MME

The three letters MME stand for the family names of the founding partners Bernhard Meyer, Luka Müller and Martin Eckert, who started the firm in 1999 in Zurich and Zug at the same time. The clients of MME are startups, small and medium-sized companies, multinational groups and private individuals. The practice areas reach from banking and insurance law, data protection and intellectual property to employment law, real estate, mergers and acquisitions, litigation and notary services.

Next to its lawyers and tax advisers, MME runs a compliance unit that acts as external compliance officer for asset managers and fund management companies. The unit screens business relationships for sanctions and politically exposed persons, writes anti-money laundering directives and prepares the audits that follow them. For crypto firms the same team runs blockchain investigations of cryptocurrency transactions and assigns risk categories to business built on distributed ledgers.

The blockchain practice of MME classifies tokens under Swiss civil and regulatory law, structures token offerings such as ICOs, STOs and token generation events, and sets up companies and foundations. The lawyers draft the contracts around a token project, from SAFTs and development contracts to open source licenses and employee share plans. Tax advisers negotiate rulings on tokens with the tax authorities and work out how crypto tax in Switzerland applies to them for direct tax, VAT, stamp duty and withholding tax.

MME introduced its own BCP framework for token classification in 2018, in which asset, counterparty and ownership tokens represent a right to an asset and other token types do not. FINMA has not approved the framework as such, and MME applies it to cases such as tokenized investment funds. Legal partner Andreas Glarner and tax partner Thomas Linder lead the practice, which Chambers ranks in Band 1 for blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

Decentralized organizations hire the firm as well, and the 1inch DAO engaged MME as legal counsel for legal, tax and regulatory services. In such a mandate the law firm submits its proposal to the DAO, whose token holders then discuss it and vote on it.

The Swiss DLT Act created a new license for DLT trading facilities, which may admit retail clients, hold DLT securities in custody and settle trades in them. Romedi Ganzoni and Andreas Glarner, both partners at MME, explained the new license category when the draft ordinance came out in November 2020. In March 2025, FINMA licensed BX Digital, a sister company of BX Swiss and part of the Boerse Stuttgart Group, as the first DLT trading facility in Switzerland.

MME advised BX Digital on all legal aspects of the licensing process, with a team led by partner Ronald Kogens. BX Digital trades tokenized financial instruments and settles them on the public Ethereum blockchain. The cash leg of each trade runs through Swiss Interbank Clearing, the payment system operated on behalf of the Swiss National Bank.

On 22 October 2025, the Swiss Federal Council opened a consultation on amendments to the Financial Institutions Act, which MME analyzed for stablecoin issuers and crypto service providers. Under the draft, only a payment instrument institution may issue stablecoins pegged to the Swiss franc or another single fiat currency in Switzerland. Such stablecoins must be fully backed, redeemable at par on demand and described in a published white paper.

The second new category, the crypto institution, covers custody of crypto assets, trading platforms, brokerage, market making and staking for clients. Its capital and risk rules follow those for securities firms, and many crypto service providers that today only belong to an AML self-regulatory organization would need this license. MME expects the new rules to take effect in 2027 at the earliest, and the draft may still change in the consultation.

For the Travel Rule, MME advises crypto service providers on transfers to and from self-hosted wallets. FINMA Guidance 02/2019 requires Swiss VASPs to identify the beneficial owner of every external wallet before a transaction, in the same way as their own clients.

MME has two offices, one at Zollstrasse 62 in Zurich and one at Gubelstrasse 22 in Zug. The Zug office is a five-minute walk from Zug station, and MME Compliance AG is registered in Zug as well. Zug is the center of the Crypto Valley, and startups from that ecosystem are among the blockchain clients of the firm. Tax partner Samuel Bussmann and tax counsel Christina Stocker wrote about the amendment to the Zug Tax Act, which lowers the cantonal tax rate from 82 to 78 percent for the years 2026 to 2029.

The DLT Act is the Federal Act on the Adaptation of Federal Law to Developments in Distributed Ledger Technology, which the Swiss parliament passed in its autumn session 2020. The act introduced ledger-based securities, which let companies issue shares and other rights as tokens, and the license for DLT trading facilities. Article 973d of the Code of Obligations calls the ledger behind such tokens a securities ledger, and crypto regulation in Switzerland builds on these rules.

Custodial staking needs no banking license in Switzerland when the custodian keeps control of the staked assets at all times, as FINMA set out in guidance that MME summarized in December 2023. In the accepted setup, the custodian holds the withdrawal keys, while a third-party node operator may hold the validator keys. MME took part in the joint industry intervention after FINMA had raised the banking law question in 2023. For VAT, the Swiss Federal Tax Administration confirmed a ruling request that treats the delegation of the staking function to a validator as a taxable service of the token holder.

The FINMA fintech license allows a company to accept public deposits of up to CHF 100 million, as long as it neither lends the money out nor pays interest on it. The draft amendments of October 2025 would replace it with the payment instrument institution license, which drops the CHF 100 million cap. MME handles FINMA license applications for banks, securities firms, trading venues, insurers and fintech companies.