Zürich is not a city that gets excited easily. Its banks have watched currencies rise and fall, fortunes made and lost, and more than one technology promise to change everything. So when bankers, asset managers and blockchain builders filled the Kongresshaus on the shore of the lake for two days in September 2025, the question in the room was a sober one. Is digital finance finally ready for the institutions? CV Summit, now in its eleventh edition, brought more than 3,000 executives, investors, founders and policymakers to Zürich on 23 and 24 September. There were five stages, 190 speakers, more than 100 partners — from Franklin Templeton and Binance to Google, Microsoft and Palantir — and delegations from more than 80 banks and asset managers.
FROM CRYPTO MARKETS TO FINANCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE For years, digital assets were defined by token prices and speculative cycles. The conversation in Zürich had moved on. The talk was of settlement, custody, payments, tokenised funds and wealth management: the plumbing of finance rather than its casino. A blockchain is, at heart, a shared ledger that records transactions and ownership. In financial services, that opens the door to faster settlement, programmable payments and the tokenisation of assets that have always lived in separate databases held by separate intermediaries. Tokenisation changes how a right is recorded and transferred. It does not change the right itself. The legal claim, the custody arrangement and the regulatory obligation all remain. A ledger can prove that a transaction happened. It cannot prove that the issuer behind it is sound.
BANKERS IN THE ROOM WITH BUILDERS "Our vision was to bring bankers into the same room as builders," said Mathias Ruch, founder and chief executive of CV VC, the Zug-based investor behind the summit. In 2025, the bankers came with news. Luzerner Kantonalbank announced that it now accepts Bitcoin and Ether as collateral for loans, a step that would have been unthinkable for a Swiss cantonal bank a few years ago. The Swiss Bankers Association, UBS, PostFinance and Sygnum Bank presented a feasibility study on blockchain-based deposit tokens, including what they described as the first legally binding payment between institutions using bank deposits on a public blockchain. Franklin Templeton's Sandy Kaul and Roger Bayston spoke on tokenised funds. Heinz Tännler, the finance director of the canton of Zug, spoke for the Swiss Blockchain Federation, and Ahmed Bin Sulayem of Dubai's DMCC brought the view from the Gulf. Philipp Rickenbacher, the former chief executive of Julius Baer and now chairman of CV VC, summed up the mood: "Innovation does not happen incrementally. It only happens in big steps."
THE SWISS ADVANTAGE Switzerland did not become a digital-asset hub by accident. Crypto Valley, the cluster that stretches across Zug, Zürich and into Liechtenstein, now counts 1,766 active blockchain companies. According to CV VC's 2026 ecosystem report, its 50 largest firms and projects — among them Ethereum, Solana, Cardano, Sygnum Bank and Copper — were worth a combined $467 billion, with ten valued above $1 billion. In 2025, Crypto Valley companies attracted 47% of all blockchain funding raised in Europe. The law came early too. Switzerland's DLT Act came into force in 2021, giving legal recognition to ledger-based securities, protecting crypto assets held by a custodian in bankruptcy, and creating a new licence for DLT trading facilities. The first, BX Digital, received its licence in March 2025.
THE STABLECOIN LINE Stablecoins were the most debated asset at the summit, and Switzerland's rules are among the strictest. Under guidance issued by the regulator FINMA in July 2024, a stablecoin redeemable at par is treated as taking deposits. Its issuer needs either a banking licence or a default guarantee from a Swiss bank covering every franc owed, and must be able to identify every holder at any time. A month after the summit, in October 2025, the Federal Council opened consultation on a reform that would create two new licences: a payment instrument institution, which would expressly allow stablecoin issuance, and a crypto institution for custody and trading. The consultation closed in February 2026. The new regime is not expected before 2028.
AI ENTERS THE FINANCIAL STACK The other half of the summit's title was artificial intelligence. Banks are already using AI for research, documents, client service and compliance. The sessions in Zürich went further, to autonomous agents that hold assets, make payments and act for a client. The organisers have a name for it, "Wealth³": programmable money, tokenised assets and AI agents running on the same rails. In finance, an error costs money. Anything that touches credit, investments or client assets needs limits, human oversight and an audit trail. Automation speeds up a process. It speeds up a mistake just as fast. A session co-hosted by Citi looked further still, at what quantum computing could do to the encryption that protects all of it. "Innovation has never been as fast as today," said Olaf Hannemann, co-founder of CV VC, "but will never be as slow ever again."
PRIVACY AND CUSTODY Switzerland adds its own demands: client confidentiality, cybersecurity and banking standards the world still measures itself against. Digital systems make money easier to trace and processes easier to automate. They also bring new risks: lost keys, software flaws and too much technical control in too few hands. For a Swiss private bank, a token is only as good as the vault behind it.
THE INSTITUTIONAL TEST Banks adopt a technology when it settles faster, costs less, opens a market or gives clients something they want. They hold back when the law is unclear, the market is thin or the risk is hard to control. So the sessions that mattered most in Zürich were the least glamorous ones: integration costs, systems that can talk to each other, custody standards and networks that do not go down. Switzerland has the banks, the lawyers, the regulator and the builders within a short train ride of each other. That is its real advantage. Adoption will not arrive in one moment. It will come product by product. The twelfth CV Summit returns in 2026. By then, the industry will need to show that blockchain and AI have become dependable parts of finance, and that Zürich's caution was worth the wait.