“Interest on your crypto” is how staking is often marketed – and that is exactly what it is not. When you stake, you put your coins up as collateral for a blockchain network and receive newly created coins and transaction fees in return. It only works with certain cryptocurrencies, involves lock-up periods and, in Switzerland, is taxed as income. Since PostFinance introduced ETH staking in January 2025, it has also reached Swiss high-street banking. If you staked through an app in your previous country, check whether it serves Swiss residents at all: Crypto.com, for one, excludes them from its Earn product. This guide covers who offers what, what is left after fees and tax, and which risks you take on.
What actually happens when you stake
Blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana, Cardano and Polkadot use A consensus method in which participants lock up their own coins as collateral instead of using computing power as Bitcoin does.. Instead of computing power, participants put up coins as collateral. A A computer that checks and proposes new blocks and earns rewards for doing so. checks transactions and proposes blocks; if it does the job properly, it is rewarded. If it breaks the rules or makes serious technical errors, it loses part of its stake – this is known as A network penalty: part of the staked coins is destroyed when a validator misbehaves..
Running your own Ethereum validator takes 32 ETH, a computer that is online around the clock and a fair amount of technical know-how. Staking providers therefore pool coins from many clients, operate the validators and keep a share of the rewards as their fee. Bitcoin, incidentally, cannot be staked: it uses proof of work. Any “yield” offered on bitcoin comes from lending, not staking.
Rewards are not a guaranteed rate. They depend on how many coins are staked across the whole network, how busy the network is and how reliably the validator performs. And they are paid in the staked coin, not in francs.
Swiss providers compared
| PostFinance | Swissquote | Bitcoin Suisse | Kraken | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coins | ETH only | ETH, SOL, DOT, ADA | ETH, SOL, XTZ, ADA, NEAR, DOT | many, varies by country |
| Fee on rewards | 20%, min. USD 1 per quarter | 20% | not published | 25% bonded, 30% flexible |
| Minimum | 0.1 ETH | 0.001 ETH, 0.1 SOL, 1 ADA | not published | varies by coin |
| Supervision | bank (FINMA) | bank (FINMA) | SRO member (VQF) | foreign company |
| Open to Swiss residents | check in your account |
PostFinance only offers staking for ether, from 0.1 ETH. Since mid-August 2026 there have been no fixed terms: you trigger unstaking yourself in e-finance. PostFinance executes staking and unstaking orders twice a week, and rewards are added automatically to your staking position. The 20% fee is charged quarterly to your reference account. To use PostFinance’s crypto service as a foreign national, you need a B, C or C1 permit. PostFinance plans to add more proof-of-stake networks. The full offer: PostFinance crypto.
Swissquote stakes four coins and publishes estimated gross rates of up to 2.5% (ETH), 6.24% (SOL), 4.29% (DOT) and 2% (ADA). Rewards are paid out every Tuesday. According to Swissquote, no sub-custodians are involved. Fees and trading in detail: Swissquote review.
Bitcoin Suisse in Zug stakes six coins but does not publish its fees. In September 2026 the company announced a restructuring and is focusing more on wealthy and institutional clients. Kraken keeps 25% of rewards on bonded staking (up to USD 1 million in assets) and 30% on flexible staking. Whether a particular coin can be staked from Switzerland depends on Kraken’s country rules, which we could not confirm reliably; if the option does not appear in your account, it is not available to you. More: Kraken review.
Other names: AMINA Bank in Zug offers staking to private clients, without a public fee schedule. SwissBorg runs an “Earn” offer for which its pricing policy lists protocol and success fees; its official pages do not make clear whether it is open to Swiss residents or where the yield comes from in each case. Check before depositing – more in our SwissBorg review. We found no staking offer at Yuh or at the cantonal banks that sell crypto.
You can only stake coins you already own. With an account at a crypto exchange you can buy ether and other proof-of-stake coins in a few steps.
