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asset transactions . For example , by incorporating digital token identifiers , blockchain wallet addresses , or DLTbased places of settlement . This reflects Swift ’ s role as a mobiliser of industry efforts in reaching harmonisation of common standards , such as ISO 20022 . We believe this will pave the way for a unified , interoperable payments ecosystem , and set the stage for further innovations . Ultimately , we believe our community should have the opportunity to reuse its existing investment and infrastructure , as they use to connect to Swift today . We want to create a single window that can support both digital and traditional asset flows going forward . and can lead to operational challenges and compatibility issues when processing digital asset transactions . The final point is to underline the need for players to ensure they develop very clear business cases to justify continued investment , given the fairly early stages of the market . Of course , there are clear exceptions to this , and we ’ ll gradually see more niche use cases mature into commercial solutions . This does create a little bit of a chicken and egg problem because markets and actors need a mature and interoperable infrastructure for real business value to materialise .
Swift has long played an important role in connecting financial institutions to traditional markets . Can that role extend to the digital asset ecosystem and help address some of these barriers to adoption ? Swift ' s role for the past several decades has been to provide a global network and standardised communication between different platforms and actors
across markets . Therefore , carrying forward this role to support and reach these emerging digital asset platforms or ledgers is a natural extension of the role Swift plays today . On a technical level , we ' ve proven that we can interlink different types of blockchain platforms and networks , whether that ' s emerging CBDC , digital asset , or trade networks , across a range of technologies including both permissioned and permissionless DLT platforms . Our commitment to interoperability will also go a long way to ensuring that the risk of fragmentation , creating so-called ‘ digital islands ’ is mitigated . Over the past several years , our own experimentations , along with the community , have been to demonstrate our vision of facilitating interoperability between digital systems and traditional systems . Beyond the technical elements , we ' ve also worked with the community to introduce updates to existing standards that can support digital
What does the future hold for Swift in this space ? Sibos 2024 is around the corner , and Swift is focused on building on the work we ’ ve done with the community over the past couple of years . Reflecting the industry ’ s sentiment and feedback from our customers to move beyond proof of concepts ( PoCs ), we ’ re working to enhance our existing infrastructure to be able to support real-world digital asset solutions . For example , we have a clear focus on facilitating the orchestration of delivery-versus-payment ( DVP ) and payment-versus-payment ( PVP ) transactions between different networks and ledgers , over our existing network . It ’ s important to reinforce that Swift is not going to go about this alone ; as a cooperative owned by the community , we ’ re building for the community . To get there , we ' re planning a set of targeted pilots with the community in 2025 that will - for the first time - move out of a sandbox environment towards trialling real-world transactions , allowing us to test and refine the development of that infrastructure with valued input from our members . Additionally , you can expect us to continue our collaborative efforts on the development of standards necessary to support digital securities . There ' s more to come , so keep an eye out . As a request to our community , please do get in touch with us . As we move forward , we continue to strongly encourage the spirit of collaboration and look forward to working even more closely with you .
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