Crypto Valley has further matured and added substance in the first half of 2020. Despite challenging circumstances because of COVID-19, the number of firms in Crypto Valley has increased to 919, and employment reached over 4700 in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
Growth and funding have been driven across all areas, including protocols, financial services, and other applications. The big story has been the funding of companies by investors. The flows of money from VCs and investors are confirming the view that the clear regulatory framework will enable companies to execute on their business plans and become very valuable. As such, Crypto Valley’s first non-protocol layer unicorn may not be too far away.
Companies which raised substantial amounts include: Bitcoin Suisse AG ($48M), 4ART Technologies AG ($45M), METACO SA ($20M), Crypto Finance AG ($14M), Near Protocol ($12.1M), Taurus Group SA (undisclosed amount), Sygnum Bank AG (undisclosed amount in second round).
Financial services continue to push ahead with a broader adoption of cryptocurrencies and DLT infrastructure (storage, settlement), as evidenced by a number of successful funding rounds among Switzerland’s main crypto players and the work of established players such as InCore Bank AG to provide key infrastructure to other banks.
The valuation of protocols that count Crypto Valley as their home has increased significantly. All 6 Unicorns are protocol layer projects of which the listed ones saw their network value increase significantly. The markets are rewarding higher degrees of decentralization, technical milestone achievements, well-performing testnets and mainnets with increased valuations.
Outside of financial services, the protection of intellectual property and the tracking of IP transactions is attracting large investments and valuations. 4ARTechnologies AG, which provides application infrastructure for the art market, has raised $45M at a valuation of $250M. In addition, its utility coin for use in its ecosystem has an implied valuation of $250M. Utopia Music AG, which is tracking the use of music, is nearing a triple-digit valuation as it is engaging in pilot projects with large royalty collection agencies.
CV VC’s research reveals eight crypto hotspots in Crypto Valley: Zug, Zurich, Liechtenstein, Geneva, Ticino, Neuchatel, Vaud, Lucerne and Bern. The largest number of companies is in Zug with 439, as it remains the heart of Crypto Valley.
The regulatory framework in Switzerland keeps evolving rapidly and its regulatory clarity is now being enhanced with significant functionalities for digital assets, including securities. Switzerland opted to modify a number of existing laws, introducing changes only where necessary. The result is the world’s leading regulatory framework and legal basis for the issuance, trading, and ownership of digital assets, including securities. The DLT Act is expected to go into effect in the first quarter of 2021.
Top 50 Crypto Valley Companies
| Company Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Sygnum | Sygnum is the world’s first digital asset bank. Sygnum is the first digital asset specialist to be regulated in Switzerland as a bank, and in Singapore as an asset manager |
| HDAC | Backed by Hyundai BSandC, Hdac’s new technology allows fast, secure and e¦ective communication between IoT devices. |
| Etherisc | Etherisc‘s mission is to build decentralized insurance applications, making the purchase and sale of insurance more efficient, enabling lower operational costs, increase transparency of insurance compared to traditional operations, and democratize access to reinsurance investments. |
| ICON | The ICON project is building one of the largest decentralized networks in the world. Promotion and development of new technologies and applications, especially in the areas of new open and decentralized software architectures. In the foreground - but not exclusively - is the promotion and development of the so-called ICON protocol and the corresponding technologies, as well as the promotion and support of applications using the ICON protocol. |
| 4ARTechnologies | 4ARTechnologies sets a new standard for the global art world. Combining patented and cutting-edge technologies, 4ART brings together all art market stakeholders. |
| Modum | Modum.io sensor devices record environmental conditions while physical products are in transit. When a change in ownership occurs, the collected data is checked against a specific smart contract in the blockchain. This contract validates that the transaction meets all of the standards set out by the sender, their clients, or the regulator and triggers various actions: notifications to sender and receiver, release of goods, payment, etc |
| Smart Containers | Smart Containers develops, builds and rents out airfreight containers for medicine & food transports. We combine cutting-edge technology and IoT sensors in a logistics ecosystem on blockchain. |
| Nexo | Nexo is the leading crypto lending provider, that has built its reputation in the blockchain world with its signature Instant Crypto Credit Lines™ and Earn Interest product, which is accessible via the Nexo Platform or Nexo’s Mobile Banking Solution. |
| Mt. Pelerin | Unlike traditional banks, MtPelerin won‘t use your money to invest for our own profit. Instead, 100% of the currencies deposited on our accounts will be kept in reserve at all time. This reserve and its movements are recorded on Ethereum blockchain, and are therefore completely transparent in a permanent and immutable way. Their reserves are visible to all in real-time, while the state of individual accounts remain confidential. |
| Deon Digital | Deon Digital has developed a programming language and operating system to create and manage truly digital contracts, which you can use to build digitized enterprise processes and future business ecosystems. We aim to “tear down walls” not only within, but also between organizations: letting information, ideas and transactions flow freely — and exactly where, when and how they should. |
