ANZ Bank, one of Australia’s “big four” banks, which has had a forward thinking posture towards blockchain and crypto-assets, has announced that it has completed a pilot building on lessons learned from a SWIFT blockchain interoperability test which took place earlier this year and followed an announcement by SWIFT late last year around the adoption of blockchain technology.
In a press release, Mr Nigel Dobson of ANZ said:
Banks are increasingly exploring use cases involving tokenised assets, with 93 per cent of institutional investors believing in their long-term value, according to a recent EY report.
Mr Dobson cited the Bank of International Settlement’s comments that a “unified ledger” representing a new kind of financial market infrastructure could enable the benefits of tokenisation “by combining central bank money, tokenised deposits and tokenised assets on a programmable platform”.
By using Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) ANZ worked:
to complete a test transaction to simulate the purchase of a tokenised asset, facilitated using A$DC and an ANZ-issued NZ-dollar-denominated stablecoin. This transaction involved technical integration of ANZ’s digital asset services technology stack with CCIP to realise cross-chain settlement of tokenised assets securely and efficiently.
This kind of TradFi usage of blockchain and crypto-asset technology are important steps to help move the industry past tired past narratives and truly unlock the benefits of tokenised real-world assets and upgrade our current financial infrastructure.