A train ride through Switzerland’s Bitcoin heartland

In Europe, Switzerland, alongside the Czech Republic, may have been one of the friendliest countries toward cryptocurrencies at a time when Bitcoin was seen as a criminal tool. Between Crypto Valley and Lugano, “the Monte Carlo of Switzerland,” digital assets are being pushed by true early believers.

With a surface area similar to that of the Netherlands or Bhutan, wedged between the borders of Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, France and Italy, Switzerland had, on paper, few reasons to withstand the twists of history and its invaders, apart from its hard-to-cross Alpine massif and a resilience that led its citizens to form a federal state after a civil war between liberal progressives and Catholic conservatives in 1847. That war, initiated by the conservative Sonderbund (which means “separate alliance”), is the foundation of today’s Switzerland: ultimately, after their surrender, the belligerents were demobilized and released unconditionally, in the name of compromise and saving lives, while the liberal cantons eventually prevailed with the creation of a federal state and a strategic central government, designed to remove customs barriers between cantons and to be able to stand up to other European nations.

Not without shocks (the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland still lists 93 deaths), but with damage kept relatively limited, Switzerland emerged as a unified nation while remaining respectful of its 26 cantons. In 1949, after concluding that the emergency clause written into its Constitution, allowing the federal government to bypass referendums when it felt the need, was being used too often, the Swiss population mobilized around a popular initiative for a “Return to Direct Democracy.” It passed by a narrow majority, reintroducing the right to direct political participation. In Switzerland, citizens can take part in up to four rounds of voting per year on more than a dozen issues on average, while individual initiatives to amend the Constitution are examined once they collect at least 100,000 signatures. A law can also be challenged by referendum if its opponents gather 50,000 signatures. “Switzerland is, to some extent, the gold standard of direct democracy. Here, every citizen can change this or that aspect of life, naturally on the condition that they do not act alone but belong to a group,” Uruguayan political scientist David Altman in an interview¹ a decade ago. Still, that model comes with a certain taste for conservatism. “The people’s right to co-decision increases the acceptability of decisions,” said Pascal Sciarini², professor of political science at the University of Geneva, in 2017. Another political scientist, Marc Bühlmann, added in 2023³ that in Switzerland it is “the people who want it [who] must prove to others that a problem exists.” In a country where 80% of the population says it is satisfied with its life, conservatism, in the sense of inertia rather than ideology, inevitably prevails.

Switzerland, like a “boring” blockchain? 

That is probably why Bitcoin’s intrinsic qualities appealed to the country. In the end, Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention is a participatory system where everyone can review transactions and, when needed, take part in decision-making, transparent and consensus-based. “Switzerland is a direct democracy and decentralised system with direct democracy votes, this is maybe to a certain extent what blockchain in a digitised way wants to achieve,” Swiss entrepreneur and Bitcoin early adopter Marc Bernegger tells us during our visit to Zurich. “Many people say Switzerland is, with how it may be a bit annoying, a little bit like the old fashioned footprint or example of how blockchain would structure a government or a country.” A Zurich native, Bernegger built his fortune through different ventures tied to the early days of the internet and then cryptocurrencies. He was notably one of the shareholders and founding board members of Crypto Finance AG, sold in 2021 to Deutsche Börse for several hundred million Swiss francs. He has witnessed the growth of digital assets in the country, especially in Zurich, which together with nearby Zug forms what is called Crypto Valley, an Alpine twin of Silicon Valley, chosen by crypto builders to set up their foundations, often created as the entities responsible for issuing digital assets. One of the first was Ethereum. “Ethereum launched out of Switzerland. Vitalik Buterin lived here, his office is still in Zug,” Bernegger adds. Another is Tezos, which set up its foundation headquarters there in 2017 before its $232 million token sale, as did Cosmos Network and Cardano. One of the latest is the Solana Foundation, which is why we met its president Lily Liu downtown. “Between 2017 and 2019, Switzerland was like the epicenter of the whole industry,” Bernegger tells us. And even though today every jurisdiction around the world, from Hong Kong to Singapore via Paris, San Francisco, Austin or Dubai, is trying to become a “crypto hub” and attract this capital, Swiss Crypto Valley remains a serious contender.

