Swift Could Support Interconnected CBDCs Via Chainlink

Swift, the global interbank messaging service, released a report on August 31 that showcased how over a dozen major financial institutions and infrastructure providers utilized Web3 oracle provider Chainlink’s Cross Chain Interoperability Protocol to securely and scalably transfer tokenized assets between blockchains.

“The ability to use your existing bank systems to integrate with hundreds of private/bank or public/DeFi chains, through only one integration, is a big unlock for the entire global financial industry to flow into the blockchain industry,” Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov posted on X.

The financial services cooperative demonstrated that Swift is capable of acting as an access point across various networks utilizing existing secure financial services architecture, according to the report. This would reduce institutional investment challenges surrounding tokenized asset development. Further, the experiments fall under Swift’s wider plans to underpin interconnectivity between Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and other digital assets.

Participating firms included major financial institutions such as ANZ, BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, Citi, Clearstream, Euroclear, Lloyds Banking Group, SIX Digital Exchange, and The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation.

The initiative leveraged Chainlink's technology as an enterprise abstraction layer to ensure secure connectivity between the Swift and Ethereum Sepolia networks, with Chainlink's CCIP facilitating asset transfers between the originating and target blockchains.

Centralization Concerns

While Chainlink's CCIP demonstrated its ability to potentially link CBDCs that may not be fully decentralized, some industry participants say Chainlink itself lacks decentralization.

In years past, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin commented on Reddit to clarify that although he was happy Chainlink existed, “its security model is too centralized for me to be satisfied with it being the solution to all oracle problems.”

DeFi governance delegate Chris Blec has previously called out Chainlink on the capacity of the protocol to expose users to risks from outside actors, more recently noting that every price feed from the oracle is controlled by one to four unknown individuals who could “take DeFi down whenever they want with a single Ethereum transaction.”