đ Live trials of digital asset transactions on Swift to start in 2025 đ
Starting next year banks across North America, Europe, and Asia will embark on live trials of digital assets and currency transactions over the Swift network.
The ability to execute digital asset and currency transactions over the Swift network is moving from experimentation to reality. Starting in 2025, global financial institutions will have the ability to use Swiftâs global platform to conduct pilot transactions for the settlement of digital assets and currencies. These trials will demonstrate how financial institutions can transact interchangeably across both existing and emerging asset and currency types using their current Swift connection.
This marks a giant leap forward from our prior experimentation, with a deliberate focus on providing interlinking and orchestration capabilities that could support real-world solutions.
Recent experiments have proven our capacity to connect public and private blockchains, interlink central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) on a global scale, and integrate multiple digital asset and currency networks.
â Now weâre moving beyond experimentation.
Next year weâll be collaborating with our community to pilot an advanced version of our infrastructure that is capable of orchestrating digital asset and currency transactions across networks for the first time. This move will mark an important milestone as we progress towards achieving our ultimate vision of giving financial institutions a single point of access to multiple digital asset classes and currencies.
"For digital assets and currencies to succeed on a global scale, itâs critical that they can seamlessly coexist with traditional forms of money,â said Tom Zschach, Chief Innovation Officer at Swift. âWith our vast global reach, we are uniquely positioned to bridge both emerging and established forms of value, and weâre now focused on demonstrating this in real-world, mainstream applications.â
â Pioneering global interlinking of digital networks
These trials aim to address a key challenge in the continuously evolving digital asset market: the rise of disconnected digital platforms, or âdigital islandsâ, that could hinder more widespread adoption and ease of use for new forms of value.
Currently, 134 countries are exploring CBDCs, and the size of the tokenised assets market is forecast by Standard Chartered and Synpulse to rise as high as $30 trillion by 2034. 91% of institutional investors also say theyâre interested in investing in tokenised assets, according to a survey from Celent and BNY Mellon.
While the scale is impressive, without interconnectivity between platforms, global adoption is set to remain fragmented. The live trials will leverage our existing global network to interlink various digital and traditional currency platforms, providing a single system for banks to transact across borders with digital and fiat currencies and further aiding this new market to grow.
â Proving the real-world impact for payments, FX, and securities
In the lead-up to next yearâs trials, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and Banque de France are leveraging Swiftâs capabilities in ongoing experiments for foreign exchange use cases, as part of the European Central Bankâs initiative to explore new technologies for wholesale payments.
Weâre also investigating how our interlinking capabilities could integrate emerging bank-led networks, such as the US Regulated Settlement Network, with traditional financial systems. Swift has also recently been named as a participant in Project Agora, a Bank for International Settlements-led project exploring the integration of tokenised commercial bank deposits and tokenised wholesale CBDCs on a unified platform.
â Enabling a secure and scalable future for digital assets
Weâre committed to ensuring our global network of over 11,500 financial institutions will be able to support digital assets and currencies through their existing Swift connectivity securely and efficiently. We believe these trials and collaborative innovations are a critical step in achieving global interoperability for these new forms of value, and our global network is an essential bridge between traditional and digital asset platforms.
Swift is uniquely positioned to support the global adoption of diverse asset classes across multiple use cases. As the financial industry continues its migration to ISO 20022 and the promise of richer, more structured data, weâll continue to provide end-to-end transparency, a centralised view of transaction data, and the ability to access it all in real-time â even as value takes on new forms across different networks.
âAs 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," Tom says.
https://www.swift.com/news-events/news/live-trials-digital-asset-transactions-swift-start-2025