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Switzerland, traditionally the world’s banking center, last week authorized its SIX stock exchange to create the SIX Digital Exchange, or SDX.
The exchange will offer a single, blockchain-based venue through which traders and investors can buy, sell, and store digital tokens under “the highest Swiss standards of oversight and regulation,” promised Finma, the Swiss financial regulatory agency.
However, the new exchange will be open only to supervised financial institutions, not to individuals; persons who choose to deal in crypto will have to do so through their banks or asset management firms.
By giving equal weight to innovation and client safety, Finma has fostered “a closely-knit value chain ranging from issuance and trading through to settlement and custody of tokenized assets,” the agency claimed.
Switzerland has long sought to be a hub of crypto innovation: many of its banks offer Bitcoin trading and custody and the northwestern city of Zug anchors “Crypto Valley,” a region rife with start-ups and traders.
As part of that ecosystem, SIX has been developing SDX for three years and plans to use government approval as a step to creating a global network of crypto trading platforms.
Next: SIX is fashioning an SDX-like trading exchange in Singapore.
TRENDPOST: As we noted in our article “Wealth Managers Readying Crypto Funds for Clients” (10 Aug 2021), major banks have accepted the inevitability of cryptocurrencies going mainstream and are creating ways for clients to buy, sell, and store them.
The final step in crypto’s entry into the mainstream is digital coins’ acceptance among nations, now under way in Switzerland and even more so in El Salvador (see related Blockchain Battles article).
TREND FORECAST: Crypto’s acceptance by both major banks and sovereign nations will increase pressure on central banks to create national digital stablecoin currencies. The banks now will accelerate their development of national digital money.