The recently released ninth episode of Chainlink’s “The Future Is On” spotlight series features AsiaNext CEO Kok Kee Chong, who illuminated AsiaNext’s digital asset strategy and Chainlink’s role in advancing institutional blockchain and digital asset adoption.
AsiaNext, a leading digital asset exchange for institutions, is a joint venture between Japan’s SBI Digital Asset Holdings and SIX Group of Switzerland. The SIX Digital Exchange (SDX), a fully regulated blockchain-based financial market infrastructure (FMI), was among a dozen major financial institutions and FMIs that collaborated with Swift to develop a blockchain interoperability model utilizing Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) last year.
Chong summarized AsiaNext’s vision for digital asset adoption in the capital markets. “Our strategy is to work with like-minded ecosystem partners, namely institutions across the world, to create a platform for members on our exchange to be able to trade on a fair, open, transparent basis,” he said.
Though some of the industry’s most influential players have yet to dominate the digital asset space, Chong sees mass adoption on the horizon. “There’s a lot of wind behind the wings to enable the adoption of digital assets, but it’s still in the early days,” he explained.
AsiaNext is focused on capital efficiency, allowing institutional members to deploy the least amount of capital to support their trading volumes. The platform has already deployed its own open-source blockchain, Hyperledger Besu, in order to mint and store securities tokens.
“We envisage that in the future there will be opportunities to link our blockchain with other blockchains out there,” said Chong. “We know that the world is not made up of little islands, but connectivity between these islands.”
Central to AsiaNext’s multi-chain approach is its strategic partnership with Chainlink. As the industry-standard decentralized computing platform, Chainlink has enabled more than $15 trillion in transaction value and provides a comprehensive set of services, including CCIP, that are critical for securing digital assets and scaling onchain finance to billions of global users.
“For asset transfers between one location to another when both locations are on different blockchains, we need a bridge like CCIP to allow us to do that seamlessly,” Chong explained. “We see the future of digital assets in capital markets being very much a connected ecosystem where such asset transfers or data transfers are crucial.”
While he believes the race to mainstream digital asset adoption will ultimately be more of a marathon than a sprint, he has the finish line in view.
“We see regulators and the community of financial institutions aggressively pushing tokenization, distributed ledgers, and smart contracts to enable seamless financial transactions,” he said. “I see that AsiaNext will also play its part in enabling this for the community. We hope that this will come sooner than later.”
Watch the ninth episode of “The Future Is On” featuring AsiaNext’s Kok Kee Chong.