Swift is working with more than a dozen financial institutions and market infrastructures to test the use of its messaging network as a means to instruct the transfer of tokenised value over a range of public and private blockchain networks.
The fresh initiative follows a proof-of-concept conducted with Chainlink last year on the development of a Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) that would connect Swift to multiple blockchain networks.
Tom Zschach chief innovation officer, Swift, says there’s unlikely to be a single prevailing blockchain network.
"We would expect to see a multitude of different platforms emerging, each serving different customer segments with their own bespoke capabilities and requirements," he says. "In such a highly fragmented ecosystem, it would simply not be feasible for financial institutions to connect to each and every platform individually. That’s why the community is working with Swift to develop an interoperability model that would enable access to different platforms globally.”
The new set of experiments will see Swift collaborate with the likes of Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, Citi, Clearstream, Euroclear, Lloyds Banking Group, SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) and The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) on a series of potential implementations.
The first use case will involve the transfer of tokenised assets between two wallets on the same public blockchain network (Ethereum Sepolia testnet). The second involves the transfer of tokenised assets from a public blockchain (Ethereum) to a permissioned blockchain. And a third use case will test the transfer of tokenised assets from Ethereum to another public blockchain.