Switzerland considering new stricter rules for crypto

Switzerland’s top regulator has asked regulators to take more action to protect consumers and investors from abuses in the crypto sector. 

Switzerland calls for new crypto regulation to counter scams

Switzerland, one of the most crypto-friendly countries in the world, is also considering adopting stricter regulation on the sector to prevent and stop abuses and scams, which seem to be spreading more frequently even in the Swiss country.

According to Switzerland’s main financial market regulator, FINMA, cryptocurrency trading increasingly resembles the US stock market of the late 1920s. A kind of Wild West with little or no rules and therefore very few protections for investors.

“Much more can be done”, said Urban Angehrn, CEO of the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority.

At a conference in Zurich, Angehrn said:

“It would seem to me that a lot of trading in digital assets looks like the US stock market in 1928, where all kinds of abuse, pump and dump, are now in fact frequently common”.

He then reiterated the need to also look at the development of technology to try to give more protection to citizens:

“Let’s also think about the potential of technology to make it easy to deal with the large amounts of data and to protect consumers from trading on abusive markets”.

Latest events in the crypto market worry Switzerland

Switzerland, as mentioned, is evidently concerned by these market crashes and the difficulties faced by some companies such as Celsius, the crypto lender that last week halted withdrawals due to liquidity problems. 

Switzerland has long been considered one of the most crypto-friendly countries. 

One of its cantons, Zug, has been accepting tax payments in cryptocurrencies for months and is considered one of the world’s hubs for digital assets. 

And that is also why it now wants to curb the abuses and scams that are unfortunately part of this world. 

Last year, 2B4CH, a Swiss company focused on blockchain and cryptocurrency, has even launched a proposal to hold a referendum calling for the approval of the inclusion of Bitcoin in the Federal Constitution. 

In April, Bank of Switzerland President Thomas Jordan said that despite the bank not yet having cryptocurrencies among its assets, he did not rule out that it might soon invest in BTC-related futures:

“Buying bitcoin is not a problem for us, we can do that either directly or can buy investment products which are based on bitcoin”.

The CEO of Bank of Swiss then said: 

“We can arrange the technical and operative conditions relatively quickly, when we are convinced we must have bitcoin in our balance sheet”.