MME Legal: The Architects of Swiss Blockchain Law
There is arguably no law firm in the world that has shaped the legal architecture of a new asset class with the same concentration of influence that MME Legal has exercised over Swiss blockchain and digital asset law. From advising the Ethereum Foundation in its earliest Swiss legal formation to structuring the legal frameworks for Cardano Foundation, Web3 Foundation, and dozens of major token projects, MME — Müller, Merz, Erne and Partners — has been at the intersection of legal innovation and blockchain infrastructure for the entire decade of Crypto Valley’s ascendancy.
Understanding MME is to understand a significant portion of how Zug became the default jurisdiction for serious blockchain protocol entities. The firm did not merely follow the market — it helped create the conditions for the market to develop, through regulatory engagement, legal framework innovation, and the practical knowledge accumulated from solving novel problems in real time.
Founding and Firm Structure
MME was founded in Zurich in the late 1990s and established itself initially as a broad-based commercial law firm with particular strength in corporate, M&A, tax, employment, and technology law. The firm operates from offices in Zurich (Zurich headquarters) and has practitioner presence in Zug, reflecting the client base concentrated in both cantonal jurisdictions.
The firm’s structure follows the Swiss partnership model: MME is a partnership of qualified lawyers (Rechtsanwälte) organised under Swiss partnership law, without the Anglo-American distinction between partners and associates in quite the same hierarchical form. The partnership model means that senior practitioners — the name partners and equity partners — have genuine shared ownership of the firm’s economics and reputation, creating alignment of incentives across the practice areas.
MME employs approximately 50–60 legal professionals across practice groups. The firm is deliberately boutique in its orientation: it has not pursued the growth-at-all-costs trajectory of the UK magic circle or US Big Law firms, instead maintaining a size and scope that allows genuine partner involvement in client matters at all stages.
Practice Areas and Core Expertise
MME’s practice areas span the full range of corporate legal services, with concentration in areas where Swiss legal specificity matters most:
Technology and Blockchain Law. The firm’s defining practice area, built through a decade of engagement with Crypto Valley. MME’s technology practice covers DLT and blockchain legal structuring, FINMA regulatory advice and licence applications, token classification (payment, utility, and security tokens), foundation and association governance, smart contract legal frameworks, NFT and digital collectible legal analysis, and DeFi protocol legal risk assessment. This practice is the primary reason MME is the most frequently referenced Swiss law firm in blockchain industry contexts.
Corporate and M&A. Swiss corporate law — AG formation, shareholder agreements, governance structures, merger and acquisition due diligence, SIX Swiss Exchange listing advice — forms the commercial backbone of MME’s practice. The corporate team operates across the full size range from startup formations to mid-market M&A transactions involving Swiss-headquartered technology and financial services companies.
Tax. MME’s tax practice advises on Swiss corporate and individual tax planning, ESTV ruling applications, OECD Pillar Two structuring for Swiss-based groups, and international tax advice for multinational groups with Swiss components. The tax and corporate practices are closely integrated — a reflection of how frequently Swiss structuring decisions are simultaneously corporate and tax decisions.
Employment Law. Swiss employment law advice — employment contracts, senior management service agreements, equity compensation structuring, termination and severance, collective redundancy, and cross-border employment arrangements — serves both the firm’s technology and financial services clients and a standalone employment law client base.
Financial Services Regulation. FINMA regulatory advice — for banks, securities dealers, fintech companies, fund managers, and insurance companies — sits alongside the blockchain practice as a specialisation that benefits from the Swiss financial regulatory framework’s complexity and specificity.
Andreas Glarner: The Voice of Swiss Blockchain Law
Within MME’s partnership, Andreas Glarner has emerged as the most publicly identified practitioner in Swiss blockchain legal practice and one of the most frequently cited legal voices in the global blockchain and digital asset industry. Glarner’s public profile — speaking at major blockchain and financial industry conferences, publishing commentary on Swiss regulatory developments, and engaging regularly with financial media — reflects his genuine practitioner expertise in FINMA regulatory engagement, foundation governance, and token structuring.
Glarner’s work on the legal structuring of blockchain foundations and token projects preceded the institutional adoption of the sector. His engagement with the earliest Swiss blockchain entities — including work associated with the Ethereum Foundation’s legal structure, various protocol foundation formations, and the legal architecture of multiple initial coin offerings — gave him first-mover knowledge that has compounded into unmatched experience depth.
