Swissquote to launch its own cryptocurrency exchange
Swissquote Group, Switzerland’s provider of online trading services, is looking to delve further into the digital-asset arena with the launch of its own cryptocurrency trading platform.
Jan De Schepper, chief sales and marketing officer at Swissquote, told Finews.asia publication that he expects the crypto exchange to be run and operational before June 2002. To further sweeten the offering, Switzerland’s largest online bank plans to add stablecoins and staking services, which are currently in high demand, to the list of cryptocurrency offerings.
The new service combines Swissquote’s expertise as a provider of online trading services with digital asset security, in a bid to provide a safekeeping service for investment houses looking to gain exposure to the rapidly emerging asset class.
“We want to enable more trading in various cryptocurrencies on the platform. Our compliance and customer service teams were almost overrun by the crypto rush,” Jan De Schepper added.
The brokerage firm already allows its clients to trade CFDs on 24 cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin, XRP, bitcoin cash, chainlink, ethereum classic, EOS, stellar, tezos, augur, ox, cardano, uniswap, aave, cosmos, algorand, filecoin, maker, compound, year.finance, dogecoin, polkadot and solana.
Swissquote is going up against local players like Dukascopy
Swissquote is employing its accumulated Bitcoin experience. The company has been one of early adopters for the nascent industry, having provided clients with an actively managed Bitcoin certificate, powered by its machine learning algorithm. The exchange-traded product is listed on Switzerland’s largest stock exchange, the Six Swiss Exchange.
Swissquote’s offering removes one of the barriers to the introduction of a Bitcoin ETP to institutional investors as the investment vehicle allows them to buy into the cryptocurrency market without directly investing in Bitcoin, which regulations prohibit them from doing.
The objective of the ‘crypto’ certificate is to achieve capital growth by using an actively managed approach that shifts holdings between cash and Bitcoin.
The investment dimensions of Swissquote’s algorithm are over or underweighting the cryptocurrency position depending on the predicted future direction of Bitcoin’s price. The company said that between 60% and 100% of the certificate’s portfolio is allocated to Bitcoin.
Swissquote’s crypto offering is going up against local players like Dukascopy which has its own cryptocurrency, allows clients to deposit and withdraw funds in digital coins, as well as enabling free internal crypto-transfers between users of mobile banking.
Swissquote’s platforms allow users to trade on the movements of major currencies, as well as stocks and indices. Most of these CFDs are available both as forward contracts with an expiration date or spot/synthetic instruments (no expiration date, overnight rollover/swap interest applies).
