What is SwissLedger?
SwissLedger is the institutional, EVM-compatible blockchain promoted by the City of Lugano. It uses Proof of Authority consensus and was presented in 2025 as the evolution of 3Achain. Noku is one of its technology partners.
> Architecture Dossier/2025
SwissLedger
The City of Lugano's institutional EVM blockchain, evolution of 3Achain.
- Blockchain
- Infrastructure
- Institutional
Executive Summary
SwissLedger is the institutional blockchain promoted by the City of Lugano: an EVM-compatible, permissioned network using Proof of Authority, presented in March 2025 as the evolution of 3Achain (launched in 2021). Noku is one of the City's technology partners, and Gianluca Perletti, as CTO of Noku, has contributed to the project's technical work.
The Problem & Industry Challenge
Public permissionless blockchains have volatile fees, variable confirmation times and congestion, which make it hard for public administrations to budget costs or guarantee service levels.
Validators distributed across many jurisdictions also raise compliance questions about data residency, validator identity and accountability.
Fully closed private ledgers, on the other hand, lose public verifiability and create vendor lock-in.
Lugano therefore pursued an institutional, EVM-compatible network operated by known validators, building on the experience of 3Achain.
My Role & Technical Leadership
As CTO of Noku, one of the technology partners of the City of Lugano for SwissLedger, Gianluca Perletti contributed to the technical work on the network.
His contributions include work on the Proof of Authority validator setup and network configuration.
He has worked on node hardening practices, such as firewall policies, failover and key management for validator nodes.
He co-presented 'SwissLedger and the Finternet Vision: The Path for a Unified Financial Ecosystem' with Lorenzo Barisone and Robert Bregy at the FCiR25 conference.
He has collaborated with City of Lugano staff and institutional stakeholders on smart contract interfaces for public administration and document notarization use cases.
Technical Architecture & Systems Engineering
Institutional validator network
a predefined set of validators that, according to the SwissLedger whitepaper, includes institutions such as Bitcoin Suisse AG and Avaloq.
EVM compatibility
developers can use Solidity smart contracts, standard Ethereum frameworks and Web3 libraries.
Proof of Authority consensus (Clique)
predictable block production and stable fees, suited to public-sector budgeting.
Node security & key management
hardened validator nodes with protected signing keys.
Use cases documented in the literature
document notarization, public administration digital services, tokenization and open-finance interoperability.
RPC gateway
load-balanced RPC endpoints with rate limiting and health checks for citizen-facing and administrative applications.
Results & Verified Milestones
[1]
SwissLedger was presented by the City of Lugano on 13 March 2025, together with the Swiss Digital Key initiative, as the evolution of 3Achain.
[2]
The LVGA payment token of MyLugano is issued on SwissLedger, according to the MyLugano terms and conditions.
[3]
The SwissLedger work was presented at the FCiR25 conference in a session co-presented by Gianluca Perletti.
[4]
Noku provides tools to create wallets and issue tokens on SwissLedger, as documented in academic literature on Lugano's blockchain adoption.
Verified Links & Resources
Frequently Asked Questions
What was Gianluca Perletti's role in SwissLedger?
As CTO of Noku, one of the City's technology partners, Gianluca contributed to the technical work on the network and co-presented the SwissLedger session at the FCiR25 conference.
Why was SwissLedger created?
To scale the 3Achain experience into an institutional infrastructure for digital finance and public administration, with known validators, predictable fees and EVM compatibility.