Swiss Bank Announces First Stablecoin Commercial Payment

Sygnum, a regulated Swiss bank has announced an integration with Switzerland’s biggest retailer, Digitec Galaxus, for payment with tokenized Swiss Franks, DCHF. They say:

“Over USD 3.5 trillion per year, including USD 11 billion in Switzerland, pass through a chain of payment service providers and card systems during e-commerce transactions.

The multiple processes required to approve and facilitate payments provides opportunities for fraud and increase online retailers’ transaction costs and chargebacks.

The value of Sygnum’s DCHF is pegged 1:1 to the Swiss Franc. When used for e-commerce payments, no intermediaries are involved, and the transactions happen in real-time with stable values.

This reduces costs for online retailers by eliminating card systems and protecting against fraud, as well as simplifying and speeding the customer purchase experience.”

This integration was through Coinfy, a BitPay like crypto payment processor which already served Digitec Galaxus.

The online retailer with a yearly revenue of more than one billion Swiss Franks, was already accepting bitcoin and numerous other cryptos.

Thomas Fugmann, Galaxus’ CFO, said more than $1 million worth of crypto purchases have been made since they integrated bitcoin, eth and other cryptos.

This addition of tokenized fiat money adds a new dimension because on the surface it sounds this is like tether, but by a regulated bank.

“With the DCHF and other digital currencies, the future of money is going back to its roots; exchanged between two parties, instantly and simply,”
said Mark Højgaard, Coinify’s CEO.

We’ve sought clarification on the technical design of DCHF and will update once a reply is recieved.

In particular it’s not clear whether this is an ERC-20 token. There is one with it’s name, but anyone can create any token and name it whatever they want. So it may have nothing to do with Sygnum’s DCHF.

The stablecoins space however is clearly expanding beyond the industry roots, although in this case Sygnum calls itself “the world’s first digital asset bank.”

More established banks probably wouldn’t want to lose control over their ledgers to the blockchain, so a J coin might be more of a gimmick than a trading pair on Uniswap anytime soon.

But newer more competitive banks may well try to gain an advantage by offering new options, with a picture here developing globally whereby China claims to want a state tokenized fiat, while in the west private companies are the ones tokenizing money in a more decentralized and free market way.