Switzerland's Bitcoin Reserve Campaign Falls Short. Only Half the Required Signatures Were Collected

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A campaign to amend Switzerland's constitution to require the Swiss National Bank to hold Bitcoin alongside gold and foreign currency reserves has failed to gather enough signatures to trigger a national referendum. Organizers collected only approximately 50,000 signatures against the 100,000 required under Swiss law, effectively ending the initiative before it could reach a public vote. Campaign founder Yves Bennaim acknowledged to Reuters that the effort was always considered unlikely to succeed, but argued it served a purpose beyond the signature count by advancing public debate around Bitcoin's role in global finance. Supporters of the campaign had framed the proposal as a diversification strategy, noting that dollar and euro-denominated assets account for roughly three-quarters of the SNB's foreign currency holdings — a concentration they argued creates unnecessary exposure to fiat currency risk that Bitcoin could help offset.

The Swiss National Bank has consistently rejected the premise, stating that digital assets do not meet its reserve management standards due to concerns about volatility and liquidity. That position reflects a view held by most major central banks globally, which have remained deeply skeptical of Bitcoin as a reserve asset despite the asset's growing institutional adoption in the private sector. Switzerland's referendum process, which allows citizens to force a national vote on constitutional amendments with sufficient signatures, made it one of the more credible pathways for a bottom-up push toward sovereign Bitcoin adoption — which makes the campaign's failure to reach even half the required threshold a meaningful data point about public appetite for the idea even in one of the world's most crypto-friendly regulatory environments. The SNB's opposition and the signature shortfall together suggest that the gap between corporate Bitcoin treasury adoption and sovereign central bank adoption remains significantly wider than Bitcoin advocates have sometimes suggested.

[mendez]

Switzerland failing at 50,000 of 100,000 signatures in crypto-friendly jurisdiction is the most deflating data point for sovereign adoption bulls