Chainlink announced a technical solution enabling financial institutions worldwide to manage digital asset workflows from their systems “using Swift messaging and the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE).”
With Swift messages and CRE, banks and institutions can “access blockchains through the same Swift infrastructure they have relied upon for decades.”
This shows how institutions can access blockchains “without needing to upgrade to new infrastructure, replace their existing processes, or integrate new identity and key management solutions.”
A first use case involved a technical and operational pilot “with UBS Tokenize, the in-house unit of UBS.”
Subscriptions and redemptions for “a tokenized fund smart contract from UBS were triggered using ISO 20022 messages through CRE and Swift infrastructure.”
CRE received the Swift messages, which “then triggered subscription and redemption workflows in the Chainlink Digital Transfer Agent (DTA) technical standard.”
This new development builds “on Swift, Chainlink, and UBS’ past tokenized asset use case in the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Project Guardian in 2024, demonstrating the technical and operational possibility for settlement of tokenized fund subscriptions and redemptions using offchain cash settlement via Swift.”
Now, they have expanded the original concept’s scale by “integrating CRE to further abstract away the complexities of interacting with tokenized assets by enabling institutions to use Swift messages to trigger onchain events more generically.”
This interoperability unlock “enables last-mile connectivity options already familiar and used by financial institutions and service providers today.”
This new plug-and-play solution is “set to be a critical unlock for the $100+ trillion global fund industry.”
Institutions can leverage the “speed, efficiency, composability, and risk management benefits of blockchain technology that are only fully realized when tokenized fund workflows are fully onchain.”
The ability to interact with complex onchain workflows “through Swift messaging is a development reducing operational friction, supporting automated compliance, enhancing transparency, removing reconciliation burdens, and delivering efficiency gains through programmable infrastructure.”
Chainlink is self-described the industry-standard oracle platform “bringing the capital markets onchain and powering the majority of decentralized finance (DeFi).”
The Chainlink stack provides the data, interoperability, compliance, and privacy standards needed to power advanced blockchain use cases for institutional tokenized assets, lending, payments, and stablecoins.
Since inventing decentralized oracle networks, Chainlink “has enabled tens of trillions in transaction value and now secures the vast majority of DeFi.”
Many of the world’s financial services institutions have also adopted Chainlink’s standards and infrastructure, “including Swift, Euroclear, Mastercard, Fidelity International, UBS, ANZ, and top protocols such as Aave, GMX, Lido, and many others.”
Chainlink leverages a fee model where offchain and onchain revenue from enterprise adoption is “converted to LINK tokens and stored in a strategic Chainlink Reserve.”
