Safirum launched its new Swiss franc stablecoin on Tuesday at the Clouds venue atop the Prime Tower in Zurich. The event drew approximately 60 representatives from Swiss financial institutions, the blockchain community, and ecosystem partners of the new token. Led by Chief Executive Officer Bastien Thiébaud, who previously headed the financial planner Mithras, the team developed the CHF-S token as the initial publicly available implementation of a stablecoin operating within the parameters set by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority guidelines.
Several other initiatives related to Swiss franc stablecoins exist. These include the Frankencoin, a decentralized token operating outside regulated stablecoins with a definable issuer, and a German-issued franc stablecoin from Allunity. Additionally, a banking consortium is testing a franc stablecoin based on a bank guarantee within a sandbox phase, an initiative recently joined by SIX and Twint. While bank guarantees represent one path permitted by the regulator, the CHF-S utilizes the second path: restricting users to wallets that are whitelisted in compliance with anti-money laundering regulations. To achieve this, Safirum has joined the self-regulatory organization VQF.
Hans Kuhn, a former Swiss National Bank chief legal counsel who advises Safirum, noted during the presentation that the stablecoin relies on a banking law exemption stating that deposits from qualified investors with professional treasury operations are not classified as public deposits. Consequently, minters are limited to institutional entities whose treasury management requires at least one full-time position. The securities firm Maverix acted as the first minter. Co-founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer Giuliano Glocker views the stablecoin as a foundation for new applications, particularly for client operations and the administration of digital assets in asset management certificates.
During the event, the first 10,000 francs were reportedly issued in CHF-S, with live demonstrations showcasing millisecond transfers and point-of-sale wallet-to-wallet transactions settled within 1.5 seconds at virtually no cost. Specific use cases include cross-border corporate payments, treasury management, crypto exchange transaction settlements, and payments linked to tokenized assets. Thiébaud stated that converting digital assets back to francs previously required routing through multiple fiat currencies and intermediaries, a process simplified and cheapened by the new token. He also highlighted the global standing of the franc as the fifth most-traded currency, noting that the stablecoin market remains heavily dominated by the United States dollar.
Reserves for the CHF-S are fully backed at a one-to-one ratio through bank accounts held by Safirum at Berner Kantonalbank and Banque Richelieu, with additional custodian banks anticipated. The launch coincides with broader sector developments, following a detailed paper published the previous week by the Swiss Bankers Association requesting regulatory easing. Kuhn characterized the regulatory framework currently under discussion as cumbersome.
