Keep knowledgeable with free updates
Merely signal as much as the Cryptocurrencies myFT Digest — delivered on to your inbox.
The Swiss inventory alternate is exploring the creation of a venue in Europe for buying and selling cryptocurrencies, in a bid to muscle in on a market dominated by long-standing digital belongings corporations comparable to Binance, OKX and Coinbase.
The group is contemplating utilizing its fame and Switzerland’s superior crypto legal guidelines as a hook for big conventional traders who’re rising taken with buying and selling digital belongings.
“Crypto has develop into increasingly more a recognised asset class,” Bjørn Sibbern, world head of exchanges at SIX Group, advised the Monetary Instances, including that the corporate is analyzing creating “a platform the place we may help facilitate buying and selling, whether or not it’s [spot] crypto or whether or not it’s derivatives.”
Conventional finance corporations have up to now largely shied away from organising crypto buying and selling venues owing to an absence of clear regulation and fears over reputational injury.
Just a few massive corporations comparable to Deutsche Boerse, Nomura and Standard Chartered have arrange their very own crypto exchanges, sometimes separate from their foremost companies.
However CBOE World Markets shut its spot crypto venue this 12 months, blaming an absence of clear regulation. CME Group explored launching bitcoin trading in Might, the FT reported, though its chief government has since mentioned the alternate has no present plans.
The approval of spot bitcoin and ethereum alternate traded funds by the US Securities and Change Fee earlier this 12 months spurred a rush of retail and institutional funding into the asset, and raised hopes that extra traders can be eager to then commerce the cash straight themselves.
Though the worth of bitcoin, the world’s hottest cryptocurrency, has fallen to round $60,000 from a document excessive of round $72,000 earlier this 12 months, it’s nonetheless up 40 per cent this 12 months.
Switzerland has develop into probably the most crypto-friendly international locations in Europe, with legal guidelines across the buying and selling and custody of belongings and the classification of various kinds of tokens that many different international locations are but to introduce.
“We’re different methods for us to increase in Europe and as part of that, we’re additionally [whether] crypto needs to be part of it,” Sibbern mentioned, including that the venue would solely be obtainable to institutional traders comparable to asset managers.
“We see the pattern that increasingly more world banks and establishments are crypto,” he added.
SIX runs a crypto derivatives firm known as AsiaNext out of Singapore, in a three way partnership with Japan’s SBI Group. “We’re ought to we do one thing comparable in Europe,” Sibbern mentioned, including that the corporate “may additionally say that is one thing we don’t need to pursue”.
The Swiss group, which is owned by 120 banks, runs a separate digital alternate, the place 9 digital bonds have been listed since 2018 by issuers comparable to funding financial institution UBS and the town of Lugano native authority. Sibbern mentioned the digital alternate “may . . . increase that idea” to incorporate crypto buying and selling itself.
Crypto buying and selling would additionally mark a notable growth for SIX, whose itemizing venues in Switzerland and Madrid hosted two of the biggest IPOs in Europe this 12 months — Spanish magnificence group Puig and dermatology group Galderma.
