During SmartCon 2022, Chainlink, the blockchain industry’s leading oracle network, and Swift, the world’s biggest provider of secure financial messaging services, announced an initial proof of concept using Chainlink Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) to enable secure messaging and token movement between large financial institutions and multiple blockchains.
Swift’s Strategy Director, Jonathan Ehrenfeld Solé, explained how CCIP’s secure middleware would allow Swift to interact with any blockchain through its existing PKI and messaging standard, which is already used by the vast majority of the world’s banks, in order to satisfy “undeniable interest from institutional investors into digital assets” amid a growing number of blockchains.
Today, Swift announced it will collaborate with more than a dozen top financial institutions, including 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 and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), to further test how entities can transact with a variety of public and private blockchains through Swift’s PKI and CCIP.
Swift’s announcement highlighted the need for a future-proof, cross-chain communications standard to scale the tokenized asset space in a multi-chain economy.
“We would expect to see a multitude of different platforms emerging, each serving different customer segments with their own bespoke capabilities and requirements,” said Swift’s Chief Innovation Officer, Tom Zschach. “In such a highly fragmented ecosystem, it would simply not be feasible for financial institutions to connect to each and every platform individually. That’s why the community is working with Swift to develop an interoperability model that would enable access to different platforms globally.”
This latest collaboration is designed to demonstrate how Swift can utilize Chainlink’s enterprise abstraction layer to facilitate three primary means of transferring tokenized assets: between two wallets on the same public blockchain; between a public blockchain and a permissioned blockchain; and between two public blockchains. The results are slated for publication later this year.
Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov, who recently outlined CCIP’s role in future-proofing traditional finance at Consensus 2023, underscored Chainlink and Swift’s shared goal to optimize the relationship between legacy infrastructure and blockchains.
“We’re excited to work with Swift,” he said. “It’s clear that as banks endeavor to access multiple blockchains, a common connectivity layer across the various chains will be a critical building block for their adoption of on-chain finance.”