| Golem | Deon Digital leverages more than 10 years of academic research, a world class R&D team, and the power of distributed ledger technology to turn any form of contracts into automatically managed digital contracts.Contracts are at the core of a company covering all its operational aspects: sales/purchase, production, salaries, loans, insurance, pensions, transportation, mobility, logistics, energy, etc |
| Shift Cryptosecurity | Digital Bitbox is a minimalist bitcoin hardware wallet packed with security and privacy. Safely hold and spend your coins with peace of mind. |
| Near Protocol(New) | NEAR is a decentralized storage and compute platform that is secure enough to manage high value assets like money or identity and performant enough to make them useful for everyday people, putting the power of the Open Web in their hands. |
| Aeternity | æternity is a new blockchain technology, designed to deliver unmatched e©ciency, transparent governance and global scalability. æternity is a scalable blockchain platform that enables high bandwidth transacting, purely-functional smart contracts, and decentralized oracles. |
| Aragon | Create value without borders or intermediaries. Aragon is being built because so that decentralized organizations can solve the world’s worst problems. Aragon is a project that aims to disintermediate the creation and maintenance of organizational structures by using blockchain technology. |
| Bancor | Bancor allows you to convert between any two tokens on their network, with no counterparty, at an automatically calculated price. Thanks to built-in liquidity, the future of user-generated tokens is here. |
| Cardano | Cardano is a decentralised public blockchain and cryptocurrency project and is fully open source. Cardano is developing a smart contract platform which seeks to deliver more advanced features than any protocol previously developed. |
| Dfinity Foundation | Dfinity is a blockchain based world computer network that is powerful enough to host business applications at scale. The network features a variety of innovations in the blockchain space. The Dfinity network is self-governing through the use of an adaptive network called the Blockchain Nervous System (BNS). The network is also capable of achieving transaction finality at an average speed of 7.5 seconds due to advancements in random number generation and selection. The Dfinity protocol uses Verifiable Random Functions (VRFs), BLS Cryptography and the Threshold Relay technique (powered by a random beacon) to achieve these speeds. |
| Ethereum | Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference. These apps run on a custom built blockchain, an enormously powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent the ownership of property. This enables developers to create markets, store registries of debts or promises, move funds in accordance with instructions given long in the past (like a will or a futures contract) and many other things that have not been invented yet, all without a middleman or counterparty risk |
| Utopia Music | Utopia Music creates platforms so everyone can understand, use and benefit from the power of data. |
| Lisk | Develop and publish blockchain applications with your own sidechains on the open-source Lisk Platform. Promotion of new technology developments and applications, in particular promotion and maintenance of new open decentralized software architectures. In the foreground - but not exclusively - is the promotion and development of the so-called Lisk protocol and the corresponding technology as well as the promotion and support of applications using the Lisk protocol |
| Status | Status is an interface to access Ethereum, built for Android and iOS. Enjoy encrypted messaging, a cryptocurrency wallet, and seamless access to DApps. |
| Tezos | The Tezos Foundation is a Swiss foundation, supervised by the Swiss Federal Foundation Supervisory Authority which is part of the Swiss Federal Department of Home A¦airs. Its purpose is the promotion and development of new technologies and applications, especially in the fields of new open and decentralized software architectures including the promotion and development of the Tezos protocol and related technologies |
| Waves | They create the economics of free, perfect and instant. The Waves Platform is a global public blockchain platform, founded in 2016. Waves Platform’s mission is to reinvent the DNA of entrepreneurship around the world by providing a shared infrastructure, offering easy-touse, highly functional tools to make blockchain available to every person or organisation that can benefit from it. |
| Santiment | Santiment creates tools to help analyze the crypto market and find data-driven investment opportunities. The project provides clean and reliable on-chain, social media and development information on over 1000 crypto assets, and develops unique metrics, signals, strategies and reports on top of their custom datasets. |
| Bitcoin Suisse | Founded in 2013, Bitcoin Suisse AG (BTCS) has been a pioneer in providing crypto-financial services. It has helped to shape the crypto- and blockchain ecosystem in Switzerland and has been a driving force in the development of the ‘Crypto Valley’ and ‘Crypto Nation Switzerland’ |
| Bity | The Swiss gateway to convert money into cryptocurrencies and digital assets. Buy - sell bitcoins and ethers. Introducing Bity Kiosks, the easiest way to acquire or sell bitcoins with cash. Only a phone number is required. Bitcoin ATMs are currently located in Geneva, Lausanne, Montreux, Neuchâtel, Zürich Hauptbahnhof and Zürich Hardbrücke. |
| Coreledger | The CoreLedger infrastructure creates a simple and secure platform from which to use blockchain technology. It allows users to digitize goods and services without programming effort. Thanks to blockchain technology, these assets can be securely and irrevocably transferred with immutable and unfalsifiable proof of ownership. Transactions using digitized assets decrease costs and integrate seamlessly with existing goods and services |
| Crypto Finance | The Crypto Finance Group provides institutional and professional investors products and services with a level of quality, reliability, and security that are unique in the digital asset space today. |
