The initiative, dubbed the FIX-FinP2P Protocol Interoperability Alliance, aims to upgrade existing financial infrastructure to seamlessly interact with distributed ledger technology by facilitating interoperability across traditional financial systems and blockchain-based platforms.

The alliance is dedicated to enabling messaging between traditional finance and digital securities, such as regulated institutional tokenized real-world assets including bonds, loans, securities lending, alternative investments, repo, and money market funds. It entails the integration of the open-source FIX Trading Community and the open-source FinP2P tokenization interoperability protocol, with Ownera as an integration partner.

The Joint GDF and FIX Trading Community Working Group, which first met on June 20th, will operate over a four-month period, during which participating GDF and FIX community member firms and relevant blockchain technology firms will collaborate to test the integration of a FIX-based trading system with a FinP2P router in a sandbox environment.

Anthony Woolley, co-chair of the GDF Tokenization Forum and head of business development and marketing at Ownera says: “The biggest challenge facing tokenization initiatives today is to connect market supply and demand at scale and make it easy for buy-side institutions to access the pipelines of high-quality assets now being tokenized by the sell-side. The FIX-FinP2P Alliance will be tackling that problem head-on by enabling institutions to use their existing FIX Gateways to connect to the world of tokenization without having to worry about the expense and complexity of integrating technologies such as blockchain and digital custody into their existing systems.”

The culmination of the Alliance’s efforts will be the publication of a white paper summarizing the sandbox testing outcomes, insights gained, and recommendations for enhancing FIX to accommodate digital assets.

Jim Kaye, executive director at FIX Trading Community, comments: “This Alliance is a natural partnership - both FIX and FinP2P were conceived as open peer-to-peer protocols and the potential for our community to use their FIX gateways to instruct the orchestration and settlement of tokenization transactions over FinP2P will be a testament to the power and flexibility of the FIX messaging language.”.
For more information about the FIX-FinP2P Protocol Interoperability Alliance and to participate in the Working Group, please contact Anthony Woolley at anthony.woolley@ownera.io.