Thread by @nicolaborzi

1 - Chiasso is a small, anonymous town on Italian border at the extreme southbound Canton Ticino, Italian speaking part of #Switzerland. A place which has been well known for decades as a centre for money laundering of Italian nationals capitals fleeing away. An offshore haven.

2 - It's a transit for many legit and unlegal businesses. When Switzerland signed an treaty with Italy on tax informations and ruled out bank secrecy, which was for decades the engine of its bank industry, Chiasso banks and its whole financial industry were badly hit.

3 - After decades of bonanza, thanks to Italians big dirty money flowing on the other side of the border, the river of fees dried up. So Chiasso "fiduciari" (people working in the private financial industry on behalf of other people) had to find another way to make ends meet.

4 - The way out was cryptofinance. Since 2016, Chiasso - which lies few hundred meters north of the Italian town of Como - managed to become the center of the Canton Ticino cryptovalley. A district of hundreds of cryptocompanies grew up in a few months. Many Icos were done there.

5 - In the wild crypto gold rush of 2017, Blockchain professionals from all over the world moved there. Everything looked possible. Money was flowing like a tsunami. Crypto investments nourished the new industry. Swiss AML rules by #FINMA on cryptoassets didn't exist at that time

6 - Everything was easy. Low or no Aml compliance, down to zero KYC controls. So the race was open to every kind of money. Even dirty money. And the chance was too good to be missed for many professional moneylaunderers working for many different cartels.

7 - In those wild days, in my opinion, the thing wasn't to clean dirty many through ICOs: the real business for money launderers was to create companies with dirty money which would raise other investments via ICOs, in order to revaluate and clean huge amounts of dirty money.

8 - But in January 2018 the opportunity window closed, after bitcoin massive drawdown. ICOs became more and more difficult to run, many crypto projects collapsed, others went bankrupt. The whole cryptovalley was shaken and eventually many cryptocompanies moved to Kanton Zug.

9 - Soon FINMA Swiss financial watchdog raised new AML and KYC rules for ICOs and cryptoassets. Few cryptocompanies were able to survive the so called cryptowinter. But in Zug, they connected to banking industry and developed new DeFi projects. Another bonanza was coming.

10 - But DeFi checks and balances were flawed, too. Now you're seeing the first holes appearing in internal controls in DAO business. The hunt never ends.