to CHF 1.5 billion, largely opaque due to private nature
• Tokenised real estate: BrickMark and comparable vehicles representing approximately CHF 350–500 million in property-backed tokens
• Tokenised fund tokens and structured products: CHF 200–400 million via platforms including Stableton and Tokenestate

The market remains small relative to traditional Swiss capital market issuance (Switzerland sees approximately CHF 30–40 billion in annual bond issuances in the domestic market alone), but growth is accelerating as more institutions establish the operational infrastructure to participate.

Major Swiss Tokenised Asset Issuances: 2018–2025

The following table tracks the landmark issuances that have defined Switzerland’s tokenisation market. It includes pre-DLT-Act transactions under contractual or special-purpose structures, as well as post-2021 Registerwertrecht issuances.

Notes: Amounts for private platform issuances are estimated. SDX issuances reflect public announcements; private SDX transactions may exist under confidentiality.

Asset Categories: Where Tokenisation Is Taking Hold

Bonds: The Dominant Asset Class (Approximately 70% of Issuances)

Debt securities — bonds, notes, and schuldscheindarlehen equivalents — account for the substantial majority of Swiss tokenised asset issuances by value. This dominance is structurally logical: bonds are already dematerialised in the traditional system, have well-understood rights profiles, and do not carry the corporate governance complications of equity. The Swiss DLT Act’s Registerwertrecht concept maps cleanly onto debt instruments, allowing a digital bond to be issued, held, and transferred on a DLT network with the same legal effect as a traditional book-entry security.

Institutional issuers prefer bonds for tokenisation because the regulatory path is cleaner, investor appetite from institutional treasury functions is well-established, and the settlement integration with existing banking infrastructure (via SDX’s connection to SIX SIS) is more straightforward. The UBS CHF 375m digital bond of 2022 remains the benchmark transaction: a senior unsecured bond issued simultaneously in traditional and tokenised form, demonstrating that a systemically important bank could operate across both infrastructure layers.

Real Estate: Growing but Complex

Real estate tokenisation is the second most active segment in Switzerland by transaction count, though individual transaction sizes are smaller than institutional bond issuances. Switzerland is an attractive jurisdiction for real estate tokenisation because of the strength of its property rights framework, the liquidity of its institutional real estate market, and the existence of a sophisticated investor base in the form of Swiss pension funds and family offices.

BrickMark’s 2020 transaction involving the Zurich Bahnhofstrasse property was internationally significant as one of the first prime commercial real estate tokenisations globally. The legal structure employed — equity interests in a Swiss GmbH owning the property, represented by asset tokens — has become a template for subsequent transactions. Platforms including Tokenestate and RealUnit are building out the segment.

The challenge in real estate tokenisation is threefold: Lex Koller restrictions complicate foreign investor participation in Swiss residential property; property management decisions require governance mechanisms that token holders can exercise meaningfully; and secondary market liquidity for real estate tokens remains extremely thin.

Equity: Rare due to Corporate Law Complexity

Equity tokenisation of Swiss AGs (Aktiengesellschaften) is technically possible under the DLT Act but remains rare for listed companies. The complexity arises from several factors: Swiss corporate law requires that share registers be maintained by the company itself; exercise of shareholder rights (voting, dividend receipt) must be reliably connected to token ownership; and FINMA treats equity tokens as securities requiring prospectus approval for public offerings.

The most active segment in equity tokenisation is unlisted SME shares, where platforms like Daura allow private companies to digitise their cap tables and issue Registerwertrechte representing equity stakes. For listed Swiss companies, the path from traditional SIS-held shares to tokenised equivalents requires regulatory approvals and shareholder resolutions that have not yet been navigated at scale.

Secondary Market Liquidity: The Persistent Challenge

The most significant structural weakness in Switzerland’s tokenised asset market is secondary market liquidity. Primary issuance has been demonstrated to work: banks can issue tokenised bonds on SDX, complete settlement, and report the transaction. Secondary trading — the ability for an investor who bought a tokenised bond to sell it to another investor at a fair price — remains extremely thin.

The reasons are interconnected:

• Participant concentration: SDX currently has approximately 20 CSD participant institutions. Until this number grows substantially, there are too few natural buyers and sellers to generate meaningful bid-ask spreads.
• Investor mandates: institutional investors holding tokenised bonds typically hold to maturity; their mandates do not require or facilitate active secondary trading in digital securities.
• Benchmark effect: with most tokenised bonds being pilot or inaugural transactions, there is no benchmark yield curve for tokenised securities distinct from traditional equivalents, reducing price discovery incentives.
• Infrastructure integration: connecting secondary trading systems (order management, execution, settlement) into bank workflows for tokenised instruments requires integration work that most banks have not yet prioritised.

SDX’s secondary trading platform exists and is operational, but reported secondary market volumes remain immaterial relative to primary issuance. This is SDX’s primary strategic challenge for the next phase of development.

Institutional Demand: Who is Buying

Institutional demand for Swiss tokenised assets in 2025 comes from three main buyer categories:

Pension funds (Pensionskassen): Swiss occupational pension funds manage approximately CHF 1.1 trillion in assets. Regulatory guidance from FINMA and the Swiss Federal Social Insurance Office has become increasingly accommodating of tokenised securities as a permitted asset class, provided they are held via regulated custodians. Several large Pensionskassen participated in early SDX bond offerings as part of proof-of-concept transactions.

Insurance companies: Swiss re/insurance institutions — including Zurich Insurance, Swiss Re, and others — have treasury mandates that include fixed income exposure. Tokenised bonds with equivalent credit profiles to traditional instruments are theoretically interchangeable for insurance purposes, and several insurers have participated in or monitored SDX issuances.

Family offices and private banks: the Swiss private banking sector, managing assets for ultra-high-net-worth individuals across Zurich, Geneva, and Lugano, has been an important source of demand for real estate tokens and structured tokenised products. Private banks including Julius Baer and Pictet have explored offering tokenised alternatives to traditional structured products.

Swiss Tokenisation Platforms Beyond SDX

While SDX is the most prominent Swiss tokenisation venue, a multi-platform ecosystem has developed:

Taurus EXPLORER: the tokenisation module of Geneva-based Taurus Group’s platform, designed for banks to issue and manage tokenised securities in-house. EXPLORER allows a bank to create Registerwertrechte, manage investor registers, and handle corporate actions digitally. Multiple Swiss cantonal banks use EXPLORER for private token issuances.

Tokenestate: a Zug-based platform focused on real estate fund tokenisation. Tokenestate operates under FINMA’s collective investment scheme regulatory framework, issuing fund units as digital tokens. The platform targets professional and semi-professional investors.

BrickMark: primarily a real estate investor-developer that tokenises its own property acquisitions, BrickMark has also developed platform capabilities. Its model of direct property ownership via tokens differs from fund unit models like Tokenestate.

Stableton Financial: Geneva-based Stableton focuses on tokenised feeder funds providing access to private equity and venture capital. The platform enables investors with lower minimum ticket sizes to access PE/VC through digitised fund interests.

Market Outlook: Projected Growth 2025–2030

Switzerland’s tokenisation market is on a trajectory from proof-of-concept to institutional infrastructure. The DLT Act has provided the legal foundation; the next five years will test whether Swiss platforms can build the secondary market liquidity and international connectivity that transforms tokenised assets from a niche into a mainstream capital market format.

Published by ZUG DLT — Donovan Vanderbilt. zugdlt.com provides independent institutional intelligence on Switzerland’s distributed ledger technology ecosystem.