Switzerland’s stock exchange – owned and managed by SIX – announced that it is building a fully integrated trading, settlement and custody infrastructure for digital assets. SIX is regulated as an operator of Financial Market Infrastructure (FMI) by Swiss Authorities, FINMA and the Swiss National Bank, and intends that the planned ‘digital asset ecosystem’ – SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) – will enjoy the same standard of oversight and regulation.
It will be the first market infrastructure in the world to offer a fully integrated end to end trading, settlement and custody service for digital assets. The service expects to provide a safe environment for issuing and trading digital assets, and enable the tokenization of existing securities and non-bankable assets to make previously untradeable assets tradeable. The first services will be rolled out in mid-2019. The service will be mainly based on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).
Thomas Zeeb, Head Securities & Exchanges, SIX, said in a statement: “The digital space currently faces a number of key challenges. These include the absence of regulation that ensures official safety, security, stability, transparency and accountability – all of which contribute to a lack of trust. The challenge is less in the trading of assets but rather in the custody and asset servicing, including asset safety. Do you adopt a model with many sub-custodians, including inefficient interfaces and with inherent risks, or do you go with a recognized and regulated infrastructure provider who provides all steps of the chain in an integrated and secure model? We believe that the latter has significant value. As the stock exchange infrastructure for Switzerland, we know what it takes to build and run mission-critical and scalable, systemically important services.”
Read a recent FTCM analysis on institutional adoption of blockchain versus cryptocurrencies