As a key moment for the global financial system and blockchain industry alike, Swift announced it is launching a new blockchain-based ledger.
Chainlink acknowledges the wok of their partner Swift and the broader Swift community on “adopting blockchains and oracle networks as a key next step, validating the clear value that these technologies bring to modernizing the financial system.”
As noted by Swift, the ledger “is a natural extension of Swift’s progressive ecosystem innovation and live digital asset trials over the past two years.”
Over more than seven years, Chainlink and Swift have collaborated “across numerous initiatives, all with a common theme of enabling financial institutions to connect to blockchain networks using their existing infrastructure and messaging standards.”
As the so-called industry-standard oracle platform, Chainlink provides “the essential connectivity to chains, onchain standards, and services that institutions in the Swift ecosystem will need to enact their plans for institutional tokenization.”
The Swift community has “started to work closely with Chainlink on implementations of this technology, including enabling financial institutions to connect to any existing public/private chain using Chainlink and Swift infrastructure, UBS’s use of Swift messages to subscribe to and redeem from tokenized funds, and a global corporate actions industry initiative using Swift messages together with 24 global organizations, including some of the world’s largest financial and market infrastructures, such as DTCC and Euroclear, as well as financial institutions, including UBS, DBS Bank, BNP Paribas’ Securities Services business, ANZ, Wellington Management, and Schroders.”
Building on the previous developments, Swift and Chainlink began collaborating “more broadly with the financial industry.”
Together, they launched coordinated projects focused “on interoperability with existing financial infrastructure, modernizing asset servicing workflows, and powering advanced tokenization use cases.”
In 2023, Swift and Chainlink collaborated with “over a dozen major financial institutions and market infrastructures, including Euroclear, Clearstream, ANZ, Citi, BNY Mellon, BNP Paribas, Lloyds Banking Group, and SDX, to demonstrate how tokenized assets could be transferred between wallets on the same blockchain, across different public chains, and between public and private networks.”
The solution leveraged a combination of Chainlink and existing Swift infrastructure and messaging standards, “enabling institutions to simulate cross-system settlement workflows without replacing their backend systems.”