- Swiss crypto providers are either FINMA-licensed banks (such as PostFinance, Swissquote and Sygnum) or financial intermediaries supervised by a self-regulatory organization (SRO), such as Bitcoin Suisse, Relai and Pocket. Both kinds can be checked in FINMA’s registers.
- Several large international exchanges serve Swiss residents from abroad. On 7 October 2026 we found none of Kraken, Coinbase, SwissBorg, Bitpanda, Binance, Bybit, OKX, MEXC or Bitget in FINMA’s SRO member search.
- A simple purchase costs from about 1% to 1.5% at most providers, and some add a spread. PostFinance does not let you move coins to your own wallet.
- Crypto is not covered by deposit protection. Swiss law does keep crypto held in custody out of a failed custodian’s bankruptcy estate if it is assigned to you.
This page compares the crypto providers used by residents of Switzerland and explains how to check one. The rules behind it are on regulation. We do not rank or recommend any provider, and there are no affiliate links. Fees change often: the figures below are what each provider published on its own pages on 7 October 2026. Whether a provider is supervised comes from FINMA’s registers.
Who supervises the providers
Switzerland has no crypto license like the EU’s MiCA. A provider that exchanges or holds crypto for customers must join an SRO for anti-money-laundering supervision, unless it is a FINMA-licensed institution such as a bank, which FINMA supervises directly. FINMA publishes a list of authorized banks and securities firms and a search of all SRO-affiliated financial intermediaries. An SRO checks compliance with the anti-money-laundering rules; it is not prudential supervision of the provider’s finances.
| Provider | Legal entity | Status in FINMA’s registers (7 October 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin Suisse | Bitcoin Suisse AG, Zug | Financial intermediary, SRO: VQF |
| Bity | Bity SA, Neuchâtel | Financial intermediary, SRO: SO-FIT |
| Pocket App AG, Lupfig | Financial intermediary, SRO: VQF | |
| PostFinance | PostFinance AG, Bern | Bank (FINMA license) |
| Relai | Relai AG, Zurich | Financial intermediary, SRO: VQF |
| Revolut | Revolut Switzerland Payments AG | Financial intermediary, SRO: VQF |
| Swissquote | Swissquote Bank SA, Gland | Bank (FINMA license) |
| Sygnum | Sygnum Bank AG, Zurich | Bank (FINMA license) |
| Yuh | Yuh Ltd, Gland; accounts opened with Swissquote Bank SA | Yuh Ltd not found in the SRO search; Swissquote Bank SA is a bank (FINMA license) |
Bitcoin Suisse is not a bank. In 2021 FINMA said it considered the company’s banking license application “ineligible for approval”, citing weaknesses in its anti-money-laundering defenses, and that the company was supervised by an SRO, not by FINMA; Bitcoin Suisse withdrew the application. Bity now accepts trades only from CHF 100,000 per trade or CHF 250,000 per year, and Sygnum serves private clients with at least CHF 500,000 in liquid assets, according to their own pages.
Not in the Swiss registers
- Kraken serves Switzerland under its global terms, through Payward Trading Ltd in the British Virgin Islands, according to its own legal pages.
- SwissBorg is developed in Lausanne, but its app terms (22 July 2026) say customers in Switzerland contract with BlockNodes SAS in Paris, which according to SwissBorg holds a French MiCA license.
- Bitpanda lists only Austrian and German entities in its Swiss legal notice. We could not read Coinbase’s pages for Switzerland.
- Binance, Bybit, OKX, MEXC and Bitget gave no result in the SRO member search. None of them, nor any of the providers above, was on FINMA’s warning list on 7 October 2026.
No Swiss authority supervises these entities. FINMA says it can act only where it has territorial and material jurisdiction, so if something goes wrong you deal with the provider’s home country.
