As a landmark moment for the global financial system and blockchain industry alike, Swift announced at Sibos 2025 it is launching a new blockchain-based ledger. We congratulate our partner Swift and the broader Swift community on adopting blockchains and oracle networks as a key next step, validating the clear value that these technologies bring to modernizing the financial system. As noted by Swift, the ledger is a natural extension of Swift’s progressive ecosystem innovation and live digital asset trials over the past two years.

Over more than seven years, Chainlink and Swift have collaborated across numerous initiatives, all with a common theme of enabling financial institutions to connect to blockchain networks using their existing infrastructure and messaging standards. 

As the industry-standard oracle platform, Chainlink provides the essential connectivity to chains, onchain standards, and services that institutions in the Swift ecosystem will need to enact their plans for institutional tokenization. The Swift community has already started to work closely with Chainlink on numerous implementations of this technology, including enabling financial institutions to connect to any existing public/private chain using Chainlink and Swift infrastructure, UBS’s use of Swift messages to subscribe to and redeem from tokenized funds, and a global corporate actions industry initiative using Swift messages together with 24 global organizations, including some of the world’s largest financial and market infrastructures, such as DTCC and Euroclear, as well as leading financial institutions, including UBS, DBS Bank, BNP Paribas’ Securities Services business, ANZ, Wellington Management, and Schroders. 

The following blog dives deeper into some of the great work coming out of the Swift and Chainlink partnership over the years and how that work accelerates a world where blockchains power a modern financial system.

The First Bridge: Sibos 2016

When Sergey Nazarov spoke at Sibos 2016 in Geneva, blockchain and smart contracts were terms that many financial leaders were only starting to encounter. There was little consensus yet on whether they would amount to anything beyond niche experimentation.

At Sibos 2016, Sergey described an automated, smart contract-based solution for the post-trade securities lifecycle, specifically ISO 20022-compliant bond instruments. The following year, Sergey returned to Sibos in Toronto to present a live demonstration.

The solution leveraged oracle infrastructure to feed external interest rate data into a smart contract. The smart contract used the data to calculate a LIBOR benchmark and bond coupon payment. The contract also used oracle infrastructure to generate ISO 20022 payment messages sent over Swift, allowing settlement to take place over the same rails already trusted by global banks.

“That was maybe the first steps of this sort of love story between Swift and Chainlink, which continues today.”—Jonathan Ehrenfeld Solé, Head of Strategy at Swift  (source) 

The most novel aspect of this solution was the connectivity between blockchains and traditional financial and API infrastructure, particularly to bring trusted financial data onchain and trigger offchain payments on traditional payment rails. Oracle infrastructure had long been one of the biggest limitations of blockchain technology, but Sergey was keenly aware of the problem and how to solve it well before the rest of the industry.

Swift and Chainlink Accelerate Interoperability

In 2019, Chainlink officially launched in production and quickly became the standard within DeFi while also deepening its institutional capabilities, as Swift continued to investigate blockchain applications across capital markets.

In 2021, Sergey spoke at Swift’s Smarter Securities event, where he outlined how enterprises could use Chainlink to connect existing backend systems to multiple blockchains. Later that year, Swift attended its first Chainlink SmartCon, where Swift Strategy Director, now Head of Strategy, Jonathan Ehrenfeld Solé, discussed how Chainlink-powered smart contracts could interoperate with Swift’s messaging standards.

At SmartCon 2022, Sergey and Jonathan announced a new development being worked on between Swift and Chainlink, centered on how Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) could facilitate the movement of data and token transfers between institutions, with those transfers initiated using existing Swift infrastructure and messaging standards. The goal was to show how Swift could serve as a single access point for institutions interacting with a growing number of blockchain networks, enabling them to reuse their existing infrastructure to support digital assets.

Working With the World’s Leading Financial Institutions

Building on the previous developments, Swift and Chainlink began collaborating more broadly with the financial industry. Together, they launched coordinated projects focused on interoperability with existing financial infrastructure, modernizing asset servicing workflows, and powering advanced tokenization use cases.

Swift and Chainlink Demonstrate a Secure and Scalable Way To Transfer Tokenized Assets Cross-Chain Using CCIP

In 2023, Swift and Chainlink collaborated with over a dozen major financial institutions and market infrastructures, including Euroclear, Clearstream, ANZ, Citi, BNY Mellon, BNP Paribas, Lloyds Banking Group, and SDX, to demonstrate how tokenized assets could be transferred between wallets on the same blockchain, across different public chains, and between public and private networks. The solution leveraged a combination of Chainlink and existing Swift infrastructure and messaging standards, enabling institutions to simulate cross-system settlement workflows without replacing their backend systems.

