Why a Profitable Crypto Pioneer Is Cutting Half Its Swiss Workforce

Bitcoin Suisse, one of the oldest and best-known names in Swiss crypto finance, said it will cut up to 60 of its 120 jobs in Switzerland and close its software-development office in Copenhagen. On its face that reads like a scaled-down survivor doing damage control after a rough patch. The numbers underneath tell a different story.

The Zug-based firm, founded in 2013 and had roughly 200 employees globally heading into the cuts, with repeat offices in Liechtenstein, Abu Dhabi, and Bermuda. Its most recent reported years were profitable: it swung from a CHF 13 million net loss in 2023 to a CHF 16 million net profit in 2024 on revenue up 56 percent, and reported a multi-million-franc profit again in 2025. A company that is cutting nearly half its home workforce immediately after two profitable years is not scrambling to survive. It is repositioning, and the direction of the move is the useful signal.

Management frames it as growth. The company says it is reorganizing from a "mainly Swiss crypto company" into an international financial services group, and its chief executive, Andrej Majcen, insists the cuts are a strategic investment rather than a reaction to months of weakness in crypto markets, noting the firm holds a "substantial cushion" to ride out market phases. Read charitably, that is a founder defending a pivot. Read as evidence, the payroll moves describe the mechanics: back-office, administrative, and software roles are being consolidated into an existing hub in Bratislava and a new site in Vietnam, where Majcen says the same work can be done at significantly lower cost, while client-facing wealth-management staff stay in Zug.

That is where the real story lives. Bitcoin Suisse makes most of its money the way a broker does: spreads on trading, custody fees, and staking income on the assets it holds, having passed CHF 5 billion in assets under custody with about CHF 2 billion staked. Trading and custody revenue is cycle-sensitive — it collapsed in the 2023 crypto winter and surged in the 2024 rebound, and it now faces a structural threat it cannot control. The world's largest banks are moving into the very services that made Bitcoin Suisse special. UBS is preparing to offer bitcoin and ether to wealthy Swiss clients, Morgan Stanley has opened crypto to all of its wealth clients, and incumbents like UniCredit are expanding into crypto custody and brokerage. When a $7-trillion-asset wealth manager competes for the same high-net-worth business, a standalone crypto broker's spread is hard to defend.

So the pivot makes sense as an attempt to migrate up the value chain: hold on to the relationship, sell wealth and asset management rather than just trade execution, and shrink the expensive Swiss back-office that a bull-market revenue spike could no longer justify. The cost arbitrage — moving back-office to Slovakia and Vietnam, which is cheaper and sits inside different regulatory perimeters — is the unglamorous half of the same strategy. Cut fixed cost per franc of revenue and lean on a recurring wealth-management fee instead of a volatile trading spread.

The honest caveat is that the "growth, not distress" framing cannot be verified and deserves skepticism. Nothing in the disclosure distinguishes organic momentum from the cost-cutting that half these layoffs represent, and a profitable firm has the least to lose from telling its story at its most imposing. The strategic shift also carries real risk: wealth management is precisely where the big banks have distribution, trust, and scale, and Bitcoin Suisse has no banking license after Swiss regulators deemed its 2021 application ineligible, in part over anti-money-laundering concerns. It has since built regulated bases in Liechtenstein, Abu Dhabi, and Bermuda, but that is a foothold, not a moat.

For the U.S. retail investor, the more important fact may be that you cannot buy this story. Bitcoin Suisse remains privately held; an eventual listing was always a stated ambition, but it was tied to securing a banking license it later withdrew, and no flotation is on the horizon. So the company is better treated as a sector signal than a holding. What it says is that value in crypto finance is consolidating toward two poles: the regulated incumbents with distribution and the cost-efficient operators who can serve them, with the mid-tier brokerage that was once a pioneer getting squeezed in between. A profitable pioneer cutting half its home staff is a quiet admission that the business it invented no longer earns enough to stay high-cost and independent, and that is a useful lens for anyone judging which crypto businesses are built to last.