Key Points
– Swift will initiate live trials of digital asset and currency transactions across its global network in 2025, marking a shift from testing to real-world implementation.
– The trials aim to demonstrate how financial institutions can seamlessly transact with both digital and traditional currencies using their existing Swift connections, addressing the challenge of fragmented adoption.
Swift, the global financial messaging network, has announced plans to begin live trials of digital asset and currency transactions in 2025. This marks a significant step forward from their previous blockchain experiments in testing environments. The trials will involve banks from North America, Europe, and Asia, utilizing Swift’s extensive network that serves over 11,500 financial institutions worldwide.
Bridging Traditional and Digital Finance
A key objective of these trials is to create a unified system for banks to conduct cross-border transactions with both digital and fiat currencies. Swift aims to leverage its existing global infrastructure to interlink various digital and traditional currency platforms. This approach is designed to allow financial institutions to transact seamlessly across different asset types using their current Swift connection.
Addressing Fragmentation in Digital Asset Adoption
Swift’s Chief Innovation Officer, Tom Zschach, emphasized the importance of integrating digital assets and currencies with traditional forms of money for global success. The company views its vast global reach as a unique advantage in bridging established and emerging forms of value. By providing a single point of access to multiple blockchain networks, Swift aims to support the creation of tokenized assets and the development of central bank digital currencies, potentially solving the issue of fragmented adoption in the digital asset space.
