In an ever-evolving crypto ecosystem, Chainlink has steadily established itself as the standard for oracles. This position has enabled it to partner with the SWIFT interbank network while developing a bridge for tokenized equities on the Backed Finance protocol.
Chainlink and SWIFT: Unlocking the Next Evolution of Global Finance
The evolution of the cryptocurrency sector relies on a succession of numerous projects, many of which eventually fade away, leaving room for the most robust ones—such as the decentralized oracle network Chainlink (LINK), created in 2019.
A solution now adopted beyond the crypto ecosystem, to the point of establishing itself as the standard for oracles among traditional finance players, such as the SWIFT interbank messaging system, with which Chainlink will demonstrate as early as 2022 “a secure and scalable method for transferring tokenized assets between different blockchains using the CCIP protocol.”
A partnership that will only grow, to the point of bringing together SWIFT, Euroclear, Chainlink, and 22 of the world’s largest financial market infrastructures and institutions this year to establish a “new unified infrastructure to streamline the processing of securities transactions.”
How Chainlink enables institutions to connect to any public/private blockchain using the SWIFT infrastructure
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 significant acceleration since the start of the year, to the point where its valuation has more than tripled over this period. However, there is still a long way to go before this innovative solution can be fully established in the traditional equity market.
In fact, tokenized stocks—both private and publicly traded combined—account for just $1 million of the sector’s $18.6 billion valuation. This represents room for growth, a space where the Backed Finance protocol is seeking to establish itself with the launch of its xBridge, which enables the transfer of these assets between the Ethereum and Solana (SOL) blockchains.
“xStocks” developed using Chainlink’s CCIP protocol. This allows them to retain all the properties of the underlying shares, such as potential stock splits, dividend calculations, or other corporate actions, with a guaranteed 1:1 ratio.
With xStocks, we introduced tokenized stocks into DeFi in a permissionless manner, 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 shares are, of course, available on the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange—the platform behind the development of these xStocks—as well as following the acquisition of Backed Finance in early December, which holds an estimated market share of over 20% in this rapidly growing sector.
