SmartCon 2024 featured presentations from more than 100 blockchain industry pioneers and financial leaders, who gathered to highlight the convergence of TradFi and DeFi into a more efficient global financial system. To delve deeper into the most groundbreaking topics from this year’s event, Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino interviewed some of the most influential speakers on-site at Hong Kong’s Kerry Hotel.
Tom Menner is CTO of SBI Digital Markets (SBI DM), a subsidiary of SBI Digital Asset Holdings, the digital asset arm of Japan’s leading conglomerate, SBI Group. He sat down with Malandrino to discuss some of the most influential blockchain technology trends institutions should pay attention to as they embark on creating tokenized real-world assets.
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 more exchanges in regions such as Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Germany in the near future.
Menner believes one of the most appealing features of tokenized assets for traditional financial institutions and investors is the potential to access secondary services such as collateralization in new markets around the world. To facilitate this, SBI DM is focused on eliminating regional silos by enabling compliant cross-border, cross-network transactions.
“That liquidity and that network effect is what’s going to provide the value,” he explained.
Last month, SBI DM 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. Ultimately, this capability could enhance efficiency and transparency within the $63 trillion mutual fund industry.
As the standard for onchain finance, Chainlink provides secure and reliable data, proof of reserves, and cross-chain connectivity needed to tokenize new and existing asset classes as superior financial instruments offering unique benefits including atomic settlement, fractionalization, and programmability.
“There’s the potential for a lot of operational efficiency to be squeezed out of this and the possibility of introducing new asset classes that would be of interest to the investors,” Menner said.
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Tom Menner.