SBI Digital Markets (SBI DM) – a subsidiary of SBI Digital Asset Holdings, the digital asset arm of Japan’s leading conglomerate, SBI Group – and large-scale investment manager UBS Asset Management announced the success of a pilot demonstrating how Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) can streamline tokenized fund operations across different blockchains and financial systems.
The Fixed Income and Asset and Wealth Management pilots are spearheaded by the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Project Guardian, a multi-year collaboration between policymakers and the financial industry to enhance financial markets’ liquidity and efficiency through asset tokenization.
As part of the Fixed Income pilot, SBI DM created a regulated structure for issuing securities in traditional and tokenized formats, as well as a blockchain-agnostic technology and governance framework for connecting regulated digital asset exchanges across multiple jurisdictions to facilitate global secondary market liquidity.
As part of the Asset and Wealth Management pilot, SBI DM created a digital transfer agent smart contract leveraging CCIP to streamline operations for the UBS tokenized fund across different blockchain networks and financial systems. Ultimately, this capability could create new standards for operational efficiency and transparency within the $63 trillion mutual fund industry.
“This year, SBI Digital Markets has focused its efforts on building regulated frameworks to facilitate the end-to-end flow of tokenised securities,” said SBI DM CEO Winston Quek in an official announcement.
“From origination, tokenisation, distribution, digital custody, listing on digital asset exchanges and building secondary trading – we have put in place workflows for efficient cross-border distribution networks whilst allowing for dual issuances in traditional and tokenised formats.”
As the industry-leading decentralized computing platform, Chainlink has enabled over $16 trillion in transaction value and provides a full stack of essential tokenization infrastructure including CCIP – a global standard for transferring digital assets with the highest level of cross-chain security.
With the largest securities account customer base and the second largest trading market in Japan, SBI Group’s global network spans 25 countries. SBI DM’s focus is launching digital asset market solutions that connect exchanges in regions such as Switzerland, Thailand, and Singapore, with the goal of including exchanges in regions such as Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Germany in the near future.
In a recent episode of Chainlink’s “The Future Is On” spotlight series, Quek elaborated on SBI DM’s mission to become a blockchain-agnostic hub that leverages critical infrastructure such as CCIP to unite international liquidity silos and unlock new efficiencies through tokenized real-world assets.
“A lot of times in the industry people build individual silos and they are unable to scale their business because they’re restricted to their blockchain technology,” he said. “We are trying to connect different pockets of liquidity so the sum of the parts is larger than the whole.”