Deutche Bourse is teaming up with Swisscom and Singapore's Sygnum to create a regulatory compliant market for trading in digital assets, competing directly with a forthcoming equivalent venture from the Swiss Stock Exchange.
The core elements of the new platform will include issuance, custody, access to liquidity, and banking services - all leveraging distributed ledger technology (DLT). The first products and services for the build out - which will include a a listing and trading venue for digital assets in the Swiss market - are expected to be launched in the course of 2019.
The strategic partnership includes an investment by Deutsche Bourse in Swisscom and Sygnum joint venture company Custodigit AG. The integrated platform allows bank customers to manage the entire life cycle of their digital assets.
Furthermore, Deutsche Bourse and Sygnum will become shareholders of daura AG, which uses distributed ledger technologies to issue, transfer and register Swiss SME-shares, enabling non-listed companies to access the capital markets.
Singapore-based Sygnum is currently in the process of obtaining a Swiss banking and securities dealer license from the Swiss regulator Finma. With the licence under its belt, Sygnum will provide custody, deposits, credit & lending, capital issuance via tokenization, brokerage and asset management within the digital asset ecosystem.
Jens Hachmeister, managing director, DLT, crypto assets and new market structure, Deutsche Bourse says: "Continuing our investments in new technologies and driving the development around DLT forward is a key focus of Deutsche Bourse Group. Switzerland, known to be a nucleus for financial markets innovation, is the ideal starting point for Deutsche Börse to drive this evolution forward.”
The new venture will tread on the toes of Switzerland's SIX Group, which last week selected R3's Corda platform to provide the underlying blockchain technology for its digital asset listing, trading, settlement and custody service, SIX Digital Exchange (SDX), set for go-live later this year.