Swift to conduct live trials of digital asset transactions in 2025
Swift announced on Thursday that live trials of digital assets and currency transactions over the company's global messaging network will begin in banks in North America, Europe, and Asia early next year.
The ability to transact with digital assets and currency over the Swift network is becoming a reality, having previously only existed as an experiment. Pilot transactions for the settlement of digital assets and currencies will be possible for global financial institutions using Swift's global platform beginning in 2025, according to a statement by the company.
Exciting news! Starting next year, financial institutions from around the world will start trialling live digital asset and currency transactions on the Swift network.
— Swift (@swiftcommunity) October 3, 2024
This marks an important milestone in our journey to enable banks to transact interchangeably across both… pic.twitter.com/70BxOMoBpT
Through these trials, financial institutions will be able to use their current Swift connection to transact interchangeably across emerging and existing asset and currency types.
Swift is moving beyond experimentation
Tom Zschach, chief innovation officer, said, “With our vast global reach, we are uniquely positioned to bridge both emerging and established forms of value, and we’re now focused on demonstrating this in real-world, mainstream applications.”
This move from experimentation to reality will be an important milestone in the company's journey to fulfill its ultimate goal of providing financial institutions with a single point of access to a wide range of digital asset classes and currencies.
Recent experiments have found the quick capacity of Swift to connect public and private blockchains, link central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) globally, and integrate multiple networks of digital assets and currencies.
The announcement is also in line with a number of recent experiments that Swift conducted by connecting its network to the Ethereum Sepolia test network using an enterprise abstraction layer in collaboration with web3 services company Chainlink.
The experiments have demonstrated that Swift could offer a single point of access to a variety of public and private blockchain networks. It could also support organizations in developing tokenized assets and central bank digital currencies, which are presently being explored by 134 nations. Swift said it will be partnering with the community to test a more advanced version of the company infrastructure next year.
Addressing the rise of disconnected digital platforms
According to the company, the goal of these trials is to address a major issue facing the constantly changing digital asset market: the emergence of disconnected digital platforms, or "digital islands," which may make it more difficult for new forms of value to be widely adopted and easily used.
As of right now, 134 nations are exploring CBDCs, and Standard Chartered and Synpulse predict that the market for tokenized assets will grow to a size of up to $30 trillion by 2034. According to a survey conducted by BNY Mellon and Celent, 91% of institutional investors likewise stated they were interested in purchasing tokenized assets. Despite the impressive scale, global adoption is expected to remain fragmented in the absence of interconnectivity between platforms.
Ensuring a scalable and secure future for digital assets
Swift said it is dedicated to making sure that the more than 11,500 financial institutions that make up its global network can securely and effectively support digital assets and currencies using their current Swift connectivity. Swift believes these trials and collaborative innovations are important to achieve global interoperability for these new forms of value, and its global network is a crucial link between traditional and digital asset platforms. Swift is in a unique position to facilitate the adoption of various asset classes globally for a variety of use cases, the post added.
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