A recurring problem for asset managers running crypto strategies is not performance — it is access. Banks, private banks, and family offices are frequently unable to hold unstructured crypto assets directly, whether for compliance, custody, or operational reasons. A strategy manager can have an excellent track record and still find that the majority of the institutional and semi-institutional investor base simply cannot allocate to it. The Actively Managed Certificate, or AMC, exists to solve exactly this problem.

What an AMC Actually Does

An AMC wraps an actively managed investment strategy — in this case, a crypto strategy — into a security identified by an ISIN. Issued under Swiss law, the AMC becomes visible on standard institutional infrastructure such as Bloomberg, and can be held in a normal custody account by banks and family offices that would otherwise be unable to touch the underlying crypto assets at all. The strategy itself does not change; what changes is the legal and operational wrapper through which investors access it.

This distinction matters enormously in practice. The manager continues to run the strategy exactly as before — making allocation, timing, and risk decisions — while the AMC structure handles the legal issuance, valuation, and administrative mechanics that make the strategy bankable. Investors buy the certificate, not the underlying crypto directly, and the certificate behaves like any other structured product they already know how to hold and report on.

A Structure Flexible Enough for Any Strategy Type

One of the strengths of the AMC wrapper is that it is agnostic to the underlying strategy style. It can accommodate:

  • Spot exposure strategies tracking a single asset or a basket of digital assets.
  • Actively managed directional strategies with discretionary allocation decisions.
  • Arbitrage and market-neutral strategies seeking to extract relative-value returns.
  • Thematic strategies built around specific sectors of the digital asset ecosystem, such as infrastructure tokens, DeFi protocols, or tokenized real-world assets.

This flexibility means the AMC is not a niche product for a specific type of crypto manager — it is a general-purpose bridge between any crypto investment approach and the regulated, bankable infrastructure that institutional distribution requires.

The Swiss DLT Act as the Legal Backbone

The credibility of the AMC as a bankable instrument rests on the strength of the legal framework behind it. Switzerland's DLT Blanket Act of 2021 gives issuers the option to represent the AMC as a ledger-based security where appropriate, while the underlying issuance itself follows well-established Swiss structured products law. The result is an instrument that custodian banks recognize and are comfortable holding, because it follows the same legal logic as any other certificate they already process — the only difference is the strategy underneath.

From Mandate to Live ISIN: A Realistic Timeline

Asset managers evaluating this route often ask how long it takes to go from a decision to structure a strategy to having a live, tradeable ISIN. In practice, a well-prepared mandate — with a clearly defined strategy, investment guidelines, and service providers already lined up — can move from mandate signing to a live ISIN in four to six weeks. This includes documentation drafting, regulatory and compliance review, ISIN allocation, and onboarding with the paying agent and custodian.

That timeline is considerably faster than many managers expect, and it reflects how standardized the AMC issuance process has become in the Swiss market. For a manager sitting on a crypto strategy with genuine investor demand but no way to make it bankable, the AMC route offers a clear, proven, and relatively fast path from strategy to structured, ISIN-identified security.