Fees compared
The table shows what each provider’s own pages said on 7 October 2026, for a normal private customer at the lowest fee level. “Simple buy” is the buy button in the app; “advanced” is the order book (maker / taker). A spread is the difference between the buying and selling price and is an extra cost on top of the fee. “Not found” means we could not find or read the figure on the provider’s own pages.
| Provider | Simple buy | Advanced (maker / taker) | CHF deposit | CHF withdrawal | Coins to your own wallet |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin Suisse | 0.95%, minimum CHF 50 | – | Not found | CHF 20 | Yes, CHF 40 |
| Bitpanda | Markup from 0.99% | Not found | Free | Not found | Not found |
| Coinbase | Not found | Not found | Not found | Not found | Not found |
| Kraken | 1% plus spread | 0.40% / 0.80% | Free via SIC (CHF 0.75 via SWIFT) | CHF 1 via SIC | Yes, fee not found |
| 1.5%, no minimum fee | – | Not found | Not found | Always: bitcoin goes straight to your own wallet | |
| PostFinance | 0.95% (lower from USD 250,000), plus a portfolio fee of 0.15% a year | – | From your PostFinance account | To your PostFinance account | No, “currently not available” |
| Relai | 1.0% plus spread, minimum purchase CHF 50 | – | Not found | Not found | Always: bitcoin goes straight to your own wallet |
| SwissBorg | 0.99% (minimum €5) plus a market-liquidity adjustment | Not found | Free by bank transfer | 0.10% (minimum CHF 5, maximum CHF 110) | Yes, network fee plus 0.1% (for bitcoin minimum €1.61) |
| Swissquote | 1% / 1% at the lowest level | Down to 0.08% / 0.18% at high volume | Free | Free for online payments in Switzerland | Yes, USD 10 for bitcoin |
| Yuh | 1% | – | Free | Free | Not found |
A few things the table does not show:
- Custody fees. Bitcoin Suisse charges 0.45% a year up to CHF 5 million (minimum CHF 62.50 a quarter), Swissquote from CHF 20 a quarter and PostFinance 0.15% a year. Yuh says custody is free.
- Minimums. PostFinance has a minimum of USD 50 per order and per savings-plan installment. Relai’s first CHF 100 a month in a savings plan is free of its service fee.
- Cards. Card payments cost extra, for example 3% at Relai and 3.75% to 4.5% at SwissBorg.
- Kraken charges 1.5% on custom orders. Its fee page shows two tables for the order book, with a maker fee of 0.40% in one and 0.38% in the other.
Features compared
| Provider | Number of coins (its own claim) | Staking | Recurring buy | Bitcoin Lightning | Languages of the site |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin Suisse | 65+ | Yes (15% of rewards) | Not found | Not found | English, German |
| Bitpanda | 650+ | Yes, commission not found | Yes, from €10 | Not found | German (Swiss site) |
| Kraken | Not found | Yes (20% commission on flexible staking); availability in Switzerland not verified | Yes | Not found | Not found |
| 1 (bitcoin) | No | Yes, through a bank standing order | Yes | English, German, Italian | |
| PostFinance | 20+ | Ether only (20% of rewards) | Yes | No | Not found |
| Relai | 1 (bitcoin) | No | Yes, weekly or monthly | Not found | English, German, French, Italian |
| SwissBorg | Not stated (“more than 10,000” trading pairs) | Yes (performance fee 15%, 25% for ether via Lido, plus a service fee by rank) | Yes | Not found | German, French, Italian |
| Swissquote | 55 | Yes (20% of rewards) | Not found | Not found | Not found |
| Yuh | 50 | Not found | Not found | Not found | German, French, Italian, English |
Relai and Pocket are bitcoin-only and do not hold your coins: they send them straight to a wallet you control. Yuh says it holds crypto through sub-custodians, naming Coinbase, Bitstamp Europe and Payward (Kraken).
How to check a provider
- Find out which legal entity you would contract with: it is in the provider’s terms or legal notice, and often differs from the brand.
- Look that entity up in FINMA’s list of authorized institutions (banks, securities firms, FinTech license holders) or in FINMA’s SRO member search.
- Check FINMA’s warning list, and look out for clone sites: the list includes a fake site imitating Crypto.com. FINMA says the list is not exhaustive.
- Read the fee page before you deposit. Look at the spread and custody fees as well as the trading fee, and check whether you can withdraw coins to your own wallet.
Published FINMA measures
- Bitcoin Suisse (17 March 2021). FINMA gave an unfavorable assessment of its banking license application because of weaknesses in its anti-money-laundering defenses; the company withdrew the application.
- Stablecoin issuer (case 2025-47, 16 December 2025). FINMA found that an issuer had accepted deposits from the public without a license after one of its bank guarantees lapsed.
If a provider fails
- No deposit protection for crypto. The Swiss deposit insurance scheme, esisuisse, covers bank deposits up to CHF 100,000 per client and bank, but not “units of cryptocurrencies on accounts”. FinTech license holders must tell clients expressly that their balances are not covered.
