My experience of setting up my first company from scratch in Switzerland using only Bitcoin.
It so happened that on April 12, 2020, I was unable to enter Switzerland once again in my car due to the pandemic. So after vacation in Russia, I stayed in Moscow. I spent the first half of the year before the pandemic traveling: I went snowboarding in Montenegro with my friends, then I went to the United Arab Emirates with my family to get some sun, and then I came back and continued working, but I couldn’t! The pandemic has started all over the world: borders were closed, state institutions were closed, nobody worked properly not only in Russia, but in Switzerland as well. At that time, there were a lot of difficulties, and no one knew how to overcome them. We have found a person who will be the CEO of our company. He is a German who has Swiss citizenship and has been living with his family and children in Zug for 12 years. We’ve been looking for a CEO for more than 4 months and thanks God, he gave us such a wonderful person as Wilhelm Gudelu.
We started working on opening a company, not depositing fiat money into the company’s authorized account, but using only Bitcoin. In Switzerland (in Zug, to be accurate) this possibility has been present for several years already.
In Switzerland, it is possible to open a company of two types: GmbH, similar to “LLC” in Russia, where there are only founders and one CEO, and the minimum authorized capital is 20,000 Swiss francs. Swiss franc is almost equivalent of the dollar, but the dollar rate is slightly lower at the moment. The second type is “JSC” in Russia or AG in Switzerland, where the authorized capital is 100,000 Swiss francs or larger. In any other format, without using Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, you would have to put this money here in Russia to a current account in a bank, and transfer it to the account of either the CEO or the company. Plus, you had to pay a fee, and accordingly, all the services would have found out about it, because this is fiat, you put rubles, they are converted into francs and are sent to Switzerland. In this case, everything was much easier.
Then I had to collect all the necessary paperwork for the company registration in the Canton of Zug, Switzerland. A lot of documents had to be prepared: apostille, translations, notarization in Russia, translation into German, then we had to perform notarization and make the apostille again and send it to the Ministry of justice. The Ministry of justice, in turn, also does not accept documents just like that. It was necessary to send a letter by mail, and the russian mail service is not the best. And during the pandemic, this process was even slower. I had to wait several weeks for the papers to be transported to the Ministry of justice and back to get my documents. After all, we’ve prepared all the necessary documents and sent them via UPS to Zug for the CEO, who took over the registration from here.
The next step was to create an account where bitcoins could be deposited, and this amount had to be more than 20,000 Swiss francs. The verification was carried out on a specific website where the bitcoin price tag was monitored. The amount must be more than 20,000 francs at the time of submission of documents. A Swiss auditor in Zug should check the presence of bitcoins on this account. For this purpose, we created a multi-signature wallet with three or more signatures, one was sent to the director who gave it to the auditor. When the director came to a Swiss auditor, who checks the availability of funds in this virtual account (bitcoins, assets), he was able to log into the wallet and see the availability of funds at this particular address. He cannot withdraw funds, because the wallet is multi-signature, and it requires more signatures, which he does not have. Accordingly, he can only use his private key to log into the wallet and make sure of the availability of 5.8 bitcoins and at that time it was about 55,000–65,000 Swiss francs. Thus, he saw the required amount and signed the document. After these steps, we could submit documents to the registration chamber (it has another name in Switzerland, but it is the place where the company is registered).
There was one more important point. We had to choose the amount of charter capital. If we had chosen 60,000 francs, they would have rejected the documents and we would have had to go all the way again (At the time when the documents went to the registration chamber, the price of bitcoin could have gone down because the asset was still young and volatile. In the result, the amount would no longer have been 60,000 but 59,000 francs). Each step of document submission cost from 300 to 1000 Swiss francs. Also, we can add the preparation of lots of documents in Russia. All these steps took months, and therefore, we did not want to do it again. In this regard, we declared that we had a registered capital of 40,000 Swiss francs because there was such a possibility that bitcoin could have fallen in price during this period. There are also long queues due to the pandemic, everything was arranged not in a week, but several weeks. Thus, it was not done under the standard procedure, which Switzerland used to have before the pandemic.
After they had seen the presence of the auditor’s signature and the correspondence of the bitcoin price in the wallet to the declared 5.8 bitcoins, which corresponds to 40,000 Swiss francs, they wrote 40,000 CHF in the charter capital. If we had been physically there, of course, we would have declared 60.000 CHF. If the course had suddenly changed a lot on this day, we would have made changes quickly within 2–4 days, applying 2000–4000 dollars lower. Ноwever, we took it on the safe side and registered capital of the first company is 40,000 Swiss francs at present.
All director, notary, auditor, company registration costs were paid in cryptocurrency. Neither a dollar, ruble nor franc was spent, except sending the documents by UPS.
Antony also plans to register another company ‘Simba Storage’ in the city of Zug, Switzerland within a month, undergoing similar procedures. Now the company is registered in the UAE and deals with custodian storage of bitcoins. Thus, it is the second company Antony plans to start using Bitcoins.
In this regard, by the end of this year, everyone can follow in my footsteps on their own or with our company ‘TRES Group GmbH’. We can help you to meet all necessary specialists in Zug, who will tell you how to go through all stages and what you can do if you have from 2 to 1000 bitcoins. For example, as long as new amendments to the law are not in force, which is planned in 2021, you can legalize all your bitcoins in Russia, Switzerland and other countries of the world and it doesn’t matter where you have bought or received them. You can legally register them, put them on your current account, which is controlled by you, not by the bank. You can be anywhere in the world, in any country, you can have access passwords, you can even have a USB flash drive, you can have a cold wallet, you can have anything!
You will be able to control this balance remotely. For example, you can deposit 100 bitcoins into your charter capital, go through the same procedures within a month, and register a company with a registered capital of 100 bitcoins. It will be registered and these bitcoins will be officially the ‘whitest’, ‘fluffiest’, transparent and Swiss bitcoins that belong to a Swiss company (a resident of Switzerland), which are controlled by you. Even a nominee director in Switzerland will not be able to take them out on his own if you do not give him all necessary keys. Accordingly, all actions can be only carried out by you, even if you are located in Antarctica. This is a unique opportunity to start a company in the pandemic, deposit bitcoins into the balance without using any banks and the old system. Then you can pay for servers, notary fees, 12% taxes on growth. For example, if you have 100 bitcoins and a year later there will be 110 bitcoins, that is 10 bitcoins more, you will pay 12% of these 10 bitcoins to the treasury. Bitcoin Suisse bank will be a service provider between taxpayers and the state and it has already received government approval for this activity. He will accept bitcoins as tax payments, convert them into francs and give them to the state.
Next year the relevant laws will be passed and you will be able to buy a car or a hotel on the balance of the company. Accordingly, if you have bitcoins in Zimbabwe, Congo, Antarctica or on Mars, the company is registered in Zug, Switzerland and you have deposited 1000 bitcoins into its account, you will be able to buy anything you want using the bitcoins. You do not need to use the services of banks, which can freeze your accounts, freeze a transaction and where you can be asked such questions as ‘Where does this money come from in our country?’, ‘Where did you get it?’, ‘Who gave it to you?’. No one will ask you about it. Using bitcoin, you simply make an agreement, execute it, make a transfer to the company’s balance and that’s it, you own property.
If you have any questions, please send me an e-mail at zug@tres.swiss
