Legal and Regulatory Aspects of the New Swiss DLT Register Securities – Virtual

On February 1, 2021, at 00:00:01, MME and daura created the first Swiss DLT register securities based on that law’s amendments. Since this historic moment, the shares of MME Compliance AG are tokenized and recorded accordingly on the daura infrastructure – the digital share platform for Switzerland.

With that, the first part of the Swiss “Federal Act on the Adaptation of Federal Law to Developments in Technology of Distributed Ledgers” has come into force. Thereby, Switzerland has taken a further step to remain a key jurisdiction for FinTech, Blockchain and DLT Technologies and respective projects.

New provisions for registered uncertificated securities (DLT register securities) have been introduced in Swiss law (article 973d ff. of the Swiss Code of Obligations (CO)) which allow tokenization of securities and other rights. The transfer of such DLT register securities is subject to the rules of a registration agreement and possible without any written form requirements.

Later this year, Switzerland will also introduce a new license type for DLT based exchanges. This license will be an opportunity to create one of the first regulated digital securities exchanges in the world, which could serve both institutional and retail clients.