Financial industry executives will need to familiarize themselves with the essentials of tokenization, and quickly. After a decade of fits and starts, momentum is building behind the development of markets in tokenized assets. These are not volatile, unbacked cryptocurrencies, but rather tokens that are linked to existing financial or physical assets and that now enjoy a measure of legal certainty, e.g. , tokenized money market funds, tokenized bonds and tokenized commercial bank money. Bullish forecasts…
The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) has issued to BX Digital AG a first-ever distributed ledger technology (DLT) trading facility license. BX Digital is an affiliate of BX Swiss Exchange AG, which operates the second-largest stock exchange in Switzerland (SIX Swiss Exchange is the largest). Both firms are subsidiaries of the Boerse Stuttgart Group, the sixth-largest exchange group in Europe. The license granted to BX Digital aims to simplify the multilateral trading of DLT…
On 27 April 2023, HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) released a second consultation regarding the taxation of transactions in the Decentralised Finance (DeFi) market. In short, HMRC proposes to legislate to ensure that the use of cryptoassets in certain DeFi transactions would no longer give rise to a taxable disposal, but instead would trigger taxation only when the assets are economically disposed of in a non-DeFi transaction. This is a significant step for HMRC and the UK…
On November 30, 2018, the Federal Council (the highest executive authority of Switzerland) published the implementing rules governing the newly introduced Swiss “innovator license.” Â The Swiss Parliament has recently enacted this new license category. Younger companies, in particular from the fintech and blockchain space, often engage in taking deposits from the public. Until recently, this activity was reserved for banks. However, fintechs that operate payment systems, including such systems based on cryptocurrencies or other blockchain…