Today at Sibos, Chainlink announced a groundbreaking solution for global financial institutions to manage digital asset workflows using the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) alongside their existing systems and Swift messaging standards. The first use case comprised a technical and operational pilot with UBS Tokenize, the tokenization unit of UBS Asset Management, one of the world’s largest private banks with over $6 trillion in assets under management.
Subscriptions and redemptions for a UBS tokenized fund smart contract were triggered using ISO 20022 messages through CRE and Swift infrastructure. CRE received the Swift messages, which initiated subscription and redemption workflows in the new Chainlink Digital Transfer Agent (DTA) technical standard, which defines how transfer agents and fund administrators can support tokenized assets in accordance with existing regulatory frameworks.
The novel ready-to-use solution expands on Swift, Chainlink, and UBS’ previous tokenized asset use case under the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Project Guardian. The 2024 pilot demonstrated how more than 11,500 financial institutions in 200 countries and territories could settle tokenized fund subscriptions and redemptions with fiat payment systems using the Swift network.
CRE expands this concept by abstracting away additional complexity so that institutions can use Swift messages to trigger onchain events more broadly. Enabling institutions to adopt the efficiency and risk-management benefits of blockchain via the offchain systems they’ve used and trusted for decades is a critical unlock for the $100+ trillion global fund industry.
“I’m very excited about this landmark innovation we’ve achieved by leveraging Swift’s standards and UBS’ tokenized asset design, as we are showing how the use of smart contracts and new technical standards can enable transfer agents and other entities to manage tokenized asset workflows onchain,” said Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov in an official announcement.
“UBS is demonstrating how the use of smart contract-based technologies can be used by financial institutions to more readily explore new types of product lifecycle composability.”