Chiara Bianchi
Starting in the coming year, Swift has announced that banks across North America, Europe, and Asia will participate in live trials for processing digital asset and currency transactions through its global messaging network, which connects over 11,500 financial institutions.
Swift has previously conducted blockchain-related tests in controlled environments. However, these upcoming trials will introduce a more advanced infrastructure that will, for the first time, facilitate real-world transactions involving digital assets and currencies across different networks, as outlined in the company’s Thursday statement.
These live trials will utilize Swift’s established global network, integrating both digital and traditional currency systems. This unified platform will enable banks to conduct cross-border transactions using digital and fiat currencies, offering a streamlined solution, according to the company.
The purpose of these trials is to show how financial institutions can leverage their existing Swift connections to interact with both established and emerging currency and asset types. “Global financial institutions will have the opportunity to pilot transactions using Swift’s platform for the settlement of digital assets and currencies,” the statement said.
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Transitioning from Testing to Real-world Applications
This development follows Swift’s recent series of experiments in collaboration with web3 services provider Chainlink, which serves as an abstraction layer to connect Swift’s network to the Ethereum Sepolia testnet. These trials demonstrated Swift’s capability to act as a central access point for multiple blockchain networks, both public and private. This functionality could potentially aid institutions in managing tokenized assets and the development of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), which are currently being explored by 134 countries.
“For digital assets and currencies to achieve global success, it is essential that they seamlessly integrate with traditional monetary systems,” said Tom Zschach, Swift’s Chief Innovation Officer. “Given our extensive global reach, Swift is uniquely positioned to connect both new and established value systems, and our current focus is on showcasing this in real-world applications.”
One key objective of the trials is to address the growing number of disconnected digital platforms, which could limit the global adoption of new forms of value, the company explained. “While the scale is impressive, global adoption will remain fragmented without interoperability between platforms,” Swift said.
Zschach further commented, “As new value forms continue to emerge, we aim to ensure our community can easily conduct and monitor transactions across all asset types — all while using the same secure and reliable infrastructure they rely on today.”