Operating since 2013Group registered with FinCEN (US) and the FCA (UK)
Worked example: what is left after fees and tax
Say you stake CHF 10’000 worth of ETH with Swissquote and the estimated gross rate of 2.5% turns out exactly right. After a year you receive rewards worth CHF 250. The 20% fee takes CHF 50, leaving CHF 200. That is taxable income; at a marginal tax rate of 25%, you pay CHF 50. You end up with about CHF 150, or 1.5% a year – before wealth tax.
For comparison: if the ether price falls 10% in the same year, you lose CHF 1’000. Staking barely changes the question of whether a crypto holding makes sense for you. It is a small extra on coins you plan to hold anyway, not a substitute for a savings account.
Lock-ups: how quickly you get your coins back
Staking costs flexibility. Ethereum has a queue to get in and a queue to get out; how long they take depends on network load and can range from days to several weeks. PostFinance therefore gives no fixed timeframe and refers to a “technical waiting period”. Swissquote states a maximum of three days for SOL and seven days for ADA, plus up to five business days of internal processing, and warns that the whole process can take considerably longer because of protocol queues.
During this The waiting period after you trigger unstaking, during which coins earn nothing and cannot be sold. you cannot sell. FINMA specifically flags this as a market risk: if the price drops, you are stuck. Alongside bonded staking, Kraken offers flexible staking with no lock-up, for 30% instead of 25% of rewards.
The risks
Slashing. If the validator makes mistakes, part of the staked coins can be lost. Swissquote lists the risk per coin: for ETH and DOT it affects both coins and rewards, for SOL only rewards; ADA has no slashing, though validators can be excluded from rewards.
Provider failure. In Guidance 08/2023 of 20 December 2023, FINMA takes the view that staked coins belonging to custody clients are to be segregated from the estate if a supervised institution goes bankrupt – provided they are held available for clients at all times. It stresses, however, that the legal position is not settled and that the uncertainty grows when custody or staking is outsourced to foreign firms. On a foreign platform without Swiss supervision, the rules of its home country apply anyway.
Liquid staking. Protocols such as Lido issue a tradable token, such as stETH, in exchange for staked ETH. You stay flexible, but you take on smart-contract risk and the risk that the token trades below the value of ETH in stressed markets. Bitcoin Suisse announced in 2023 that it would offer liquid staking via the Liquid Collective.
Staking from your own wallet
You can also stake without a bank or exchange. With Cardano, Solana or Polkadot, you delegate coins from your own wallet to a validator; they stay in You hold the keys to your coins yourself instead of leaving them with a provider., and many wallet apps – including those for hardware wallets – support this. For Ethereum, self-custody means either your own validator with 32 ETH or a liquid staking protocol, with the risks described above.
The upside: your coins do not depend on anyone’s balance sheet. The downside: a delegation error, a poor choice of validator or a lost key is entirely your problem. And if you produce blocks yourself as a validator on a larger scale, the tax office will look at whether that counts as self-employment. Which wallets work: our guide to crypto wallets.
A third route is exchange-traded staking products: SIX lists several staking ETPs on ether and Solana, where the issuer stakes and rewards generally flow into the product’s value. How these securities work is explained in our guide to crypto ETPs.
Tax on staking rewards
The ESTV is clear: rewards from a staking pool count as income from movable assets (Art. 20 para. 1 DBG). The taxable amount is their value in francs at the moment they are credited. If you run a validator yourself without a pool, the tax office checks whether you are self-employed. The canton of Zug’s guidance likewise states that staking income is taxable.
In practice: record the date, amount and franc value of every reward, or use your provider’s statements – PostFinance lists rewards in its crypto asset statement. At year end, staked coins and rewards form part of your wealth and are declared at the tax value in the ESTV price list. If you later sell rewards at a profit, that capital gain is tax-free for private investors. How it looks on the form: crypto tax in Switzerland and declaring crypto on your tax return. If you do not own any ether yet, the buying options are in buy Ethereum in Switzerland.
