BX Swiss: Switzerland's Digital Securities Exchange
Overview of BX Swiss
Switzerland is one of the few countries in the world with two fully licensed, nationally regulated stock exchanges operating simultaneously. SIX Swiss Exchange, headquartered in Zurich, is the dominant venue — the home of the SMI blue-chip index, Swiss government bond listing, and the world’s leading crypto ETP market. BX Swiss, the country’s second exchange, is a quieter but increasingly significant presence in the Swiss capital markets landscape, and has positioned itself strategically around the theme that will define the next decade of securities markets: digital assets.
BX Swiss traces its institutional lineage to the Berner Börse, the Berne Stock Exchange that operated from 1888. Following consolidation within the Swiss exchange landscape and a subsequent rebrand, the exchange became BX Swiss — with the BX standing for Berne eXchange — and relocated operational focus to Zurich while maintaining its Bernese legal heritage. In 2023, BX Swiss secured FINMA authorisation as a stock exchange, placing it on equal regulatory footing with SIX for the purposes of listing securities in Switzerland.
The exchange’s defining strategic choice has been to embrace digital assets as its primary growth vector, establishing BX Digital as the dedicated digital securities segment and positioning itself as the more agile, digitally native alternative to SIX in the growing market for crypto ETPs and tokenised securities.
Regulatory Status: FINMA Stock Exchange Licence
BX Swiss holds a FINMA stock exchange licence under the Financial Market Infrastructure Act (FMIA), the same statutory basis that authorises SIX Swiss Exchange’s operations. This equivalence is significant: BX Swiss is not a lesser-regulated alternative platform or a dark pool — it is a fully FINMA-supervised exchange with the same legal standing as Switzerland’s principal venue.
A FINMA stock exchange licence under FMIA imposes substantial requirements: adequate market surveillance, transparent and non-discriminatory access rules, trading system resilience standards, and ongoing reporting obligations to FINMA. BX Swiss must maintain a market surveillance function capable of detecting and reporting market abuse, provide clear listing standards and admission criteria, and ensure that trading system downtime meets FINMA’s business continuity standards.
For issuers and market participants, the FINMA stock exchange licence provides the key regulatory assurance: securities listed on BX Swiss carry the same regulatory status as securities listed on SIX. A Bitcoin ETP listed on BX Swiss is a FINMA-regulated listed security, eligible for purchase by Swiss bank clients within FINMA-compliant investment mandates, just as an SIX-listed ETP would be.
BX Digital: The Digital Securities Initiative
BX Digital is the dedicated digital assets and digital securities segment of BX Swiss, launched to create a regulated venue that combines the regulatory standing of a FINMA-licensed exchange with a product development philosophy specifically oriented towards digital assets.
The BX Digital initiative encompasses two principal activities. First, the listing of crypto exchange-traded products — Bitcoin ETPs, Ethereum ETPs, and broader digital asset basket products — in a format accessible to Swiss banks, brokers, and their institutional and private clients. Second, the development of infrastructure for tokenised security listings, including tokenised bonds and equity instruments issued under the Swiss DLT Act’s Registerwertrecht framework.
BX Digital’s listing process is designed to be faster and operationally lighter than SIX’s equivalent procedure, reflecting BX Swiss’s strategic intent to attract innovative issuers who find SIX’s established listing bureaucracy slow relative to the pace of digital asset product development. Smaller product launches, niche token exposures, and emerging market digital asset ETPs that might struggle to justify SIX’s listing economics are natural candidates for BX Digital.
Bitcoin and Ethereum ETP Listings
BX Swiss’s entry into the crypto ETP market followed the trail blazed by SIX Swiss Exchange, which listed the world’s first exchange-traded crypto product (the Bitcoin ETP issued by 21Shares, then known as Amun) in 2018. By the time BX Digital began actively listing crypto ETPs, SIX had established a dominant position with over 150 products.
BX Digital’s competitive approach has been to list products that are either:
Directly mirroring SIX listings — providing issuers with dual-listed products that spread liquidity across both venues and give investors multiple access points.
BX-exclusive listings — products structured for smaller asset exposures, emerging blockchain networks, or innovative product designs that SIX has not yet accommodated.
Bitcoin and Ethereum ETPs are the cornerstone of BX Digital’s crypto product offering, attracting the broadest institutional and private bank interest. Both physically backed (with direct Bitcoin or Ether holdings in custody) and synthetic products have been listed. Physically backed products — where the ETP issuer holds the actual crypto assets in regulated Swiss custody — are generally preferred by Swiss institutional investors who require documented physical backing for fiduciary compliance purposes.
Competitive Strategy Against SIX Dominance
Competing against SIX Swiss Exchange is structurally challenging. SIX processes over 90 per cent of Swiss equity trading by volume, benefits from network effects that reinforce market maker participation, and enjoys the deep liquidity relationships that come from being the primary settlement counterparty for Swiss institutional fixed income and equity trading. Every major Swiss bank is both a client and a shareholder of SIX, creating alignment between the exchange’s interests and its institutional client base.
