(31 August 2023 – Global) Financial messaging network Swift has hailed the results of a project that placed its financial infrastructure as a central point for the transfer of tokenized assets by banks across multiple blockchains.
The banking co-operative in June announced that it was working with more than a dozen financial institutions and market infrastructures to test the use of its messaging network as a means to instruct the transfer of tokenised value over a range of public and private blockchain networks.
Participants in the project include Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ), BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, Citi, Clearstream, Euroclear, Lloyds Banking Group, SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) and The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation.
Web3 services platform Chainlink was used as an enterprise abstraction layer to securely connect the Swift network to the Ethereum Sepolia network, while Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) enabled interoperability between the source and destination blockchains.
Transfers of simulated tokenised assets took place – between two wallets on the same public distributed ledger technology network; between two wallets on different public blockchains; and between a public and private blockchain network.
Tom Zschach, chief innovation officer at Swift says the findings have the potential to remove significant friction slowing the growth of tokenised asset markets and enable them to scale globally as they mature.
“For tokenisation to reach its potential, institutions will need to be able to seamlessly connect with the whole financial ecosystem,” he says. “Our experiments have demonstrated clearly that existing secure and trusted Swift infrastructure can provide that central point of connectivity, removing a huge hurdle in the development of tokenisation and unlocking its potential.”
Alain Pochet, head of client delivery, securities services at BNP Paribas, adds: “With the increasing number of blockchains, the task of connecting our traditional technical platforms and ensuring interoperability between blockchains presents a growing challenge that we must overcome. In this regard, the experiment demonstrated the potential to leverage the extensive connectivity already established with Swift.”