By: Tim Staheli

Geneva and Zug together account for an estimated 35 per cent of global oil trading, and a dominant share of grain, metals, and soft commodity flows. The traders who operate here manage staggering quantities of physical goods: crude in supertankers, grain in bulk carriers, copper in containers – and they do it at speed, selling cargoes multiple times while still at sea. What makes this possible is a set of paper documents so fundamental to global trade that they have their own legal category: documents of title. Warehouse receipts, holding certificates, bills of lading – whoever holds the original controls the goods, and can sell them on by endorsing the document. For most of the industry’s history, that has meant a physical piece of paper.

What the DLT Act is

In 2021, Switzerland became one of the first countries in the world to pass legislation giving tokenised assets a statutory foundation. The DLT Act updated the Code of Obligations to create a new category of ledger-based securities: rights that can be issued and transferred via a qualifying electronic ledger, with detailed and auditable requirements that ledger must use. For commodity trade, the implications were immediate. Warehouse receipts, holding certificates, and bills of lading were all brought within the framework. This indicates that a transaction involving parties or warehouses situated globally, but subject to a financial agreement or title document regulated by Swiss law, can subsequently be represented by a legally recognized digital instrument. Switzerland had not merely permitted tokenisation. It had built a statutory architecture for it.

What was missing

The DLT Act had established that commodity papers could be issued as ledger-based securities, but a specific question remained unanswered: did an electronic document of title carry the same statutory force as its paper counterpart? The Swiss law until this July had not explicitly clarified on this matter. For a trading house or a bank, it was uncertain whether the digital document could offer a strong and legally valid foundation for a transaction.

That uncertainty mattered because it left room for exactly the kind of contractual workaround that has limited the adoption of digital documents of title. The private market had long introduced interim remedies through eBL platforms, requiring all participants to sign a multi-party rulebook agreement – and if any stakeholder is not a member, a paper document must be issued instead. This contractual scaffolding mimics paper-based processes by mutual agreement, which works well enough until someone in the chain falls outside it: a customs agent in a less-digitalised port, a smaller freight forwarder, a bank that never signed the relevant rulebook. A contract only binds those who signed it, and in a transaction spanning multiple jurisdictions, carriers, and banks, the odds that every counterparty has joined the same private legal framework are not often favourable. As of 2026, only around three to five per cent of global trade documents have transitioned to eBL. The gap between legal ambition and commercial reality remained wide. The situation was even starker for what pertains inventory finance, with warehouse receipts, holding certificates and warrants far from being digitized due to legal uncertainty and above all lack of the proper technology.

The Swiss response

The Swiss Federal Council’s 2026 ordinance removes the paper assumption embedded in Swiss bill of lading definitions: an electronic bill of lading administered through a qualifying system now carries the same legal weight as its paper counterpart. Combined with the DLT Act’s existing coverage of warehouse receipts and holding certificates, the framework is now complete. From the moment goods leave their origin, through storage, to final delivery, Swiss law provides an unbroken statutory basis for electronic title across every major document of title in commodity trade. One document. One holder. One cargo. For a trading house whose entire business model depends on moving title faster than the goods themselves, 1 July delivers that.

To qualify under that framework, a system must do three things: prove the document is unique, ensure only the rightful holder can use it, and guarantee its contents have not been tampered with. A digital document that cannot natively guarantee those properties without falling back on contractual agreements among platform members is not a document of title under Swiss law. It is a promise dressed up as one. These are the conditions that platforms such as Secro, built around native tokenisation rather than contractual simulation, are designed to meet.

Why this matters to the ecosystem

For banks and traders, the advantages of this legal framework are concrete: under a single unified system, logistics service providers, traders, and financial institutions can seamlessly issue, pledge, and finance digital negotiable instruments across the entire value chain—from pre-shipment to shipment and post-shipment. This establishes an unprecedented, back-to-back chain of trust that puts the Swiss ecosystem one step ahead of other jurisdictions.

On top of this, Switzerland reinforces that legal clarity with credentials that no contractual framework can replicate: some of the strongest data protection standards in the world, a stable political environment, and a financial infrastructure built around the needs of international commodity trade. The jurisdiction does not merely permit this kind of digitisation – it is architecturally suited to it.

This is the terrain on which Secro operates, and where its architecture is distinct. Most digital platforms simulate uniqueness contractually – members agree to treat a database entry as the one original, which holds only as long as every counterparty has signed the same rulebook. Secro’s model works differently. Each document of title issued through its private blockchain exists as a single cryptographic token: the token is the title, not a pointer to it. Uniqueness is not agreed upon – it is guaranteed by the code. This is what the client wanted to call the ‘one token, one title’ model, and it is precisely what Swiss law now demands of any system that wants its digital documents to carry statutory force. A system that embeds those properties natively, rather than simulating them contractually, does not need a rulebook. The law recognises it directly.