The Bank for International Settlement (BIS) has recently published a consultative paper on the Prudential Treatment of Crytpoasset Exposure. Being good citizens, we were happy to follow the BIS' call for a response to their proposals with constructive feedback that not only points out where they err, but more importantly how some of the proposed principals will prove detrimental to the stability of the financial system they BIS is trying to protect. Never has a proverb being more fitting than this: the path to hell is paved with good intentions.

The Bitcoin Association Switzerland has sent a comment on the FATF's revised draft guidance on crypto assets. In a consciously "expansive" approach, the FATF proposes to classify participants in decentralized systems as financial intermediaries even if they do not engage in financial intermediation. This would erode the benefits of disintermediation and cause great harm to the nascent sector of Decentralized Finance (DeFi). We criticize this approach and suggest a number of measures to contain the potential damage of imprudent regulation.

Today we sent the following letter to the Financial Stability Board of the G-20 commenting on their risk assessment for "global stablecoins":

On the 8th of April 2020 we sent the following comment to FINMA regarding the new money laundering ordinance...

In December 2019 the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision published a discussion paper on the design of a prudential treatment for crypto-assets and welcomed comments on its analyses and ideas. The comment submitted by the Bitcoin Association Switzerland are the following...

While the Crypto Valley Association's paper on "Asset Tokenization" contains many insightful sections, there are other sections that get some fundamental legal considerations embarrassingly wrong. Further questionable is a piece of advice that could make an issued token incompatible with the law. In this blog post, we shed light on the three biggest blunders of the paper.

In March, the Federal Council presented a draft for a number of legal adjustments and invited Bitcoin Association Switzerland to take part in the public consultation. The consultation phase ends this month and we have filed an extensive comment, in which we support the position of the Swiss Blockchain Federation and lay out some of our common concerns in more detail. In this blog post, I will summarize the content of the proposed law as well as the comments of both Blockchain Federation and Bitcoin Association.

The federal council published its 170-page report on the legal foundations of the blockchain in Switzerland. It incorporates the findings of the consultation that took place in September and to which the Bitcoin Association also provided some inputs. All in all, it is great that the Swiss government not only recognizes the potential of the blockchain, but also applies the right strategy for allowing the blockchain-ecosystem to flourish.

There are some hints that abstract systems like Ethereum should legally be treated like their own entities. The latest such hints comes from the context of value-added tax (VAT or MWST in German), where the taxation of transaction fees is practically impossible when trying to find a taxable relationship between miners and users.

The last few weeks have been very busy in the regulatory debate about Bitcoin and its consequences within the legal framework.

Marcel Dobler, member of the Swiss national parliament and co-founder of digitec.ch, proposed a law that could turn out to be very helpful for Crypto Nation Switzerland. It would give you the right to get your digital assets back in case you have stored them with a provider that goes bankrupt.

The Swiss government has proposed a law that inadvertently threatens Switzerland's excellent position in the international race for becoming the preferred jurisdiction for crypto startups.