Swift, the global financial messaging network, will launch live trials of digital asset and currency transactions in 2025.
Banks in North America, Europe, and Asia will participate, using Swift’s platform to conduct transactions involving both digital assets and traditional currencies.
These trials will demonstrate Swift’s orchestration capabilities, moving beyond experimentation to real-world application.
Swift will interlink various digital asset networks, blockchains, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), enabling seamless transactions between traditional and emerging forms of value.
The trials aim to address the issue of fragmented digital platforms, often called “digital islands,” by connecting them through Swift’s global network.
Key use cases for these trials include payments, foreign exchange (FX), and securities transactions.
Swift’s focus is on integrating both digital and fiat currency platforms into a single system, providing financial institutions with a streamlined approach to handling multiple types of assets.
This builds on prior experiments where Swift successfully connected public and private blockchains and linked CBDCs on a global scale.
The scope of these projects includes ongoing collaborations with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and Banque de France as part of the European Central Bank’s initiative, with a focus on foreign exchange use cases.
Additionally, Swift is exploring integration with emerging bank-led networks such as the US Regulated Settlement Network.
The company is also participating in Project Agora, a Bank for International Settlements-led project aimed at integrating tokenized commercial bank deposits and tokenized wholesale CBDCs.
Swift has outlined plans to ensure that its network of over 11,500 financial institutions can securely support both traditional and digital assets through their existing connections.
The trials aim to bridge the gap between these asset types, demonstrating the infrastructure’s ability to facilitate seamless global transactions.
“As new forms of value emerge, our intention is to continue offering our community the ability to seamlessly make and track transactions of all kinds of assets – using the same secure and resilient infrastructure that is integral to their operations today,”
said Tom Zschach, Chief Innovation Officer, Swift
The tokenised assets market is expected to grow significantly, with projections from Standard Chartered and Synpulse estimating it could reach US$30 trillion by 2034.
A survey by Celent and BNY Mellon also shows that 91% of institutional investors are interested in tokenised assets.
Featured image credit: Edited from Freepik