Swift, Euroclear, Chainlink, and 8 Major Financial Institutions Transform Asset Servicing With AI, Oracles, and Blockchains

In 2024, Chainlink collaborated with Swift and Euroclear on an industry-wide corporate actions initiative focused on improving the sourcing, structuring, and distribution of corporate action data. The project brought together eight major financial organizations, including Swift, Euroclear, UBS, Franklin Templeton, and Wellington Management, around how AI, oracle networks, and blockchains could be used to create standardized onchain records of corporate actions data from unstructured issuer disclosures. It also highlighted how Chainlink can interoperate with Swift’s messaging protocol to enable downstream data consumers to access the records via their existing systems.

Swift, UBS Asset Management, and Chainlink Successfully Bridge Tokenized Assets with Existing Payment Systems

In 2024, as part of the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Project Guardian, Swift, UBS Asset Management, and Chainlink successfully demonstrated the settlement of tokenized fund subscriptions and redemptions using the Swift network. The solution demonstrated how digital asset transactions can be settled offchain in fiat by maintaining compatibility with institutional infrastructure. Chainlink’s platform orchestrated the onchain interactions required to mint or burn fund tokens based on subscription or redemption requests. Swift’s network was used in combination with Chainlink to transmit the fiat payment instructions, enabling the transaction to complete without requiring an onchain form of cash settlement. This provided institutions with a practical model for integrating tokenized asset workflows with widely used payment systems.

Swift and Chainlink Enabling Banks To Connect To Blockchains Using Existing Swift Standards and Chainlink Infrastructure

At Sibos 2024, Sergey Nazarov introduced a pre-production solution that enables banks to connect to blockchains using the Swift messaging standards and infrastructure already used in traditional financial systems. By combining these standards with Chainlink’s platform, institutions can initiate and complete blockchain transactions while maintaining their current operational workflows. This approach is designed to facilitate seamless interoperability across systems and lower the cost and complexity of adopting tokenized assets at scale.

2025: Building Institutional-Grade Standards for a Connected, Onchain Financial System

Establishing a Unified Standard for Asset Servicing With the Chainlink Platform, Blockchains, and AI

Announced at Sibos 2025, Chainlink and 24 of the world’s largest financial institutions and market infrastructures, including Swift, DTCC, Euroclear, UBS, and Wellington Management, continued their work on corporate actions processing. Building on the foundations established in Phase 1, the second phase introduces a production-grade system that includes new data attestor and data contributor roles. These roles enable trusted institutions to validate and enrich the LLM-extracted corporate actions records, allowing data accuracy for confirmed records to reach 100%.

The Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) orchestrated the validation of multiple AI model outputs and transformed the confirmed results into ISO 20022-compliant messages, which were then transmitted to the Swift Network. In parallel, Chainlink Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) distributed these same confirmed records across DTCC’s blockchain ecosystem and additional public and private blockchain environments, enabling simultaneous access across traditional infrastructure and blockchain-based platforms. New institutionally-designated roles for data attestors and contributors were also introduced to cryptographically attest to data accuracy and contribute to any missing data fields, creating a verifiable chain of custody across the lifecycle of each corporate action.

Throughout testing, the system achieved nearly 100% data consensus agreement among AI models across all evaluated corporate actions. The architecture also demonstrated support for multilingual processing across disclosures written in non-English languages, such as Spanish and Chinese, enabling broader global coverage across jurisdictions.

This solution unlocks a unified golden record for corporate actions, an attested, real-time source of truth that can be accessed simultaneously by smart contracts, custodians, and post-trade systems. It also enables tokenized equities, an increasingly adopted category of tokenized assets, to reference the same confirmed records across public and private blockchains, laying the groundwork for better synchronization and increased automation across onchain markets.

By standardizing how corporate actions data is extracted, validated, and delivered, the collaboration creates a shared foundation for asset servicing across both blockchain networks and traditional financial infrastructure.

Advancing Global Finance Together

By defining shared standards and aligning with existing market infrastructure, Swift and Chainlink have given institutions a reliable way to participate in this new era of finance using the systems they already trust. 

We are proud to work closely with Swift, and are excited about the future of our partnership as we transition the financial system into its next chapter, one defined by digital assets and onchain financial services.