In an ever-evolving crypto ecosystem, Chainlink is steadily establishing itself as the standard for oracles. This position has enabled it to partner with the SWIFT interbank network, while developing a bridge for tokenized stocks on the Backed Finance protocol.
Chainlink and SWIFT: Unlocking the next evolution in global finance
The evolution of the cryptocurrency sector is based on a succession of numerous projects, many of which eventually disappear, leaving room for the most robust ones, such as the decentralized oracle network Chainlink (LINK), created in 2019.
This solution has now been adopted beyond the crypto ecosystem, to the point where it has become the standard for oracles among traditional financial players, such as the SWIFT interbank messaging system, with which Chainlink will demonstrate in 2022 “a secure and scalable method for transferring tokenized assets between different blockchains using the CCIP protocol.”
This partnership is set to grow, to the point where this year SWIFT, Euroclear, Chainlink, and 22 of the world’s largest financial market infrastructures and institutions will come together to establish a “new unified infrastructure to streamline securities processing.”
As the industry-standard oracle platform, Chainlink provides the essential connectivity to blockchains, on-chain standards, and services that institutions in the SWIFT ecosystem will need to implement their institutional tokenization plans.
Chainlink
xBridge: Backed Finance’s cross-chain solution
The tokenization sector has seen a sharp acceleration since the beginning of the year, with its valuation more than tripling over this period. However, there is still some way to go before this innovative solution can be implemented in the traditional stock market.
In fact, tokenized stocks—both private and publicly traded—represent just $1 million of the sector’s $18.6 billion valuation. This is an area with room for growth, and Backed Finance is attempting to establish itself there with the launch of its xBridge, which can move stocks between the Ethereum and Solana (SOL) blockchains.
These “xStocks” were developed using Chainlink’s CCIP protocol. This allows them to retain all the properties of the represented stocks, such as any splits, dividend calculations, or other actions of the companies concerned, with a guaranteed 1:1 ratio.
With xStocks, we introduced tokenized stocks into DeFi in a permissionless way, and now with xBridge, we’ve come full circle: tokenized stocks can finally circulate as freely as any other crypto asset.
Yotam Katznelson, CTO and COO of Backed
These tokenized stocks are of course available on the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange platform, which was behind the development of these xStocks, but also behind the acquisition of Backed Finance in early December and its estimated market share of more than 20% of this rapidly growing sector.
