Chainlink announced today a landmark technical solution enabling financial institutions worldwide to manage digital asset workflows directly from their existing systems using Swift messaging and the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE). With Swift messages and CRE, banks and institutions can seamlessly access blockchains through the same Swift infrastructure they have relied upon for decades. This shows how institutions can access blockchains without needing to upgrade to new infrastructure, replace their existing processes, or integrate new identity and key management solutions.
A first use case involved a technical and operational pilot with UBS Tokenize, the in-house tokenization unit of UBS. Subscriptions and redemptions for a tokenized fund smart contract from UBS were triggered using ISO 20022 messages through CRE and Swift infrastructure. CRE received the Swift messages, which then triggered subscription and redemption workflows in the Chainlink Digital Transfer Agent (DTA) technical standard.
This new development builds on Swift, Chainlink, and UBS’ past tokenized asset use case in the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Project Guardian in 2024, demonstrating the technical and operational possibility for settlement of tokenized fund subscriptions and redemptions using offchain cash settlement via Swift.
Now, we have expanded the original concept’s scale by integrating CRE to further abstract away the complexities of interacting with tokenized assets by enabling institutions to use Swift messages to trigger onchain events more generically. This interoperability unlock enables last-mile connectivity options already familiar and used by financial institutions and service providers today.
This new plug-and-play solution is set to be a critical unlock for the $100+ trillion global fund industry. Institutions can leverage the speed, efficiency, composability, and risk management benefits of blockchain technology that are only fully realized when tokenized fund workflows are fully onchain.
“I’m very excited about this landmark innovation we’ve achieved by leveraging Swift’s standards and UBS’ tokenized asset design, as we are showing how the use of smart contracts and new technical standards can enable transfer agents and other entities to manage tokenized asset workflows onchain,” said Sergey Nazarov, Co-Founder of Chainlink. “UBS is demonstrating how the use of smart contract-based technologies can be used by financial institutions to more readily explore new types of product lifecycle composability.”