The practitioner profiles of MME’s blockchain team more broadly — combining lawyers with backgrounds in financial regulation, corporate law, and tax — reflect the multidisciplinary nature of genuine digital asset legal advice. A blockchain company coming to MME for a foundation formation needs corporate advice, FINMA regulatory engagement, tax ruling support, and often employment law for its Swiss-based team. MME’s integrated practice allows this to be delivered coherently rather than assembled from multiple boutique advisers.
Advising the Ethereum Foundation
MME’s advisory role in the Ethereum Foundation’s Swiss formation is the firm’s most historically significant engagement and the project that most clearly demonstrates MME’s position at the origin of Crypto Valley’s institutional foundations.
The Ethereum Foundation — the Swiss Stiftung that stewards the Ethereum protocol, holds the treasury of Ether donated at genesis, and funds Ethereum research and development — was established in Zug in 2014. Vitalik Buterin and the co-founders required Swiss legal counsel with the combination of foundation law expertise, FINMA regulatory knowledge, and willingness to engage seriously with novel blockchain-specific questions. MME provided that counsel.
The practical legal work involved structuring a Swiss Stiftung capable of holding significant digital assets (Ether), establishing governance mechanisms appropriate for a non-profit foundation stewarding a public blockchain protocol, navigating FINMA classification of the Ethereum presale (which preceded the formal ICO regulatory guidance that FINMA would issue years later), and establishing the compliance framework that allowed the foundation to operate as a credible institutional entity in the Swiss legal environment.
This engagement established MME’s institutional credibility in the crypto space in a way that no marketing effort could replicate: being the lawyers to the most significant blockchain protocol in the world at its founding is a reference that the global crypto industry recognises and values.
Cardano Foundation and the Protocol Foundation Model
MME’s work on the Cardano Foundation — the Swiss Stiftung established to promote and develop the Cardano blockchain protocol — extended the Ethereum Foundation model to a second major protocol and established the template that dozens of subsequent blockchain protocol foundations would follow.
The “Zug foundation” model for blockchain protocols — a FINMA-familiar Stiftung structure with clear governance, compliant AML/KYC procedures, a defined protocol stewardship mandate, and professional management under Swiss law — is today the industry standard. MME’s role in its development, through work on Ethereum Foundation, Cardano Foundation, and subsequent protocol foundations, means that the firm has been a significant contributor to the legal infrastructure that makes Crypto Valley what it is.
ICO Legal Advisory Practice
During the 2017–2018 ICO boom and the subsequent period of more considered token project development, MME’s blockchain practice was the most in-demand source of Swiss legal advice for token projects seeking Swiss incorporation and compliant token structuring. The FINMA ICO Guidelines of February 2018 — which classified tokens as payment tokens, utility tokens, or asset (security) tokens — were developed in part through engagement with industry practitioners including MME, and the firm’s ability to advise clients on the guidelines’ practical application immediately upon publication gave it a decisive time advantage over firms that needed to study the guidance before advising clients.
MME advised on token project structures for a range of blockchain companies across Crypto Valley: structuring the legal relationship between the token-issuing entity, the foundation, and the software development company; advising on investor protections and regulatory boundaries between utility and security token classification; and drafting the legal documentation frameworks for public and private token sales. The firm’s institutional knowledge from this period constitutes one of the most extensive practical archives of real-world digital asset legal structuring experience available at any single law firm.
Ecosystem Role and Forward Relevance
As the Swiss digital asset regulatory framework has matured — through the DLT Act of 2020, FINMA’s ongoing supervisory guidance, and the convergence with EU MiCA from 2024 — MME’s practice has evolved from pioneering into institutionalising. The questions it now addresses on behalf of clients are often about the operationalisation of frameworks that the firm helped develop: how to structure ledger-based securities (Registerwertrechte) under the DLT Act, how to apply for a DLT trading facility licence, how to structure a tokenised fund under CISA and the DLT Act simultaneously.
The forward relevance of MME’s blockchain practice to the Zug business ecosystem rests on two pillars: the continued growth of genuine blockchain infrastructure companies requiring legal infrastructure, and the emerging tokenisation of traditional financial assets (bonds, equities, real estate, fund units) under the DLT Act framework — an area where MME’s combined capital markets, regulatory, and blockchain expertise provides a differentiated capability.
Donovan Vanderbilt is a contributing editor at ZUG BUSINESS, a publication of The Vanderbilt Portfolio AG, Zurich. The information presented is for educational purposes only.