Swiss Stock Exchange (SIX) to add crypto markets

Switzerland's stock exchange "SIX" announced today that they are building a fully integrated trading market infrastructure for trading digital assets. It will be the first time in the world that digital assets will be traded on a public stock exchange.

SDX

The Swiss Exchange ("SIX") announced today that they are planning to create a fully integrated trading, settlement and custody infrastructure for digital assets such as cryptocurrencies. The new to be founded cryptocurrency exchange platform will be called the SIX Digital Exchange ("SDX"), and will facilitate cryptocurrency trading as well as enabling the tokenization of existing securities or issueing new tokens. It will be for the first time that an existing stock exchange will publicly facilitate the trading of digital assets directly to it's existing customers.

SIX is a long standing and well regulated stock exchange, and will apply the same standards and offer the same insurances that their customers are used to on their digital asset platform. Through this SIX aims to offer investors a safe and trustworthy environment to invest in digital assets.

NOT BITCOIN & ETH 🤔

Interestingly enough, a spokesperson from SIX said that the platform will not be used for trading cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum initially,but added that this is likely to change as soon as there is more regulatory clarity.

Initially it seems the platform will be mainly used to tokenize existing assets and trade these in order to lay a basic foundation to add a variety of cryptocurrencies. Whether these will be added in a short timespan, I wouldn't dare say. Switzerland is at the forefront of cryptocurrency regulation, and there very well might be progress by the time SDX launches mid 2019.

If we're all waiting for institutional investors, from the sound of it they may be just around the corner. It almost seems like we are bombarded daily with news announcements of some kind of ETF, hedge fund, bank or stock exchange looking to get involved with cryptocurrency.

Though, we should be careful not to get too excited. These things take time, and usually a lot more patience than the average crypto-investor has. Just like SDX will launch at the soonest in the first half of 2019, I don't expect most of the other traditional financial markets to hop onboard anytime sooner than that. We may very well be stuck inside the bear market all the way up to 2019 before we can enjoy the fruits that the institutional bulls may bring us.

Click to read the SDX news announcement here