SWIFT to Trial Digital Asset Transactions

From 2025, banks in North America, Europe, and Asia will commence testing digital asset transactions via the SWIFT network.

Exciting news! Starting next year, financial institutions from around the world will start trialling live digital asset and currency transactions on the Swift network.

This marks an important milestone in our journey to enable banks to transact interchangeably across both… pic.twitter.com/70BxOMoBpT

— Swift (@swiftcommunity) October 3, 2024

The pilot project aims to explore the capability of financial institutions to conduct transactions with cryptocurrencies, tokenized products, and CBDCs across multiple blockchains using a connection to the payment platform.

Previous experiments conducted by Swift demonstrated the network’s ability to address one of the key challenges in the digital asset space—fragmentation, according to a press release.

Regarding market scale, the firm noted that 134 countries are exploring CBDCs, and the tokenized asset market is projected by Standard Chartered and Synpulse to grow to $30 trillion by 2034. According to a survey by Celent and BNY Mellon, 91% of institutional investors expressed interest in the segment.

“For digital assets and currencies to succeed globally, it is crucial that they coexist seamlessly with traditional forms of money. With our vast global reach, we are uniquely positioned to bridge both new and established forms of value, and we are focused on demonstrating this in real-world mass applications,” said Swift’s Chief Innovation Officer Tom Zschach.

Back in 2023, SWIFT expanded the number of participants in the pilot testing of compatibility between existing payment systems and CBDCs.