Swift Expands Offerings to Support Digital Asset Transactions Across Global Networks

• Swift’s blockchain trials show successful interoperability between public and private blockchains for tokenized assets.
• Swift is exploring multi-ledger platforms for real-time Delivery-vs-Payment and Payment-vs-Payment transactions.
• Swift is focused on scaling digital asset transactions, refining standards for CBDCs and tokenized forms of money.

Swift is advancing efforts to enable its members to seamlessly transact with regulated digital assets and currencies on the Swift network. Recent experiments and collaborations have laid the groundwork for real-world solutions aimed at integrating these new asset classes into global financial systems. Swift’s long standing role in enabling secure and frictionless transactions positions it well for the challenges of integrating diverse digital platforms.

Addressing Challenges in Digital Asset Integration

The rapid growth of digital assets has brought with it complexity. A key issue lies in the proliferation of fragmented technologies and platforms. Institutional investors face hurdles in scaling their digital asset operations due to the multitude of tokenization systems. 

Moreover, central banks across 130 countries are actively exploring central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). However, integrating these emerging currencies into the broader financial ecosystem remains a major challenge.

In recent years, Swift has focused on solving these issues by developing solutions that extend its infrastructure to support digital assets and CBDCs. Swift’s role as a trusted platform for fiat currency transactions now extends to offering similar capabilities for digital assets. 

Notably, Swift’s experiments have shown how its existing infrastructure can interoperate between different blockchains and asset classes, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the growing digital sector.

Building Interoperability Through Innovation

Swift has conducted successful blockchain interoperability trials, showcasing how tokenized assets can move across public and private blockchains. Additionally, two phases of CBDC sandbox projects have demonstrated the possibility of linking CBDCs across networks and integrating multiple asset classes. Swift’s goal is for members to use its global infrastructure to conduct transactions using both traditional and digital currencies.

Further innovations include exploring the feasibility of Delivery-versus-Payment (DvP) and Payment-versus-Payment (PvP) transactions on multi-ledger platforms. This could allow real-time settlement of tokenized assets, with initial payments conducted in fiat currencies and later transitioning to tokenized forms like CBDCs, commercial bank money, or regulated stablecoins.

The Future of Global Digital Asset Transactions

Swift continues collaborating with financial institutions to refine the technical solutions necessary for achieving global interoperability for digital assets. In the coming months, the focus will be on the practicalities of implementing these solutions, including workflows, standards, and market practices, to scale the use of digital assets and currencies globally.