Today, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ), a leading Australian bank with over $1 trillion in assets under management, announced it has officially partnered with Chainlink Labs and joined the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Project Guardian, a multi-year collaboration between policymakers and the financial industry to enhance financial markets’ liquidity and efficiency through asset tokenization.
As partners with Chainlink Labs and investment platform ADDX, ANZ will work to enhance interoperability between private blockchains and promote the exchange of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) such as commercial paper – a short-term, unsecured debt instrument typically issued by corporations.
Chainlink Labs is the leading contributor to Chainlink, the industry-leading decentralized computing platform which has enabled over $15 trillion in transaction value. Among Chainlink’s full stack of essential tokenization infrastructure is Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) – a global standard for transferring digital assets throughout the growing multi-chain economy.
ANZ was among a dozen banks and financial market infrastructure providers that collaborated with Swift to develop a blockchain interoperability model that allows traditional financial institutions to securely transfer tokenized assets between public and private blockchains using their existing infrastructure and CCIP.
ANZ is currently utilizing CCIP to power cross-chain, cross-currency RWAs in the form of green financial products that can be purchased with A$DC, Australia’s first bank-issued, dollar-backed stablecoin. As ANZ expands its digital asset capabilities with Project Guardian, CCIP will enable secure cross-chain exchange of new tokenized RWAs.
“ANZ has been in Singapore for 50 years and over that time, our customers have benefited from the bank having access to a regulatory environment that truly fosters innovation,” said ANZ Singapore Country Head, Mark Evans, in an official announcement.
“We’re pleased to join Project Guardian and play a role in fast-tracking the development of a stable, secure digital asset ecosystem which will be essential to meeting the future needs of our customers across the region.”
ANZ’s Banking Services Lead, Nigel Dobson, described the ability to unite fragmented markets on a universal interoperability standard as crucial to driving tokenization’s global institutional adoption.
“We are pleased to join Project Guardian and look forward to demonstrating how our emerging Digital Assets capabilities, such as A$DC, can be used to support our customers to move goods and capital across the region,” he said.
“We’re excited to continue our collaboration with ANZ and support their market-leading digital innovation program with secure cross-chain infrastructure as part of Project Guardian,” added Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov.
“Interoperability is critical for financial institutions to transact with tokenized assets at scale, making Chainlink CCIP a key enabler for accelerating the growth of the tokenized economy.”