The Swiss National Bank (SNB) has made it a very merry Christmas for Swiss crypto lovers by teaming up with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and exchange SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) to launch a blockchain hub. The project, which comes 18 months after SDX first announced that it was getting involved in crypto trading, marks an increased level of legitimacy for the nascent market in the country.
SIX Getting Serious
The hub, which was first announced in October, will initially focus on identifying technological trends influencing central banking and enhancing the universal financial system by uniting innovation experts to help create public instruments.
The hub will handle two projects at the outset, with Singapore, Hong Kong, and Switzerland itself slated to be the beneficiaries. One project, a joint effort between SIX and SNB, will focus on the incorporation of central bank funds onto a distributed ledger technology (DLT) system, with the money used to settle tokenized assets between funding agencies.
The second project looks at the rising demand for central banks to monitor dynamic electronic markets, making the most of the technological advancements that blockchain can offer in order to achieve this.
Stablecoin Coming in 2020?
SIX, the parent company of Switzerland’s chief stock exchange, has been extremely active in pushing cryptocurrency in the country ever since they announced they were getting into the space back in July 2018. Just four months after launching they listed the world’s first crypto exchange-traded product (ETP), followed in July this year by a formal request to SNB to consider a stablecoin for settlements. It would be surprising if such a project was also not part of the SNB, SIX, and BIS tie up, meaning that we can likely look forward to more developments on the subject in 2020.