You can feel it even in local shops. Bernegger tells us that at every tram stop, it is possible to buy Bitcoin at a digital kiosk. “I doubt anyone still does it these days, now that there are mobile apps, and I don’t know the fees or the spread, but it’s been possible for years,” he says. In practice, you buy vouchers that give you the right to withdraw those bitcoins to a personal wallet. A simple Swiss phone number is enough to do it. A short walk through the city confronts you with ads for Sygnum Bank, which claims to be the first bank in the world to have provided access to digital assets. Since 2024, even cantonal banks offer it as well. Switzerland shows a violence rate (8.5% in 2024⁴) lower than Sweden (9.4%), Germany (10.7%) and the Netherlands (16.7%), suggesting that access to Bitcoin is certainly not correlated with crime, however many critics may insist otherwise.

Other experiments tied to digital assets are happening elsewhere in the country. We stop by Zurich station, where, tucked away on the platform and almost anonymous, sits one of the best sandwich shops we have ever tried, and we take the train to Lugano, about two hours south of Zurich. At the end of this journey, running through some of Europe’s most beautiful landscapes, between lakes and mountains, we arrive in the city chosen by Tether for its European base. Tether is one of the most powerful crypto companies in the world, if not the most powerful, in charge of issuing the USDT stablecoin (a dollar-pegged crypto), one of the largest market capitalizations in the sector. Now diversified across multiple activities (Bitcoin mining, AI data centers, agriculture, streaming, neuroscience), the company, said to employ only between 100 and 200 people, generated more than $14 billion in profit in 2024, a figure it is expected to repeat in 2025, which would make it the most profitable company in the world without being publicly listed. In this part of Switzerland, Ticino, where Dante’s language reigns and which is nicknamed the “Monte Carlo of Switzerland,” Tether’s Turin-born founding and executive team chose to install part of its offices. For the lifestyle and the language, no doubt, even if tax considerations likely play a role too, since there are incentives for Italians and lower corporate pressure than elsewhere in Europe, even if still far higher than in Zug (19.3% versus 11.8%).

Our stay took place during Plan B, the Bitcoin-focused event created by the company. For a week, developers, investors and everyday enthusiasts digress on the future of the digital asset. And it is from all over the world that key figures in the sector gather there, whether for public roundtables or more private cocktails. From one street to the next, it is not uncommon to run into Adam Back (co-founder and CEO of Blockstream), Elizabeth Stark (co-founder of Lightning Labs), or Nicolas Bacca slipping away into the coworking space dedicated to crypto startups, PoW.space (PoW being the acronym for proof of work, Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism). The space is housed inside a former bank, and its top two floors would be occupied, according to our sources, by… Tether.

A panettone with a taste of Bitcoin

But the company is not aiming to leave Bitcoin’s footprint only for the duration of a yearly event. It has developed a payments program, complete with terminals distributed free of charge, to let local merchants easily accept Bitcoin, USDT and LVGA (a crypto designed specifically for Lugano). Around 350 businesses have equipped themselves, of all kinds: jewelry shops, art galleries, cafés, identifiable through stickers placed in windows, similar to those used by other payment networks like Amex, Visa or Mastercard. During our visit, however, the impact felt mixed. The manager of the IMAGO gallery on Via Nassa, there for nearly seven years, told us she had never carried out a single transaction in cryptocurrencies. At the café of the same name a few meters away, the waitress had seen a bit more success: “Over the past few months, we’ve had four or five payments. A few this week because of the event. But overall, it’s very rare,” she agrees. Overall, paying in cryptocurrencies was not part of the daily routine for any of the merchants we spoke to. A question of time, or of education?

One thing is certain: all energies are being mobilized to evangelize this Bitcoin-scented city, all the way to panettone. One of them is made by the family-run food company Gabbani, which uses surplus energy from the photovoltaic panels at its production plant to mine Bitcoin. Not far from there, a new statue depicting the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, designed by artist Valentina Picozzi (said to be Giancarlo Devasini’s partner), was inaugurated by the mayor in Ciani Park, just behind the Congress Palace. A first version of the statue had been vandalized and thrown into Lake Lugano. Clearly, even in Switzerland, Bitcoin leaves no one indifferent. But in one form or another, it keeps blending in everywhere.

¹SwissInfo, 12 novembre 2015

²Interview, “Démocratie directe : un « modèle » helvétique ?”, nonfiction.fr,  April 11 2017

³ RTS, La Matinale, 23 août 2023

⁴Neighbourhood crime, violence or vandalism in 2023, Eurostat, published in 2025