- Your crypto is kept apart. If a custodian goes bankrupt, the bankruptcy administration must hand over crypto it held for you, provided it had undertaken to hold the crypto ready for you at all times and the crypto is assigned to you individually, or to a group of clients with your share clearly identifiable (Art. 242a of the Debt Enforcement and Bankruptcy Act). For banks, the Banking Act has the same rule (Art. 16(1bis) and 37d). FINMA calls this “comprehensive bankruptcy protection” for crypto held in custody by third parties.
- Limits. The protection depends on those conditions: the provider must have undertaken to hold the crypto ready for you at all times. Check the terms before you lend or stake coins through a provider. Yuh, for example, writes that the bankruptcy process “cannot be fully guaranteed due to the lack of case law”.
Coins in your own wallet do not depend on a provider at all; the rules for that are on regulation.
Where to complain
- The provider first. Use its complaints procedure and keep a record.
- An ombudsman. Under the Financial Services Act, financial service providers that serve private clients must join an ombudsman office recognized by the Federal Department of Finance (Art. 77), which tries to settle disputes by mediation (Art. 74). There are eight recognized offices, including the Swiss Banking Ombudsman, whose procedure is basically free of charge for clients. The act covers financial instruments such as shares and bonds; payment tokens such as bitcoin are not on that list, and FINMA does not treat them as securities. So a provider that only buys and sells bitcoin may not have to join an ombudsman. We found no official statement on this, and none of the crypto-only providers’ terms we read names an ombudsman. Banks such as PostFinance, Swissquote and Sygnum are covered.
- FINMA does not handle individual complaints: it says it “is not able to protect individual investors”.
- Court or police. You can go to the civil courts, and report fraud to the cantonal police (see scams).
Sources
- FINMA: Authorised institutions, individuals and products (list of banks and securities firms) (last checked October 2026)
- FINMA: SRO member search (last checked October 2026)
- FINMA: Warning list (last checked October 2026)
- FINMA: Bitcoin Suisse banking licence application (17 March 2021) (last checked October 2026)
- FINMA: Enforcement case 2025-47 (last checked October 2026)
- FINMA: Guidance 01/2026, custody of crypto-based assets (PDF) (last checked October 2026)
- FINMA: ICO guidelines (16 February 2018) (last checked October 2026)
- FINMA: How investors can protect themselves against unauthorised financial market providers (PDF) (last checked October 2026)
- esisuisse: FAQ (last checked October 2026)
- Fedlex: Bankengesetz (BankG), Art. 16, 37a and 37d (last checked October 2026)
- Fedlex: Debt Enforcement and Bankruptcy Act (SchKG), Art. 242a (last checked October 2026)
- Fedlex: Financial Services Act (FinSA), Art. 3, 74 and 77 (last checked October 2026)
- Federal Department of Finance: Ombudsman offices (last checked October 2026)
- Swiss Banking Ombudsman: Frequently asked questions (last checked October 2026)
Exchange pages (not official sources)
Fees, features and the legal entities named by each provider come from its own pages, checked on 7 October 2026. They are the provider’s own statements, not checked by a regulator.
- Bitcoin Suisse: Fee schedule private clients (PDF) (last checked October 2026)
- Bitcoin Suisse: Mobile app (last checked October 2026)
- Bitpanda: Sparplan (last checked October 2026)
- Bitpanda: Legal notice (last checked October 2026)
- Bity: Home page (last checked October 2026)
- Kraken: Fee schedule (last checked October 2026)
- Kraken: Global terms (last checked October 2026)
- Kraken: CHF deposit options (last checked October 2026)
- Kraken: CHF withdrawal options (last checked October 2026)
- Pocket: Terms of service (last checked October 2026)
- PostFinance: Kryptohandel (last checked October 2026)
- PostFinance: Produktbeschreibung Kryptohandel (PDF) (last checked October 2026)
- Relai: Pricing policy (Switzerland) (last checked October 2026)
- SwissBorg: Pricing policy (last checked October 2026)
- SwissBorg: App terms of use (last checked October 2026)
- Swissquote: Crypto pricing (last checked October 2026)
- Swissquote: Payment fees (last checked October 2026)
- Sygnum: Private clients (last checked October 2026)
- Yuh: Pricing (last checked October 2026)
- Yuh: Crypto (last checked October 2026)
This page is general information, not financial advice. Fees and registrations change, so check FINMA’s registers and the provider’s own fee page before you open an account.