Switzerland ranks sixth out of fifteen financial centres in the first "SBF Global Benchmark Report 2026" by the Swiss Blockchain Federation (SBF), the association that represents the Swiss blockchain industry before policymakers and the authorities. Presented on 3 November 2026 in Zurich, the ranking revives the debate on the future of the Swiss blockchain hub and the Crypto Valley. According to its own sensitivity analysis, Switzerland lands between fourth and eighth place depending on the weighting used.

What the Swiss Blockchain Federation ranking measures

The report, titled "Infrastructure First", compares fifteen centres on eleven criteria, according to the Crypto Valley Journal (cvj.ch) of 3 November 2026. It assesses the regulated infrastructure for tokenised securities, bonds and funds, that is, those represented by digital tokens. According to finews.ch, the SBF produced it with the support of AMINA Bank, a Swiss bank active in crypto assets, and MME, a Zurich law and tax advisory firm.

The ranking does not measure how welcoming a country is to bitcoin. The site bitcoinnews.ch, which says it received the 35 pages of the report, stresses that taxation is deliberately excluded. The scores per criterion are expert judgements based on public sources as of June 2026, not measurements: the SBF says so itself, according to the site. 2clics did not have access to the full report, which the SBF offers on its website; the detailed figures come from the media outlets that read it.

The weighting carries a lot of weight. Three criteria each count for 15%: the pace of implementation, market size and liquidity, and artificial intelligence (AI) combined with blockchain and talent. Together, they make up 45% of the score. Switzerland's three strengths, distributed ledger technology (DLT) infrastructure, regulatory clarity and the legal certainty of transfers (legal finality), weigh only 25%, cvj.ch notes.

The ranking of the fifteen financial centres

RankFinancial centrePoints out of 100
1United States85.00
2Singapore83.25
3United Kingdom80.00
4Germany76.88
5Japan76.38
6Switzerland75.62
7Luxembourg75.50
8France74.12
14Liechtenstein64.25
15Cayman Islands50.25

The middle of the ranking is very tight. Between Germany, in fourth place, and France, in eighth, the gap is only 2.76 points, according to bitcoinnews.ch. Luxembourg trails Switzerland by 0.12 points. The report also splits the centres into three groups: "Leading" from 82 points, "Advanced" from 76 to 82 and "Developing" below 76. With 75.62 points, Switzerland remains just below the threshold of the "Advanced" group, cvj.ch notes.

A sixth place that depends on the weighting

The SBF tested the robustness of its result. According to bitcoinnews.ch, it calculated more than 2000 variants by shifting each weight by 3 percentage points at most. Switzerland always finishes between fourth and eighth place, and sixth in 54% of cases.

The site ran its own calculations based on the published scores. With equal weights for the eleven criteria, Switzerland would score 79.77 points and rank fourth. A score of 8.5 for the pace of implementation, Germany's score, would bring it to 79.38 points and fourth place as well. These figures are bitcoinnews.ch's, not the report's.

The same site points out where the method comes from. Its first version comes from the research team of AMINA Bank, which supports the report and whose chief executive, Franz Bergmüller, signs a foreword. It also notes inaccuracies in the text: the size of the Swiss market, scored 5.0, is described as the weakest, whereas Liechtenstein (3.0) and the Cayman Islands (4.0) are lower.

Switzerland's strengths and shortcomings

Switzerland obtains the best score of the fifteen centres in three criteria, according to cvj.ch. It is on a par with the best in three others. It falls clearly behind where the model weighs the most.

  • DLT infrastructure: 9.5 out of 10, the best score in the ranking.
  • Regulatory clarity and legal certainty of transfers: 9.0 each, the best scores.
  • Banking and custody, anti-money laundering: 8.5; geopolitical stability: 9.0.
  • Pace of implementation: 6.0, against 9.0 for the United States.
  • Market size and liquidity: 5.0, against 10.0 for the United States.
  • AI, blockchain and talent: 7.75, against 9.0 for the United States.

The SBF attributes this legal lead to a framework put in place early. The Distributed Ledger Technology Act (DLT Act) has been fully in force since August 2021. The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) granted its first authorisations for digital assets as early as 2019, cvj.ch recalls. In an opinion piece on finews.ch, Marcel Hostettler, a lawyer at the firm Allegra LAW, counts among the hard-to-copy assets the digital settlement and custody functions taken over by SIX, the operator of the SIX Swiss Exchange, as well as BX Digital, specialised banks and universities.

