Before Plan ₿: a financial centre in search of a new business

The pressure on the banking model

The decade before 2022 was the most difficult in the modern history of Lugano as a financial centre. Chapter E.II describes how the Italian tax amnesties, the voluntary disclosure programme of 2014 and 2015 and the automatic exchange of information with Italy from 2017 removed the business model on which the city's private banks had relied since the post-war decades: the management of undeclared Italian wealth. Chapter E.I gives the figures on the consolidation that followed, from the closure of BSI in 2016 to the steady fall in the number of banks and banking jobs in the canton. For the city the effect was felt in its tax base, because banks and their employees had for decades been among the largest contributors to municipal revenue, and in its selfimage as the third financial centre of Switzerland after Zurich and Geneva.

The search for a successor model took several directions at once. Commodity trading, treated in Part F, became a second pillar. Asset managers and fiduciaries reorganized under the Financial Institutions Act from 2020, as described in Chapter E.III. The universities and research institutes discussed in Chapter I.III offered a base for technology companies. Against this background the idea that Lugano could become a centre for Kryptowerte und Digital Assets had an obvious attraction. It promised a new financial industry that would use the existing skills of bankers, lawyers and fiduciaries, that could be built without large public investment and that would place Lugano in the international news in a field where Zug had already shown what a small Swiss location could achieve.¹

The comparison with Zug was explicit from the beginning. Since the middle of the 2010s the canton of Zug had attracted foundations and companies of the Ethereum ecosystem and had marketed itself as "Crypto Valley". When Plan ₿ was announced, Swiss media placed Lugano in a competition with Zug, Zurich and Neuchâtel for a sector that counted more than 1,000 blockchain enterprises with more than 6,000 employees in Switzerland as a whole.² Ticino had the language, the proximity to the Italian market and an established class of financial professionals. What it lacked was a recognizable brand in the sector. Plan ₿ was designed to supply one.

Chiasso and Criptopolis

The first public experiment in Ticino took place in Chiasso, the border town that had been the cradle of the cross-border banking business in the 1960s and 1970s and the site of the Credit Suisse scandal of 1977 described in Chapter D.III. In October 2017 a local association named Criptopolis was founded to attract companies in the field. Under the mayor Bruno Arrigoni the municipality decided that from 1 February 2018 taxes up to CHF 250 could be paid in bitcoin, an amount the municipality itself described as deliberately symbolic. The coins were converted into Swiss francs immediately, because, in the mayor's words, a municipality cannot engage in speculation.³ The context was explicitly economic. According to the same report, banking had employed some 4,000 people in Chiasso in the 1970s and fewer than 1,000 by 2018, and the Criptopolis association claimed to have brought around thirty start-ups, mainly from Italy, to the town.⁴

The practical result was slight. Only one private taxpayer used the option in the first period. A report of March 2022 counted a single payment over five years, although the limit had meanwhile been raised to CHF 1,000 per instalment.⁵ The conversion was handled by a Ticinese company, Eidoo Sagl, according to the parliamentary report discussed below.⁶ Chiasso nevertheless established the template that Lugano would later follow on a larger scale: payment in bitcoin as an option for the citizen, a supervised or at least professional intermediary that carries the exchange-rate risk, immediate conversion into Swiss francs and a political message that counted for more than the volume of payments.

Notes

1. On the canton of Zug as the model for other Swiss locations see the comparison below and Chapter I.II. The account of the decline of Lugano's banking business is in Chapters E.I and E.II. ↩
2. Allen, "Death, taxes and crypto" (above), citing more than 1,000 blockchain enterprises with more than 6,000 employees in Switzerland and naming Zug, Zurich and Neuchâtel as competing hubs. ↩
3. "Pagare le tasse in Bitcoin? A Chiasso si può", Fortune Italia, 2018, https://www.fortuneita.com/?p=3179 (start on 1 February 2018, CHF 250 as "cifra volutamente simbolica", immediate conversion). ↩
4. Ibid. (banking employment in Chiasso of about 4,000 in the 1970s and fewer than 1,000 in 2018; about thirty start-ups attracted by Criptopolis, founded in October 2017). ↩
5. Ibid. (one private citizen in the initial period); Davide Illaretti, "Una miniera da 20 milioni (di polemiche)", Tio.ch, 22 March 2022, https://www.tio.ch/ticino/attualita/1572517/progetto-lugano-criptovalute-polemiche-miniera (limit of CHF 1,000 per instalment; one payment in five years). ↩
6. Gran Consiglio della Repubblica e Cantone Ticino, Commissione della gestione e delle finanze, Rapporto di maggioranza sulla mozione 16 ottobre 2017 di Paolo Pamini e cofirmatari (messaggio 7522), 30 March 2021, https://www4.ti.ch/fileadmin/POTERI/GC/allegati/rapporti/24890_7522r-magg.pdf. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of August 2025.