Bär & Karrer

Initial coin offerings (ICOs) are now the focus of both the public's and the regulator's attention. ICOs are a digitalised method of raising capital in which an organisation issues tradable digital units (tokens) to finance a specific project or to develop it further. They are exclusively used to fund early stage projects of startups, often without a clear track record and with unclear success probability. In the course of the offering, the investor receives a token from the issuing organisation in exchange for cryptocurrencies (for example, bitcoin) or standard currencies (also referred to as fiat money). Tokens are created on a blockchain and exist as tradable digital units on distributed ledgers as a part of a protocol. For example, the Ethereum blockchain provides not only the cryptocurrency Ether, but also a platform to write smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, which makes it possible for market participants to easily generate and issue their own tokens, mostly on the basis of the ERC-20 token standard.

The worst economic disaster since the great depression of 1929 took American and European banks by storm in 2008. The US, EU and Russia, among others, had to step in to save some of their banks from bankruptcy. Even certain German banks, symbols of the country's strength and prosperity, were on the verge of collapsing. Against this backdrop, the purpose of this briefing is to provide a high-level summary of the mechanisms in place to cope with the bankruptcy of a foreign bank in Switzerland.

On July 5 2017, the Swiss Federal Council (Bundesrat) amended the Swiss Federal Banking Ordinance to ease the Swiss regulatory framework for providers of innovative financial technologies (fintech).