The recently released seventh episode of Chainlink’s “The Future Is On” spotlight series features Nigel Dobson, Banking Services Lead at Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ), one of the largest institutional banks in Australia. Dobson highlighted ANZ’s digital asset strategy and explained how Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) facilitates the global adoption of tokenized real-world assets.
ANZ was among a dozen banks and financial market infrastructure providers that collaborated with Swift to develop a blockchain interoperability model which allows traditional financial institutions to securely transfer tokenized assets between public and private blockchains using their existing infrastructure and CCIP.
Dobson described atomic settlement as a “revelation” that solidified tokenized assets’ essential place in the future of finance.
“I think the aha moment, the light bulb moment if you like, was when we saw and proved that we could actually achieve atomic settlement between two assets,” he said. “It wasn’t until we had tokenized our carbon credit inventory and then subsequently used our Australian dollar stablecoin to settle a transaction atomically, instantaneously, that we revealed that it was true it could be done.”
ANZ is currently utilizing CCIP to power cross-chain, cross-currency real-world assets in the form of green financial products, such as reef credits, a financial incentive for farmers and land managers to reduce their crops’ nitrogen runoff in an effort to protect the Great Barrier Reef.
“Nature-based assets in general are a growing asset class; they’re going to be increasingly in-demand and many of our customers want to invest in them, buy them, and use them for offsetting purposes as well,” Dobson said.
“The other really important thing about nature-based assets is that they’re not very well served by existing financial market infrastructure, unlike equities or other securities, and so we think that is a really fertile space for us to work with our customers.”
By solving the blockchain interoperability problem, Dobson believes CCIP will ultimately play a critical role in accelerating tokenization across many asset classes.
“Quite simply, I think blockchains and digital assets are the future of finance,” he said. “And I think that interoperability being threaded through all those blockchains really will be one of the deciding factors for that tipping point.”
Watch the seventh episode of “The Future Is On” featuring ANZ’s Nigel Dobson.