Criticism targets the length of FINMA procedures

The report identifies three shortcomings: the pace of implementation, a shallow market poorly connected abroad, and the shift of AI to large-scale applications. According to finews.ch, it criticises FINMA's lengthy procedures for "slowing the transformation of legal clarity into new business models".

At the presentation, Andreas Glarner, a partner at MME, cited cases from his practice, finews.ch reports. Advance rulings would sometimes take two or three years. Some applicants have reportedly been waiting three years for a fintech licence. These durations are his statements; finews.ch reports no response from FINMA.

The SBF draws five demands from this, which remain the claims of an industry association:

  • that FINMA adopt innovation as a strategic objective and make its licensing procedures clearer, faster and more predictable;
  • a workable framework for franc stablecoins and other forms of digital money;
  • better access to foreign markets, for example by expanding the agreement with the United Kingdom on digital financial services;
  • links with international trading, custody and settlement platforms;
  • faster time to market for technologies and talent.

The association says it is not seeking weaker supervision, according to cvj.ch. It advises Switzerland to copy neither New York, nor London, nor Singapore, but to position itself as a neutral and reliable centre for institutional digital assets. The monetary aspect ties in with two stories 2clics is following: the bankers' requirements for a Swiss franc stablecoin and the launch of Safirum's CHF stablecoin.

A contrarian reading: less lamenting, more business

In an opinion piece published by finews.ch on 6 November 2026, Marcel Hostettler, lawyer, founder and managing partner of the firm Allegra LAW (Zurich and Vaduz), disputes the idea of a decline. He worked at FINMA and sits on the Regulatory Board of SIX Exchange Regulation. His firm advised SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) and BX Digital in their licensing processes, he specifies.

For him, a ranking "is not a law of nature". He relies on the range from fourth to eighth place: Switzerland remains in the broader leading group, but is no longer automatically among the top three. The problem would be less the foundation than its commercial exploitation. He speaks of a "conversion gap" between regulatory solidity and large-scale applications.

He considers the criticism of FINMA well-founded, but not as the sole explanation. Procedures that last for years can doom a good business model economically, he writes. FINMA, however, can neither create a global market nor fund pilot projects in place of banks and companies. He points out that innovation was a strategic objective in its own right for FINMA from 2021 to 2024. In the 2025-2028 strategy, it no longer has its own heading, but remains embedded in technology-neutral, risk-based supervision.

The Swiss market is small, he notes, and that is a structural fact, not a failing of supervision. His answer lies in international structures, for example by combining Swiss law with access to the European Economic Area (EEA) market via Liechtenstein. He sees opportunities in custody, tokenisation and settlement, notably for commodity trade finance.

What the report adds to Bitcoin Suisse's assessment

The ranking closely follows another signal. According to a Keystone-ATS dispatch of 2 November 2026, picked up by 2clics, Bitcoin Suisse considers the Swiss crypto hub to be in decline. Its chief executive, Andrej Majcen, told the AWP agency that Switzerland no longer features among the leading countries in the Zug-based company's internal ranking. Bitcoin Suisse is cutting 60 of its 120 jobs in Switzerland.

The two diagnoses agree on the slowness, but do not concern the same subject. The SBF assesses the infrastructure for tokenised securities and digital money, with a published method. Bitcoin Suisse has published neither the method nor the leading countries of its ranking. For the history and figures of the Zug ecosystem, see our page on Crypto Valley Zug.

For a customer in Switzerland, the ranking says nothing about the ability to buy, hold or declare bitcoin, bitcoinnews.ch observes. According to the report cited by the site, more than 40 Swiss banks offer crypto services, at least 8 of them advanced services such as custody, staking or tokenisation. Among them are AMINA, Sygnum, Julius Bär, UBS, Swissquote, PostFinance and Zürcher Kantonalbank.

What we do not know yet

  • The timetable for the new licences: the SBF expects the Federal Council's dispatches on the revision of the Financial Institutions Act (FinIA) and the Financial Market Infrastructure Act (FinMIA) in the first half of 2027, according to cvj.ch; the drafts are still in the hands of the government.
  • The follow-up to the consultation by the State Secretariat for International Finance (SIF) on the "optimisation of financial market regulation", scheduled for 17 November 2026.
  • A response from FINMA to the procedure durations cited at the presentation: finews.ch reports none.

Our articles on the Swiss hub are gathered in our Crypto Valley section.

Sources