Ahead of this year’s Sibos in Frankfurt, Germany, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov sat down with Swift Chief Innovation Officer Tom Zschach for a fireside chat about the ongoing work to unlock digital asset adoption at scale.
Swift is the world’s leading provider of secure financial messaging services. Its public key infrastructure (PKI) and messaging standard can interact with smart contracts on different blockchains through Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network.
In 2023, Swift demonstrated how global financial institutions can transact with multiple blockchains using Swift’s PKI and Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP). In 2024, Swift was part of an industry initiative to combine Chainlink oracles and large language models (LLMs) to structure and standardize corporate actions data onchain.
Last year, Swift, UBS Asset Management, and Chainlink also completed an innovative pilot for settling tokenized fund subscriptions and redemptions. This system would enable digital asset transactions to settle with fiat payment systems across more than 11,500 financial institutions in 200 countries.
Nazarov and Zschach believe rapidly evolving regulatory clarity in the U.S. will accelerate global institutional adoption in 2025 and beyond.
“When people know something’s possible, they spend a lot more time and a lot more energy on it,” Zschach said.
“We’re beyond experiments. The question now is how do you get to scale?”
The answer starts with standards that facilitate onchain settlement with the highest degree of security and reliability.
“Everything in finance today is based on trust,” Zschach explained. “Having a trusted data source is hugely important.”
As the standard for verifiable onchain data and cross-chain connectivity, Chainlink has enabled over $25 trillion in transaction value and is the preferred network for financial institutions to obtain essential pricing, net asset value (NAV), and reserve data for tokenized real-world assets onchain.
Zschach expects digital assets to be front and center at Sibos.
“I would say the PoC fatigue has set in and people are looking for real value now. The intensity and the urgency has been turned up.”
Going forward, the focus is on establishing compliant workflows and legal clarity around onchain settlement.
“The complexity of institutional transactions is immensely underappreciated,” said Nazarov.
“The compliance, books and records, identity – all the different parameters that need to be checked in order for two institutions to send money to each other, or transact against an asset purchase or an asset settlement event or a pre-trade event, is about synchronizing existing systems, existing processes, existing data with blockchain events. This is exactly the type of great work we’re doing together with you.”
Watch the full conversation.