Client Story

From incorporation to a marketplace institutions trust. In one year.

How BTCBacked got supervised in Switzerland and built something nobody had built before within twelve months.

JayBee AG · Zug · November 2026 · 5 min read

Twelve months ago BTCBACKED AG had just been incorporated in Zug. Today it is a supervised Swiss marketplace, live on Bitcoin mainnet, with institutional capital flowing through it. Every loan is over-collateralised, and not a single dispute has been raised since the day it opened.

That is not a launch. That is a company arriving.

And the interesting part is not the speed. It is the order in which BTCBacked did things.

What was built

BTCBacked connects borrowers who want liquidity against their Bitcoin with lenders providing stablecoins. Borrowers raise that liquidity without selling their Bitcoin and without handing it to a centralised custodian. Lenders deploy USDC or USDT against collateral they can verify on-chain.

Every loan is secured in a native 2-of-3 Bitcoin multisig. The borrower, the lender and BTCBacked each hold one key, and moving the collateral requires two signatures. No single party, BTCBacked included, can move it alone. Borrower and lender can settle between themselves without the platform.

It is a genuinely elegant piece of design, and it put the company somewhere nobody had been. Swiss financial market law is built around businesses that take possession of client assets. BTCBacked takes possession of nothing. There was no category waiting for them.

Three things that got them there

1. Deciding what never to compromise on, before designing anything.

For BTCBacked that was customer trust. The Bitcoin stays where no single party can move it alone, not even the platform. That principle came first, and every harder decision afterwards was measured against it. Plenty of them would have been simpler the other way, and none of them broke it.

2. The right framework before the first customer.

BTCBacked did not onboard a single customer until its compliance framework was in place: clarity from Swiss counsel on how the business fits Swiss law, SRO membership, and a working AML function. Most founders launch first and fix compliance later, and pay for it twice: once when the model does not fit the regime they assumed, and again when they have customers depending on the first answer.

3. Own what makes the company different, outsource the rest.

Founder time stayed on the vision and the product side. The parts that were new to the company were bought in rather than learned from scratch: Swiss counsel on the legal framework, an outsourced team for the AML function and an external accountant.

The questions that had no settled answer

Working with external Swiss counsels, three questions had to be settled before anyone could be onboarded.

1. Is this company classified as a financial intermediary even if client assets never pass through the company’s hands?
2. Does holding one of three keys make a company a custodian, which may mean an entirely different regime?
3. Does facilitating loans between two parties make it a lender or a securities business, when it takes no deposits, extends no credit and earns no spread?

That gave the team a clear basis for its compliance obligations and onboarding requirements, and a clear answer for counterparties who want to know exactly what a platform is and who supervises it before they move money through it.

Why Switzerland made it possible

If it comes to VASP licensing, it is where Switzerland earns its reputation, and it is worth saying plainly.

One SRO membership covers a broad range of financial intermediary activity, the substance requirements are reachable for a young company, SROs engage with a question nobody has answered before rather than deferring it, and the timeline is counted in months rather than years. The last point is the big difference between a product launching and a product waiting.

There are very few places on earth where this story is even possible.

Where BTCBacked stands today

The marketplace is live on Bitcoin mainnet, loans have been funded, and settled end to end with real funds, through match, multisig escrow, stablecoin disbursement, margin monitoring, repayment and fee collection. A Bitcoin fund has completed full KYB as the first institutional lender and funded through the platform. Every loan is over-collateralised, and there have been no liquidations, and no disputes since launch.

Every borrower and lender is identified and screened against sanctions lists before acting on the platform, and wallet screening and ongoing monitoring run alongside the Bitcoin collateral and the stablecoin payments. The first AML audit was completed in July 2026 with a clean result.