The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) announced a success with its integration with Chainlink (LINK). The international entity has been experimenting with blockchain technology, both private and public networks, and finally revealed the progress of its efforts.
Chainlink To Improve International Payment Rails?
Per an official statement, SWIFT claims that its infrastructure can “seamlessly” integrate with blockchain technology to enable users to transfer “tokenized value” across multiple networks. In that way, the international monetary system aims to reduce friction from these transfers and allow the tokenized asset markets to “scale globally.”
A tokenized asset is a “real-world” asset, such as a stock, property, or commodity, whose value is linked to a digital asset. This process is intended to allow its users to easily trade them without the need for a third party to intermediate the transaction or for a third party to verify the value of the underlying asset.
In theory, the tokenized asset market has the potential to be worth trillions of dollars, but its adoption has been relatively slow compared to cryptocurrencies. As mentioned, the partnership between SWIFT and Chainlink (LINK) seeks to change this trend.
Data from a poll conducted by the financial institution indicates that over 97% of institutional investors believe that tokenization of real-world assets has the potential to “revolutionize asset management and be a positive force in the industry.”
However, these institutional investors claim that blockchain-based projects must solve the interoperability issue to achieve this potential. The financial institution stated the following about their experiments with Chainlink:
The experiments are part of Swift’s wider strategy to ensure secure, global interoperability as new technologies and platforms emerge. They build on work over the past few years to show how Swift infrastructure could support the financial community in interconnecting Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and other digital assets with new and existing payments systems.
BNY Mellon, City, And Others Connect To Ethereum
Further details provided by SWIFT revealed that major financial institutions worldwide participated in the experiments. Banks such as BNY Mellon, Citi, Euroclear, Lloyds Banking Group, SIX Digital Exchange (SDX), etc.
Moreover, SWIFT revealed that Chainlink was part of an experiment to create an “enterprise abstraction layer” to connect the international payment rails with the Ethereum blockchain. The participants leverage Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) to connect both networks.
The financial institution added:
The experiments looked at the design and technical development of a solution and considerations around data privacy and governance, operational risk, and legal liability (…). Swift will continue to work with the financial community to understand the most concrete use cases for tokenised asset adoption and will prioritise its efforts accordingly. It is anticipated that the most compelling case, in the near term, will be in the secondary trading of non-listed assets and private markets.
As of this writing, LINK trades at $5.9 with sideways movement over the past few days.
Cover image from Unsplash, chart from Tradingview
