'I Never Wanted to Just Trade Coins': How Kevin Kern Built NETWRK

Kevin Kern could have simply kept trading his own book. By his own account it returned 200 to 300 percent a year; there would have been no clients, no compliance, no staff and no scrutiny. Instead he founded a company, and the reason he gives is disarmingly simple: "I never wanted to just trade coins."

"Private trading is one thing — but I want to give this know-how to institutional investors too," Kern told Forbes. "We young people know crypto. So why not work for banks, family offices or asset managers?" What he wanted, he says, was something that lasts: "I want more than to just earn money myself. I want to build something that remains." That ambition is what produced NETWRK AG, the Zurich firm he founded in 2022 and now runs from the Prime Tower.

From a wallet to a wrapper

The vehicle Kern chose is one of the least glamorous instruments in Swiss finance, and that is precisely why it works: the actively managed certificate, or AMC.

An AMC is a listed, bankable security that holds an actively managed basket of assets. It has an ISIN and settles through the same infrastructure as any other security. For an institutional investor that is the whole point: an AMC fits inside existing custody and reporting systems, where a crypto wallet cannot go. It is the bridge between what Kern knows and what a Swiss allocator is permitted to own.

NETWRK's first AMC went live in spring 2025. The basket holds thirty to forty crypto assets: Bitcoin and Ethereum as the foundation, Solana alongside them, and active positions in artificial intelligence, gaming and decentralised finance projects. Meme coins are excluded on principle. "Because there is no substance there," Kern says. "We are not building a product for trends, but for performance."

The targets are ambitious — 40 to 50 percent return a year — and the fee structure is unapologetic: a 1 percent management fee and a 40 percent performance fee. "If we deliver, nobody asks about the fees," Kern says. A second certificate extends the idea further: a hybrid combining crypto with traditional equities, built for allocators who want exposure to what Kern does without an all-crypto mandate.

The machinery behind it

The products run on established partners. Swissquote — a listed Swiss bank and one of the most experienced names in AMC infrastructure — provides the bankable wrapper and settlement rails, while Kraken, one of the world's largest crypto exchanges, handles execution and custody in the underlying assets at a depth traditional banks cannot match beyond the largest tokens. Around them, NETWRK works with partners including InCore Bank and Pistolese Asset Management: the back office, custodian bank and client onboarding are outsourced — and with them much of the regulatory burden that comes with running financial products.

What stays in-house is the part Kern considers the actual product: portfolio management. "We analyse the market and our coins every day, even if we don't trade every day," he says. The environment demands it. Tariffs, geopolitics and macro uncertainty move crypto violently — after the 2024 US election, Kern says, the market gained close to 100 percent within weeks — so the firm keeps strong cash reserves in stablecoins and runs risk management daily.

Apps, real estate and what comes next

The certificates are one half of what Kern is building; software is the other. The first NETWRK app, launched in August 2024, is the analysis layer — live market data, portfolio visibility, daily crypto news, price and trade history. An AI product extends that analysis to people without a trading background, running the kind of assessment Kern spent ten years learning to do by hand.

A third concept, NetState, is ready to launch: an app — operating independently of NETWRK — designed to let buyers purchase Swiss real estate with cryptocurrencies. And the map may grow. "We feel very comfortable in Switzerland," Kern says, "but we are looking very closely at hotspots like Dubai or Monaco as a next step."

Shrinking the asymmetry

Ask Kern what all of it is for and the answer is not a product list. The industry he grew up in runs on information asymmetry — a small number of people knowing what an asset is worth long before everyone else finds out. Kern was on the winning side of that asymmetry as a teenager. His company is an argument that it should be smaller: the same analysis he once ran alone at night, packaged into a certificate an institution can hold and an app anyone can open.

His stated vision for the firm is concrete: capture the roughly one percent that asset managers currently allocate to crypto in portfolios — and then scale it. He founded the company at nineteen, moved it into the Prime Tower at twenty, and runs it with a young team — and with the once-sceptical, now proud strategic support of his parents behind him.

The cheat code was a decade ago. He has not stopped building since.

NETWRK AG's certificates are investment products. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results, and nothing here constitutes investment advice.