| Lykke | Lykke takes advantage of breakthroughs in crypto-technology to build a global Internet exchange with immediate settlement for all asset classes and types of financial instruments. The banking architecture is outdated and needs to be replaced. They propose an Internet exchange that uses blockchain to trade all types of financial instruments. The benefits are immediate settlement, low transaction fees, the absence of a single point of failure, and strategic independence. Immediate settlement and highly competitive pricing will lead to rapid volume growth and establish the exchange as the Internet marketplace. |
| SEBA Bank | SEBA is a FINMA licensed bank and pioneer in the financial industry, building a progressive technological bridge between the digital and traditional asset worlds. Founded in April 2018 and headquartered in Zug, the bank enables clients to invest, safely keep, trade and borrow against traditional and digital assets, as well as issue tokens all in one place |
| Smart Valor | Smart Valor is building the blockchain-based Valor-Network: a decentralized community-based marketplace for tokenized alternative investments. It enables asset issuers to create and distribute tokenized alternative investment solutions. |
| Velas (New) | VELAS AG headquartered in Crypto Valley Zug, Switzerland is the first AI-operated delegated proof of stake blockchain, that allows to build decentralised applications and smart contracts on its mainnet, and ables scalability of the transactions, being able to validate 30 000 transactions per second thanks to Schnorr signatures. |
| Zulu Republic | The Zulu Republic aims to mitigate the adoption problem, leveraging blockchain technology to create a sustainable cryptotoken ecosystem composed of individuals, merchants, and larger businesses, bolstered by enterprise-level activity and product “exports”—creating a place where people can not only make use of blockchain technology in their daily lives but thrive in the process of doing so. |
| Eidoo | Eidoo, a Ticino based blockchain startup, has officially launched the ICO Engine to allow Crypto companies and startups host and manage their token sales safely and with ease via the Eidoo mobile app. |
| Aave (New) | Aave is an open source and non custodial protocol enabling the creation of money markets. Users can earn interest on deposits and borrow ass |
| Securosys | Technology company dedicated to securing data and communications. We develop, produce, and distribute hardware, software and services that protect and verify data and their transmission. |
| Concordium | When launched in 2020, the Concordium blockchain will be a Level-1, Proof-of-stake, regulatory-compliant, enterprise-grade blockchain with verified identity of users built-in at the protocol level and with application of zero-knowledge proofs. Technological innovations will enhance its performance and allow the blockchain to be fast without compromising security, be scalable, o¦er interoperability and it’s partial synchronicity adjust to the speed of the internet and ensure that Concordium won´t break under any circumstances. |
| Cosmos | Interchain Foundation, a Swiss non-profit, which is responsible for coordinating fundraising and allocating funds to get the network o¦ the ground. The foundation will suggest a distribution of Atoms according to the results of the fundraiser. Users will ultimately decide the distribution for themselves when they run the software. The Interchain Foundation will suggest that 5% of the Atoms go to its initial donors, 10% go to the Interchain Foundation, 10% go to the company developing most of the software, and the remaining 75% to be distributed according to the results of the private and public fundraisers. |
| Casper Labs | Casper Labs presents the design for a new Turing-complete smart contract platform, backed by a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithm, and WebAssembly (wasm). The intent is for this design to be implemented as a new permissionless, decentralized, public blockchain. The consensus protocol is built on correct-by-construction (CBC) Casper work. |
| Polkadot | Polkadot empowers blockchain networks to work together under the protection of shared security. |
| Cysec Systems | ARCATrust aims at providing valuable hardware and software platform solution for storing and managing dynamically digital assets. |
| Algo Trader | Available on-premise or in the cloud, AlgoTrader is an institutional-grade quantitative trading and trade execution solution for conducting quantitative research, trading strategy development, strategy back-testing and automated trading for both traditional finance and crypto finance. |
| Bittrex | Bittrex Global provides a proven and secure platform for its customers to access the opportunities of digital asset trading. Built on Bittrex’s cutting-edge technology, Bittrex Global provides an institutional grade experience for professional and novice customers alike. |
| Taurus Group | Taurus is a Swiss-based company specialized in digital assets and distributed ledger technology. Taurus aims at building one of the first regulated digital asset exchanges for securities. |
| Cryptix | The Cryptix Group is a full-service provider that realises digital payment and exchange solutions that make life simpler for consumers and businesses. |
| CustoDigit | CustoDigit’s asset platform is a one-stop-shop developed entirely for regulated financial services institutions |
| Flovtec | flovtec is an award-winning leader in the field of liquidity provision for digital assets (d@ssets). As a key player in the Blockchain ecosystem flovtec fosters price stability and reduces transaction costs, for the benefit of all market participants. |
| Metaco | Metaco is a Swiss-based company with international presence. It brings together industry experts and most talented engineers to fulfill the requirements of financial corporations |
| Libra | Libra is built on a secure, scalable, and reliable blockchain and is designed to help bring people everywhere equal access to financial services. Libra is backed by a reserve of assets so that its value stays stable. |
