By Helen Partz of CoinTelegraph

Banks in North America, Europe and Asia are preparing to participate in trials involving digital assets by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).

SWIFT announced on Oct. 3 that it will begin digital asset trials on its network in 2025. The trials will involve experiments with transactions that include multiple digital currencies and assets.

Source: SWIFT

The trials aim to explore how the banking network can provide financial institutions with unified access to “multiple digital asset classes and currencies.”

“Initial use cases will focus on payments, foreign exchange, securities and trade to enable multi-ledger delivery-versus-payment and payment-versus-payment transactions,” the announcement said.

SWIFT’s plan to unify the fragmented digital asset landscape

In the announcement, SWIFT highlighted the rapid growth of unconnected platforms and technologies in the digital asset economy that has led to an “increasingly fragmented landscape.”

According to SWIFT, such fragmentation poses significant impediments to global adoption because it creates a “complex web of ‘digital islands.’”

SWIFT stated:

“SWIFT’s trials will leverage its unique position […] to interlink these disparate networks with each other as well as with existing fiat currencies, enabling its global community to seamlessly transact using digital assets and currencies alongside traditional forms of value.”

SWIFT wants its network to cover “all kinds of assets”

SWIFT chief innovation officer Tom Zschach noted that the banking organization is focused on developing real-world mainstream applications to bridge emerging and “established forms of value.”

SWIFT’s chief innovation officer Tom Zschach. Source: LinkedIn

He also emphasized SWIFT’s intention to seamlessly make and track transactions of “all kinds of assets,” adding:

“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 declined to comment to Cointelegraph on the digital assets likely to be part of its blockchain trials in 2025 and when it expects to launch those trials.

SWIFT has been actively experimenting with blockchain, tokenization and CBDCs

The upcoming digital currency trials on SWIFT are yet another blockchain-related development by the global banking network, founded in the 1970s.

On Sept. 16, SWIFT joined the Bank for International Settlements and a group of central banks in the tokenization Project Agorá. This project aims to identify how tokenized commercial bank deposits can be integrated with tokenized wholesale central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) on a single platform.

In March 2024, SWIFT proposed creating a blockchain-based “state machine,” describing it as a “dynamic model that reflects the current state of transactions and balances across institutions.” The tool could be built on the already-used ISO-20022 messaging technology and could potentially work on a blockchain or a centralized platform like SWIFT’s Transaction Manager, the bank messaging network noted.

Last year, SWIFT issued a report on potential methods of connecting diverse blockchains to solve the issue of cross-chain interoperability.