Buying Bitcoin in Switzerland

It’s pretty straight forward to start buying bitcoin in Switzerland, and the mainstream exchanges accept Swiss clients without hassle. Typically you can create accounts for free, verify your identity and start trading directly through a mobile app. There are now a number of established and trusted platforms for Swiss residents to start buying bitcoin (and other crypto) with various pros and cons – which are listed below in more detail.

🧠 Consider how much of your portfolio is invested in bitcoin and cryptocurrency. It’s a risky business and you need to take care. Read more about my thoughts on risk here and here.

What is the easiest way to buy Bitcoin in Switzerland?

Generally speaking, buying and selling Bitcoin (and other related crypto) is very easy in Switzerland. The majority of the platforms listed above offer a completely digital account opening and onboarding process, making life much easier than it was a few years ago. You no longer need to submit paper work by registered post, for example.

The platforms listed above also take away a lot of the complexity of the underlying technology – with a few clicks you can be buying and selling in seconds.

Once you’ve tried a few demo accounts out from the list above, its worth experimenting with small deposits and transactions to get a feel for the platform and become familiar with what you can expect.

 

What should you look for in a Swiss bitcoin exchange?

It’s up to you to decide on the important factors for you when looking at platforms to use, and this blog won’t tell which platform to use specifically, but with the low account opening requirements its easy to try out a few before you commit.

 

For me, the priorities are business reputation, fees & security.

1. Business reputation

Regulation in the crypto space is no where near the standards of modern Swiss banking, and you are operating in a space which largely doesn’t offer much in the way of client protection. Many of the platforms are registered offshore and outside of Switzerland, which in itself isn’t a bad thing – it just means you need to do your due diligence and stick with the established players.

 

In the early days of crypto trading, there have been horror stories of exchanges disappearing, along with clients deposits. However with the big players such as Binance and Kraken, they are a lot more established and trusted. These common platforms are processing billions of dollars’ worth of transactions every day.

 

In most cases there isn’t a physical office or postal address within Switzerland, and any issues or tech support with you account are almost always conducted via the platform and helpdesk tickets. As always, start small – test out demos and read up on user feedback before you commit larger amounts of CHF.

2. Fees

Fees are varied across platforms and they have many different ways to make money – from deposit & withdrawals to transactions and spreads on the crypto you are buying – there are multiple layers of costs.

 

The table above should help give some visibility on these, however for more detail its worth checking the individual websites as they will depend on certain criteria – e.g. higher trading volumes typically generate lower fees.

 

If you are just getting started with small amounts of crypto to test things out, personally I wouldn’t be overly concerned with the fee differences (within reason) as the top ones listed above are fairly similar. Of course, once you start increasing the amounts (into the thousands) fees get increasingly important.

 

That said, crypto returns are significantly higher than traditional investments – Bitcoin has soared over 300% in recent years, so maybe a few extra bucks on fees to have a platform you prefer using – isn’t such a deal breaker.

 

Binance is certainly one of the cheapest platforms to get started with, and within Switzerland something like Relai is worth checking out for ease of use.

3. Security of the platform

As mentioned above, regulation is a pretty loose subject when we talk about crypto. While in the majority of cases you’ll have no problems with the established exchanges listed above, there are some areas to consider, such as:

 

Is your connection secure (e.g. using SSL)? Are you using two factor authentication? Is your crypto moved into cold storage with the platform? Do they conduct security audits?

 

The top platforms listed above offer these features and more – but it’s worth cross checking features such as two factor authentication are enabled.

 

It’s also a good common practice to move your crypto off the exchange after you’ve purchased it, and onto your own physical cold storage. Particularly if you plan to hold the currency for sometime. Personally I’ve been using the Ledger Nano for this for many years, and find it a perfect cold storage option.

 

The Ledger Nano is a nice and simple storage key, with a great user interface to manage your crypto. You can read more about them here.