BX Swiss’s strategy is not to displace SIX in traditional securities markets — that would be practically impossible — but to establish dominant positioning in digital securities before SIX’s institutional bureaucracy can respond with equivalent agility. The logic is not unlike that of smaller exchanges that built dominant positions in derivatives or ETFs before incumbents recognised the market’s potential.
Several structural factors support BX Digital’s competitive opportunity:
Regulatory agility. As a smaller institution, BX Swiss can develop and implement new product types faster than SIX, which must manage changes across a systemically important market infrastructure with hundreds of bank members.
Lower listing costs. BX Swiss’s listing fees for ETPs and structured products are reported to be materially lower than SIX equivalents, making BX Digital the economic first choice for smaller issuers and experimental product structures.
Digital-first culture. BX Swiss’s leadership has positioned digital assets as a central strategic theme — not an appendage to a traditional exchange business. This cultural alignment attracts digital asset issuers who find SIX’s orientation towards traditional securities more natural.
Speed to innovation. The tokenised securities market — Registerwertrecht under the DLT Act — is an emerging product category where BX Digital has an opportunity to establish listing standards and market conventions before SIX’s DLT initiative (SDX) captures the entire digital securities primary market.
Market Makers on BX Swiss
Exchange liquidity in smaller venues depends critically on the commitment of market makers — professional trading firms that quote continuous two-sided prices, ensuring that investors can buy and sell without facing wide spreads or thin books.
BX Swiss has worked to attract market makers with particular expertise in digital asset products. Flow Traders, the Amsterdam-headquartered specialist market maker in ETPs and digital assets, is among the market makers active on BX Swiss’s digital asset segments. Virtu Financial and several Swiss-based proprietary trading firms with crypto market-making desks have also participated.
The challenge for BX Digital is the reinforcing nature of liquidity: market makers are most active where volumes are highest, and volumes are highest where market makers provide the tightest spreads. SIX’s first-mover advantage in Swiss crypto ETPs means that the most liquid BTC/CHF and ETH/CHF ETP trading naturally concentrates there. BX Digital can attract liquidity for products exclusively listed on its venue, but for dual-listed products, the liquidity split typically favours SIX.
Swiss Banking Infrastructure Connectivity
BX Swiss is connected to Switzerland’s central securities depository and settlement infrastructure through the standard Swiss banking connectivity that all FINMA-licensed exchanges utilise. SIX SIS (the Swiss central securities depository operated by SIX) provides settlement services for BX Swiss-listed securities, meaning that Swiss banks trading BX Swiss products settle through the same infrastructure they use for SIX products.
This infrastructure connectivity is essential for BX Digital’s institutional access. A Swiss bank managing discretionary mandates can execute a Bitcoin ETP purchase on BX Digital and have it settle through SIX SIS into the same depository accounts used for SIX-listed products — no special accounts, no alternative settlement chains. For compliance and operations teams at Swiss banks, this familiarity reduces friction in approving BX Digital products for client mandates.
Key Milestones 2023–2025
2023: BX Swiss receives FINMA stock exchange licence, formalising its regulated exchange status and providing the legal basis for BX Digital’s operations as a regulated venue.
2023: BX Digital launches initial crypto ETP listings, establishing the segment as Switzerland’s second regulated digital asset ETP market.
2024: Following US Bitcoin ETF approvals in January 2024, BX Digital benefits from increased institutional interest in Bitcoin ETP products in Switzerland, with AuM on BX-listed Bitcoin ETPs growing materially through the year.
2024: BX Swiss announces expanded market maker arrangements for digital asset products, improving liquidity in key Bitcoin and Ethereum ETP products.
2025: BX Digital begins listing tokenised debt securities under the Registerwertrecht framework, establishing early positioning in the Swiss digital bond market ahead of anticipated broader adoption.
2025: BX Swiss expands connectivity with Swiss private banks, increasing the number of bank mandates approved to access BX Digital’s product range.
Outlook: Two Regulated Digital Securities Venues
Switzerland having two FINMA-regulated digital securities exchange venues is, from an institutional market structure perspective, a healthy outcome. Competition between BX Swiss and SIX creates incentive for product innovation, fee discipline, and service improvement that would be absent in a monopoly market.
The most likely equilibrium over the next five years is one where SIX retains dominance in the highest-volume, most liquid digital asset ETP products — the large-cap Bitcoin and Ethereum ETPs where institutional liquidity concentration matters most — while BX Digital establishes leadership in emerging product categories, tokenised securities, and innovative digital asset structures where its agility advantage is most meaningful.
For Swiss investors, issuers, and market participants, BX Digital’s existence provides genuine optionality: a second regulated venue with its own product range, listing economics, and market maker relationships. Whether BX Swiss can translate this optionality into a durable institutional business alongside Switzerland’s deeply entrenched exchange incumbent will be one of the defining market structure questions of the Swiss digital asset market through 2030.
Related reading: SDX Digital Exchange Profile | Swiss Digital Asset Trading Volume Tracker | Swiss Exchange Regulatory Tracker
Donovan Vanderbilt is a contributing editor at ZUG TRADING. This article is informational and does not constitute investment or trading advice.