The latest episode of Chainlink’s “The Future Is On” series features Lidia Kurt, CEO of Switzerland’s first DLT trading and settlement facility, BX Digital. Kurt shared key insights on how BX Digital is leveraging the Chainlink standard to accelerate digital asset adoption and how digital assets could evolve in the future.
BX Digital and its sister company BX Swiss are both part of Boerse Stuttgart Group, the sixth largest exchange group in Europe. Earlier this year, BX Digital and BX Swiss partnered with Chainlink to bring verifiable data for Swiss-based equities onchain.
Kurt explained how distributed ledger technology (DLT) solves costly inefficiencies on the settlement side of financial transactions. BX Digital uses the same offchain trading systems as traditional exchanges, but settles transactions on Ethereum. This eliminates the need for a central securities depository (CSD) intermediary, which significantly reduces settlement time and cost.
“Today’s settlement processes go up to two days. We reduce it from T+2 to T+ a couple of minutes – a mere instant.”
BX Digital facilitates the trading of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), specifically tokenized securities such as tokenized equity, tokenized bonds, and tokenized funds, as well as emerging tokenized asset classes such as tokenized commodities. Because RWAs confer benefits such as fractionalization and programmability with better liquidity, transparency, and risk management, the space could reach $10 trillion by 2030.
Kurt believes tokenization will ultimately give rise to entirely new forms of financial products with features we can’t conceive of today – just as Uber and Instagram wouldn’t exist without mobile internet.
To unlock their full potential, RWAs must be continuously enriched with high-quality offchain data. Having enabled over $25 trillion in transaction value, Chainlink has emerged as the preferred way for financial institutions to obtain key information such as pricing, net asset value (NAV), and reserve data for RWAs onchain.
BX Digital is using Chainlink to publish and distribute closing price data for securities onchain, where it can be reused by participants to generate derivative financial products.
“That actually unlocks the full potential of blockchain, because then it’s not only the assets that are on the blockchain, but rather the full processes that are involved around the assets,” Kurt explained.
“Using Chainlink’s data solution helps to bring the data onchain and for the participants to actually access that data, because ultimately what we want to have is a single source of truth – not just for the assets, but also for the data.”
This single source of truth must be interoperable across different networks in an increasingly multi-chain ecosystem. As a Swiss FINMA-regulated financial institution, BX Digital entered the blockchain realm on Ethereum to maximize security and decentralization.
“However, looking into the future, we do not know which blockchains are going to prevail – which blockchains are going to be the ones that the infrastructure is being run on,” explained Kurt. “So for us it’s very important to extend to the blockchains where the assets are being run on. We want to be able to settle all the assets that our clients are actually creating.”
She emphasized this belief in an open ecosystem and avoidance of siloed infrastructure as the foundation for BX Digital’s work with industry partners like Chainlink.
“We are going to build what we are building together with partners that are unique and have a proper value proposition in specific areas. And that’s why we work very closely with Chainlink, because Chainlink has a unique capability in the areas of data and interoperability. And I think that’s how we can grow the industry together.”
Watch the latest episode of “The Future Is On” featuring BX Digital CEO Lidia Kurt.