Starting next year, Swift said banks in North America, Europe and Asia will begin live trials of digital asset and currency transactions over its global messaging network, which services more than 11,500 financial institutions.

Swift has previously experimented with blockchain transactions in testing environments. However, next year’s trials will pilot an advanced version of its infrastructure capable of orchestrating real-world digital asset and currency transactions across networks for the first time, according to a statement by the firm on Thursday.

The live trials will leverage Swift’s existing global network and interlink various digital and traditional currency platforms, providing a single system for banks to transact across borders with digital and fiat currencies, the firm explained.

The trials are designed to demonstrate how financial institutions can transact interchangeably across both existing and emerging asset and currency types using their current Swift connection. “Global financial institutions will have the ability to use Swift’s global platform to conduct pilot transactions for the settlement of digital assets and currencies,” the firm said.

The announcement follows a series of recent experiments by Swift, working with web3 services firm Chainlink as an enterprise abstraction layer to connect its network to the Ethereum Sepolia test network. The experiments demonstrated that Swift could provide one single point of access to multiple public and private blockchain networks, which could also support institutions creating tokenized assets and the development of central bank digital currencies — currently being explored by 134 countries.

"For digital assets and currencies to succeed on a global scale, it’s critical that they can seamlessly coexist with traditional forms of money,” Swift Chief Innovation Officer Tom Zschach said. “With our vast global reach, we are uniquely positioned to bridge both emerging and established forms of value, and we’re now focused on demonstrating this in real-world, mainstream applications.”

A key aim of the trials was to address the rise of disconnected digital platforms that could hinder the widespread adoption of new forms of value, according to the firm. “While the scale is impressive, without interconnectivity between platforms, global adoption is set to remain fragmented,” Swift said.

“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," Zschach added.

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