Swiss currency systems: atlas, compendium and chronicle of legal aspects
Christophe Place*, Antonin Calderon, James Stodder and Isidor Wallimann
* Haute École de Gestion de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland. Email : cp@christopheplace.com
Abstract
Switzerland has not only the oldest and biggest modern complementary currency in the world, the WIR created in 1934, among 40’000 organizations with a velocity of 1.3 in 2017, representing 0.17% of the Gross Domestic Product at current prices and 0.08% of the global money supply, but also the second cross-border complementary currency in the world and the first local currency using blockchain technology in Switzerland, the Léman, created in September 2015 in a Swiss-French conurbation, with 160’000 units in circulation among a network of 550 organizations and 4’000 users in May 2018. Moreover, with about 49 community currencies and 15 complementary currencies in January 2018 and a cryptocurrency cluster called Crypto Valley funded in January 2017, Switzerland counts among reference case studies in the virtual, community and complementary currency systems domain. Nevertheless, some questions remain: (1) How is the partition of these currencies in term of geographical region, system type and digital software? (2) What the recent Léman case study taught us in term of strategic implementation? (3) Could a Swiss Currency Confederation facilitate their legal conformity? To contribute to these research questions, a literature review, a data analysis, and a research survey will allow us not only to overview the Swiss and the Greater Geneva currency systems, but also evaluate their legal framework evolution.
Keywords
Switzerland, Swiss, cross-border, WIR, Léman, NetzBon, cryptocurrency
To cite this article: Place, Christophe; Calderon, Antonin; Stodder, James and Wallimann, Isidor (2018) ‘Swiss currency systems: atlas, compendium and chronicle of legal aspects’ International Journal of Community Currency Research 2018 Volume 22 (Summer) 85-104 <www.ijccr.net> ISSN 1325-9547. DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.15133/j.ijccr.2018.018
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