Switzerland’s financial sector has taken another step toward exploring a digital Swiss franc. On 8 September 2026, organizers of the CHF Stablecoin Sandbox confirmed that the project has entered its live testing phase and that two additional partners — SIX and TWINT — have joined the effort. Nine Swiss firms are now working together in a controlled environment to examine how blockchain-based applications might interact with a franc-pegged stablecoin.
The initiative was first announced in April 2026 by UBS, PostFinance, Sygnum Bank, Raiffeisen, Zürcher Kantonalbank, Banque Cantonale Vaudoise, and Swiss Stablecoin AG.
SIX, the country’s leading financial market infrastructure operator, and TWINT, the widely used Swiss payment app, bring complementary expertise in market plumbing and everyday digital payments.
Together the group aims to generate practical evidence that could inform the future of Switzerland’s digital-money landscape and help keep the financial center competitive.
At the center of the tests is CHFD, a stablecoin designed to maintain a one-to-one link with the Swiss franc.
The token became technically live at the end of June 2026 on a platform run by CHFD Infrastruktur AG, a subsidiary of Swiss Stablecoin AG.
Participants will use this infrastructure to trial several categories of activity. Some experiments focus on already familiar institutional uses, such as automated transfers between banks and the settlement of tokenized assets.
Others look at programmable payments that could address everyday problems: lowering fraud risk on online marketplaces, making event-ticket allocation fairer, and streamlining the disbursement of public funds.
The sandbox itself is a restricted live setting rather than a public rollout.
Participation is limited, transaction amounts are capped, and the exercise is explicitly framed as an experiment.
Organizers emphasize that running the tests does not constitute a decision to introduce a commercial CHF stablecoin.
The work is scheduled to continue through the end of 2026 and is deliberately open-ended.
The priority is to identify where a franc-backed token might add genuine value, what operational and technical obstacles appear, and which regulatory conditions would need to be met if the concept were ever taken further.
Once the phase concludes, the partners plan to publish a summary of findings.
Stablecoins in general combine the price stability of a traditional currency with the speed and programmability of blockchain rails.
In this Swiss project the participating institutions want to build first-hand experience with those properties inside a domestic legal and market context.
By keeping the environment contained, they can study both opportunities and risks without exposing the broader payment system.
SIX has described its role as contributing infrastructure knowledge so that questions of settlement, interoperability, and operational resilience can be examined rigorously.
TWINT’s involvement similarly brings a consumer payment perspective into discussions that have so far been dominated by banks and market-infrastructure specialists.
The combination suggests the group is trying to look at the technology from both wholesale and retail angles.
Whether the results ultimately support a broader Swiss digital-franc ecosystem remains to be seen. For now the sandbox offers a structured way for major domestic players to gather evidence rather than debate the idea in the abstract. The coming months of testing should clarify which use cases hold up under realistic conditions and which remain theoretical.