The Swiss financial regulator reacted to the growing interest in digital currencies, saying that it had prepared a set of rules for participants in the young emerging market.
The Swiss Financial Market Supervision Authority (Finma) announced that it will regulate the initial coin offerings (ICOs), applying to them rules for combating money laundering.
According to the Finma press release, the creation of the guidelines was due to an increase in the number of ICOs conducted in Switzerland, combined with a lack of clarity on how to regulate them. The statement say: "the achievement of transparency is at this moment of paramount importance, given the dynamic development of the market and the high level of demand" for everything that is associated with it.
Finma writes that at present, there is no ICO-specific regulation or "consistent legal doctrine" for ICO processing.
To determine which laws will apply to different types of ICOs, the agency will divide tokens into three categories: payment tokens, utility tokens and asset tokens.
There is also a need of limitation and a clear law base for ICO audit, filtering out ICO scams and crypto pyramids (like BitConnect).
The need of such project of law lays under the fact that nowadays over 90% of ICOs proved to be a well-organized scam systems, leading to a complete loss of money and a bankrupt of the original investment all over the world. Few of those ICOs have a technical background with real benefits of the underlying technology. Even less ICOs have already implemented their doctrine and tech agenda in real world.
In 2017, a number of deliberately funny ICOs were exposed, for example, Ahoolee or Zavodcoin, that have a clear make-fun investment reason. There is, of course, a number of questionable ones, when you read the description of the financial project and understand that the people behind the project do not have a financial sector vision at all. People need to be protected by law from such ICOs. An example of these ICOs can be Polybius and Status.