Banks Ready to Join New SWIFT Digital Asset Pilots in 2025
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is hosting digital currency trials in 2025.According to SWIFT, the core aim of the upcoming pilots is to connect the fragmented cryptocurrency landscape.
Several banks in Europe, Asia, and North America are already preparing to join the new digital asset trials.
SWIFT Set to Commence Digital Asset Trials in 2025In an announcement, the international payment services provider SWIFT said it will start a new digital asset trial in 2025. The trial will test how transactions involving multiple digital assets and currencies work.
The pilots aim to evaluate how SWIFT can provide unified access to multiple digital asset classes for banks and financial institutions.
According to the announcement, the pilots will focus on payments, securities, foreign exchange, and trade to facilitate multi-ledger payment vs payment and delivery vs payment transactions.
The banking network acknowledged the rapid growth of unconnected technologies and platforms in the digital assets sector. It noted that the continuous rise in these unconnected platforms has increasingly fragmented the landscape.
This fragmentation has limited global adoption by creating an intricate web of digital islands. Therefore, SWIFT wants to leverage its unique position in the payment service sector to mend this disparity.
During the trials, SWIFT will leverage its expertise and position to interlink these disparate networks" with one another and existing fiat currencies.
This will enable the network's global community of financial institutions to seamlessly access and use digital assets alongside fiat currencies in transactions.
SWIFT Explores Tokenized Assets Transfers Across BlockchainsIn the announcement, SWIFT highlighted the success of its previous trials in tokenized assets and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).
According to the banking network, it has successfully demonstrated its capability to transfer tokenized value across private and public blockchains. It has also completed trials showing it can interlink central bank digital currencies globally and integrate several cash networks with digital assets.
CBDCs have become increasingly popular recently, with many central banks exploring ways to adopt one. According to reports, 134 countries are exploring CBDCs. Moreover, the global tokenized asset market is estimated to reach $16 trillion by 2030.
Therefore, SWIFT wants to tap into this expanding market, leveraging the emerging digital currency landscape to seal its position in the payment services sector.
Earlier, SWIFT participated in Project Agora, a project led by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). This project explores integrating tokenized commercial bank deposits and wholesale CBDCs on a single platform.
Swift's chief innovation officer, Tom Zschach, commented on the latest development in a blog post. He noted that for digital assets to gain global adoption, they must seamlessly coexist with fiat currencies.
According to Zschach, Swift's vast global reach strategically positions it to bridge the emerging forms of value with the traditional ones.
We're now focused on demonstrating this in real-world, mainstream applications," Zschach said.
He mentioned that Swift plans to continue offering its community the ability to seamlessly make and track transactions of all kinds of assets" using secure and resilient infrastructure.
The post Banks Ready to Join New SWIFT Digital Asset Pilots in 2025 appeared first on The Tech Report.