Today, the world’s biggest provider of secure financial messaging services, Swift, announced the success of its proof of concept demonstrating how global financial institutions can transact with multiple blockchains using Swift’s private key infrastructure (PKI) and Chainlink Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP).
Swift’s financial messaging platform connects over 11,500 banks and market infrastructure providers in more than 200 countries and territories around the world. More than a dozen top financial institutions, including Citi, BNY Mellon, and DTCC, collaborated with Swift to develop how entities can transact with a variety of public and private blockchains through a single integration with CCIP.
During last year’s SmartCon, Swift’s Strategy Director, Jonathan Ehrenfeld Solé, said such a model is crucial to satisfying “undeniable interest from institutional investors into digital assets” within an increasingly fragmented blockchain economy.
Swift’s findings illustrate how CCIP can be used 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 indicate more than 11,500 banks are now ready to be blockchain-enabled using their current backend infrastructure – a vital step towards future-proofing traditional finance and scaling the tokenized asset space.
A 2022 report from BNY Mellon reveals that 91% of institutional investors are interested in tokenized products because of their potential to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and attract more investors through fractional ownership. CCIP’s interoperability solution would allow financial institutions to interact with tokenized assets on any chain through one connection.
“For tokenisation to reach its potential, institutions will need to be able to seamlessly connect with the whole financial ecosystem,” said Swift’s Chief Innovation Officer, Tom Zschach, in an official announcement. “Our experiments have demonstrated clearly that existing secure and trusted Swift infrastructure can provide that central point of connectivity, removing a huge hurdle in the development of tokenisation and unlocking its potential.”
“It’s now clear that both top global banks and leading market infrastructures believe there will be greater adoption of digital assets across the entire banking industry, and that this adoption will happen using multiple different blockchain technologies at the same time,” said Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov. “When combining Swift and CCIP, we were able to show that this new level of interoperability across various blockchains is now possible with minimal resources from even the largest banks and market infrastructures.”
Read Swift’s full report here.