Crypto Finance

Company and ownership

Jan Brzezek founded Crypto Finance in Switzerland in 2017, with Tobias Reichmuth as co-founder, and led it as CEO until 2023. A CHF 14 million Series B in April 2020 brought total funding to CHF 36 million, about $37.3 million at the time. Deutsche Börse agreed in June 2021 to take a two-thirds majority in Crypto Finance AG and closed the purchase on December 15, 2021. Stijn Vander Straeten, previously CFO, has been Group CEO since 2023.

The head office is at Hardstrasse 201 in Zurich. Crypto Finance (Deutschland) GmbH, a wholly owned subsidiary, operates from Frankfurt. In 2024 the group sold its asset management arm to Matrixport so it could concentrate on trading, custody, staking and post-trade services.

Custody model and security

Private keys sit in FIPS 140-2 Level 3 hardware security modules developed by Swiss IT security firms. According to the custody page, the setup never exposes those keys, and transactions pass through an approval framework with tamper-proof hardware and whitelisted client accounts. The certified data centers are geo-redundant and located at several sites in Switzerland.

Institutions that want direct control can insource the stack instead. The wallet management platform runs on shared or dedicated HSM setups, and Crypto Finance cites a traditional bank that became its own custodian this way. The company states that the storage infrastructure under its custody service is SOC 2 Type II certified and that it follows SOC 1 Type 1 standards under ISAE 3402. Independent auditors run regular penetration tests.

Regulation and insurance

Crypto Finance AG is supervised by FINMA as a securities firm. The group's brokerage unit first received that license in 2021, and the Swiss entities merged in 2022. In February 2024 BaFin granted the German subsidiary four licenses covering crypto trading, settlement and custody. ESMA's register lists its MiCA authorization from January 24, 2025 for custody, exchange, order execution and transfer services, with passports into 14 other EEA countries.

SIX Swiss Exchange approved Crypto Finance AG as a qualified custodian for ETP issuers in October 2024. On insurance, the custody page says the company provides coverage that follows market standards.

Products and integrations

Custody clients connect through API, SWIFT, a web interface or Clearstream Banking Luxembourg. Clearstream named Crypto Finance (Deutschland) GmbH as sub-custodian in March 2025 with Bitcoin and Ether in scope, and the service went live for all Clearstream clients in June 2025. The same entity settles and holds assets for Deutsche Börse Digital Exchange. Crypto Finance also custodies the reserves behind nxtAssets' physically backed Bitcoin and Ethereum ETPs, which Chainlink Proof of Reserve reports on-chain.

The custody page names 15 assets, BTC, ETH, SOL, DOT, ADA and XRP among them, plus ERC-20, ERC-223, ERC-721 and SPL tokens. Principal trading runs 24/7 alongside algorithmic agency execution, both reachable over FIX and REST, and the desk offers more than 200 altcoins. Staking covers ETH, SOL, ADA and DOT. Figment supports ETH and SOL staking for the German entity's custody clients, and Swiss wallet infrastructure clients can use Lido liquid staking. AnchorNote, launched with BridgePort in September 2025, lets institutions pledge custodied collateral to trading venues without moving it out of custody.