A look at the FTX bankruptcy filing through Zug-registered projects and Swiss-regulated banks, built from contemporary reporting and later public data.
For most of the crypto world, the FTX collapse was a story about an exchange in the Bahamas. For Zug, it was a more local question. The town’s ecosystem — the coworking spaces around CV Labs on Dammstrasse, the foundations registered at Zug addresses, the regulated crypto banks a short train ride away — had to work out how much of the damage was its own.
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 useful question for Crypto Valley was not “is crypto dead?” That question was too large and too abstract. The useful question was narrower: which Zug-registered projects were 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 Reporting Showed Inside the Ecosystem
The narrative that emerged later — Zug as safe haven, Swiss regulation as vindication — was true, but it was not the whole picture of those first days.
The first sorting question was exposure: which projects and portfolio companies had funds, tokens or investors tied to FTX and Alameda. finews reported that the Oxygen team was in a “state of shock”, had hired legal advisors and was “considering all options”, while its token had lost nearly all of its value (finews).
Firms whose business sat closer to regulated custody than to exchange liquidity had a different profile. The bank statements below show that end of the market describing itself as the opposite of FTX within days.
Mathias Ruch, founder of CV VC (the venture capital fund attached to CV Labs), gave his assessment to the AFP news agency: FTX would set the sector back by at least one to two years (AWP/AFP via allnews.ch, in French). Precise. Unsentimental. Not wrong.
The Swiss Banks’ Unusual Week
While the exposed projects 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 got less coverage than the Oxygen story: 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 based in Zug, but they were part of the same institutional ecosystem, backing the same kinds of projects. For any investor with Zug-based portfolio companies, the practical questions were the obvious ones: which 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: for anyone building in Zug in late 2022, the numbers describe a contraction year, not a recovery.
The Standard Narrative vs. the First-Week Record
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.
Read alongside the first-week reporting, that week was not triumphant. The industry voices quoted at the time talked about a setback, not a victory (swissinfo.ch), and the teams in the Oxygen orbit had trusted a counterparty that failed them. The regulatory-vindication framing came later.
The resilience was real, but it took the form that resilience usually takes: projects without FTX exposure kept working, and the ones with it started making hard decisions. If you want to check how a Swiss provider holds client assets today, start with the segregation rules described in the glossary, and with whether the firm is supervised by FINMA at all.
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.