A building on the prestigious Banhofstrasse in Zurich, Switzerland was successfully tokenized and sold on the blockchain today. The new owner of the building is Swiss real estate investment company BrickMark. The company has issued bond-backed crypto tokens that figuratively represent “shares” of ownership in the building. The tokens are currently available to accredited institutional investment professionals who want to cut themselves in on earning some of the building’s rental income and benefit from any rise in the property’s value. Here’s a Google Street View image of Banhofstrasse 52, the building in question. Located in the center of the city …

Matrixport, a Singapore-based crypto startup launched by former Bitmain CEO Jihan Wu, will expand its services from Asia to Europe through its new Zurich office. Registered under the name of Chaintech in Switzerland, Matrixport will begin offering its trading, lending and custody services in the country, Swiss-centred publication swissinfo.ch reports on Nov. 26. The European expansion news comes less than five months after Wu launched Matrixport in July to offer over-the-counter trading, lending and custody services for crypto. The firm hired dozens of former Bitmain staff that were laid off from Bitmain as a result of the bear market of …

Switzerland’s major private investment bank Vontobel has launched a crypto custody solution targeting banks and asset managers, according to an official press release published on Jan. 14. Zurich-based Vontobel bank is reportedly the third largest financial custody provider in Switzerland, with 110.3 billion CHF ($112.2 billion) in assets under its actively developing Asset Management tool, according to the company’s financial report in 2017. With the launch of the new digital assets custodian solution named Digital Asset Vault, the private bank claims to be the first bank in the world to comply with standards required by both industry regulators and financial …