📅 Field note from: November 2022 | Last updated: May 2026 Originally written days after the FTX bankruptcy filing from inside Zug; updated with three years of follow-on observations in May 2026.
The week FTX collapsed, it was cold in Zug. That detail has stayed with me — the way the fog sat over the lake in the mornings, the kind of November that makes you want to be inside. A lot of us were inside. In coffeeshops, in coworking spaces, in the CV Labs corridors on Grafenauweg. On laptops, phones, scrolling the same damage reports.
November 11, 2022. FTX filed for Chapter 11. Sam Bankman-Fried resigned. Eleven billion dollars in customer funds had vanished into the gap between a centralized exchange and its affiliated trading firm.
The question in Zug that morning was not “is crypto dead?” That question was too large and too abstract for the specific dread that was circulating. The question was: who here was on FTX?
The Answer Nobody Wanted to Hear First
It came fast, and it came from one of the more prominent Zug-registered projects.
Oxygen Protocol — founded in 2020, backed by an estimated $40 million from Alameda Research, built on Solana — disclosed that approximately 95% of its OXY and MAPS token supply was held on the FTX platform. Not in cold storage. Not in a regulated Swiss custodian. On FTX itself.
The Oxy token lost essentially all of its value within days. The MAPS token followed. Two projects that had been part of the Crypto Valley story — with Zug addresses, Swiss foundation structures, the whole architecture — collapsed not because of any Swiss regulatory failure, but because of a counterparty they had trusted entirely.
The FTX connection in these cases went deeper than custody: Alameda Research, FTX’s sister firm, had been the principal investor. The governance structures that should have provided independence from Alameda had not been sufficient to prevent this kind of concentration risk.
What the CV Labs Corridors Felt Like
I want to be honest about what I observed that week, because the narrative that emerged later — Zug as safe haven, Swiss regulation as vindication — was true, but it was not the whole texture of those few days.
Inside CV Labs, which had been the informal social hub of the Crypto Valley community since 2017, the mood was more quiet than panicked. People were doing damage assessment, not running. There was a lot of checking on whether portfolio companies had exchange exposure. A lot of Telegram messages that started with “are you okay?” — meaning, financially, not personally, though sometimes both.
The differentiation conversation started almost immediately. The people who had been building infrastructure — custody solutions, compliance tools, regulatory tech — were quieter in a different way: watchful. They had watched exchanges get built fast and die fast before. They had weathered the 2018 crypto winter. This felt familiar, if larger.
The people who were building on centralized exchange ecosystems, or who had taken Alameda money without scrutinizing the counterparty risk — those conversations were harder.
Mathias Ruch, founder of CV VC (the venture capital fund attached to CV Labs), gave the assessment that most people around the Grafenauweg already felt: “This will set us back by at least one or two years.” Precise. Unsentimental. Not wrong.
The Swiss Banks’ Unusual Week
While Zug processed the wreckage, something counterintuitive was happening at the regulated end of the ecosystem.
Sygnum, the Zurich-based crypto bank that had been fully licensed since 2019, reported significant inflows of CHF 270 million in the first weeks of November 2022, with the figure expected to reach at least CHF 400 million by month’s end. CEO Mathias Imbach attributed this to existing clients consolidating assets from unregulated exchanges into Sygnum’s regulated custody services. The message implicit in those flows: if you needed to be reminded that Swiss segregation rules matter, FTX had just provided the lesson.
SEBA Bank — which had received an investment from Alameda Research — moved quickly to clarify the relationship. The Alameda stake was less than 1% and carried no voting rights. SEBA had not traded on FTX, had not held FTT tokens, and its client assets were held under Swiss banking law — which meant they were segregated, legally protected, and not subject to the commingling that had destroyed FTX’s customers.
The PR language was measured, as Swiss banking always is. But the subtext was legible to anyone watching closely: we are the opposite of what just happened.
The Institutional Investor Silence
One element of the November 2022 aftermath that received less attention in the Zug community at the time: the institutional investors.
Firms like Pantera Capital had exposure to FTX through their Blockfolio acquisition proceeds — denominated in FTT tokens and FTX equity. Pantera disclosed that its FTT position was under 3% of AUM and that it had liquidated as much as possible on November 8. The language in their letter was instructive: they had been trying to manage counterparty risk from centralized exchanges, and FTX had underscored why DeFi infrastructure mattered.
These firms were not physically present in Zug, but they were part of the same institutional ecosystem — attending the same conferences, backing some of the same projects. The conversations that happened in late November, at the margins of industry calls and over encrypted messaging, were calibrating questions: which Zug-based projects had exchange custody risk? Which had kept assets in regulated Swiss institutions?
The answers mattered for the follow-on funding decisions that would quietly sort Crypto Valley’s survivors from its casualties over the following year.
What the Numbers Said Later
The 2022 figures that emerged in CV VC’s annual Top 50 report told the medium-term story.
In 2022, 1,135 cryptocurrency and blockchain companies were based in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Employment in the sector contracted by approximately 4% to under 6,000 jobs. The count of unicorns — companies valued at over $1 billion — fell from 14 in 2021 to 9 in 2022.
None of that was catastrophic for an ecosystem that had been through 2018. But it was real, and the people building in Zug in late 2022 knew they were in a contraction year, not a recovery.
What This Looked Like From the Outside vs. the Inside
Here is the version of November 2022 that became the standard narrative over the following months: Swiss crypto survived FTX. Regulated Swiss banks gained inflows. FINMA’s framework was vindicated. Crypto Valley proved resilient.
That is all accurate. But it compresses something.
From inside Zug that week, the feelings were not triumphant. They were watchful, careful, sad in some cases — because people in the Oxygen orbit had genuinely believed they were building something, and they had trusted a counterparty that betrayed that trust. The regulatory framework vindication came later. In the first week, there was mostly fog over the lake and a lot of group chats.
The resilience was real, but it took the form that resilience usually takes: people kept showing up. The CV Labs spaces filled up again within a week. Projects that had not been contaminated by the FTX exposure continued their work. The ones that had been contaminated started making hard decisions.
That is what a functioning ecosystem looks like under stress. Not drama. Not exit. Just the slower, quieter process of figuring out what survives.
For the regulatory response that followed — FINMA’s post-FTX adjustments to AML thresholds and supervisory reporting — see the companion field note: Switzerland After FTX: How FINMA Responded and What It Changed.
For the longer history of how Crypto Valley built the community structures that held in November 2022, the CV Labs field note covers the ecosystem’s social infrastructure from its early days. The resilience visible in 2022 had roots going back to the ICO boom of 2017-2018 — the first time Zug had to decide what it actually was.