In a year when stablecoins finally broke into the financial mainstream, most banks still can’t process a simple USDC transfer. One exception is AMINA Bank, a Switzerland-based institution that says it has spent six years learning to do something deceptively hard: speak the languages of both traditional finance and blockchains at the same time.
Revenue-growth of 69 percent in 2024
“We think of ourselves as dual-world native,” said Myles Harrison, AMINA’s chief product officer, on the BFRR podcast. In Harrison’s telling, that identity is less branding than architecture. AMINA organizes its technology stack into three layers: a conventional core-banking base (payments, regulatory reporting, SWIFT), a middle “bridge” or translation layer that maps bank instructions to on-chain actions, and a top layer of crypto services (custody, staking, DeFi/data integrations). It is that middle tier—largely built in-house—that Harrison calls the bank’s critical intellectual property.
The timing helps explain the bet. AMINA operates in Switzerland, where lawmakers and regulators gave early legal footing to distributed-ledger activity. That head start, Harrison argues, let the bank grow up with Web3 companies that were otherwise “underbanked or cut out of the market,” even as global institutions only now roll out early stablecoin pilots and tokenized assets. AMINA says it now manages 4.5 billion in assets, grew revenue 69 percent in 2024, and—crucially for a lender that takes crypto as collateral—has posted zero defaults in more than five years of such lending.
The pitch is not that banks and crypto natives are adversaries. If anything, Harrison frames AMINA as a specialist that complements both sides. Large banks, he says, are assembling stablecoin and tokenization pilots but lack 24/7 operational muscle and hard-won crypto risk expertise. Crypto companies, for their part, are applying for bank charters, but “having a banking license is a significant undertaking”—a truth neobanks learned the hard way last decade.
Human support plus APIs
AMINA’s answer is modularity. The bank builds components that snap in and out as regulation, markets and client needs shift. A recent example: a stablecoin rewards engine. Noting rising dollar-token adoption and a gap in banking products, AMINA created a module that ingests blockchain and custody data, calculates rewards, books them into the core ledger and exposes them in mobile, web and API channels. Launched in January with two stablecoins, the feature expanded to four within six months. The same pattern shows up elsewhere: an “off-exchange custody” product that lets clients post collateral at AMINA while trading on exchanges, reducing counterparty risk without surrendering speed.
Those choices reflect who the bank serves. Individuals—professional investors under Swiss rules—tend to use mobile and web. Corporates want a hybrid: human support plus APIs to plug AMINA into treasury and risk tooling. Banks and fintechs arrive as B2B2C partners with divergent preferences: some want to embed AMINA’s plumbing under their own front ends; others prefer full white-label screens for trading or custody. Across all three segments, the bank insists on a 24/7 operating model and “professional-grade” APIs with alerts for price moves, loan-to-value changes and transaction events.
Compliance by design
Compliance, unsurprisingly, is baked into the design process rather than bolted on afterward. Harrison describes a “compliance-by-design” approach that starts in product discovery and runs through architecture, UX and operations. The goal is not to hardcode any one rule set but to route activity through controls that can adapt to different jurisdictions. AMINA obtained a Swiss banking license in 2019; it has since added entities in Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong, where regulators have carved out explicit regimes for digital assets. The bank keeps what Harrison calls “active, open dialogue” with supervisors to sense-check new products as the rulebooks evolve.
The translation layer is where these promises converge. Consider a corporate that wants to pay a supplier in USDC:
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Funds arrive after the sender’s wallet is whitelisted. That process covers both hosted-wallet sources (supported exchanges) and self-custody, with due diligence to confirm ownership and the origin of funds.
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If the client doesn’t already hold USDC, it can buy on AMINA’s exchange against fiat or other crypto.
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The translation layer turns an instruction in a bank interface—or an API call from a treasury system—into a blockchain transaction, complete with gas management, error handling and booking into the core system once finality is reached.
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To tighten travel-rule and counterparty checks on cross-border transfers, AMINA is integrating with Notabene; Harrison also points to Mesh, a startup building connectivity among crypto venues, as an example of the ecosystem maturing around these flows.
Pick a sector, build expertise and operate
This is the kind of blocking-and-tackling that sounds mundane until something goes wrong. Crypto markets are always on; margin calls do not wait for trading desks to open. AMINA’s lending platform—akin to Lombard loans in private banking—accepts BTC and select altcoins as collateral and, when protocols permit, allows staking of pledged assets so clients can earn rewards. The system pushes LTV alerts and enables clients to top up, unwind or hedge around the clock, while internal reporting feeds credit risk, finance and compliance teams.
For all the engineering talk, the strategy is resolutely old-fashioned: pick a sector, build expertise and operate to a bank’s standard of controls. Web3 corporates are not monolithic, Harrison notes: miners, software shops, foundations, stablecoin issuers and treasuries all show up with different needs. Serving them looks less like adding “crypto” onto a retail shelf and more like standing up a specialized corporate-banking unit—only one that can clear both SWIFT messages and on-chain transfers.
If that sounds like a niche, AMINA is betting the niche won’t stay small. The bank casts itself not as the winner in a zero-sum fight but as a bridge until the rest of the industry catches up—and a partner even when it does. As institutional committees grind through their decision cycles, Harrison expects a wave of adoption to break across a market that finally has somewhere to plug in. The architecture, he suggests, is ready.
The latest research from the AMINA team
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