Today, the Swiss Stock Exchange owner SIX Group said it is offering strategic partners a stake of up to 30% in its digital assets trading platform SDX, reported swissinfo.ch.
Thomas Zeeb, Head Securities and Exchange at SIX Group, revealed that the company plans to allow banks, brokers and other digital asset companies to own part of the new exchange. While a prototype is ready, the SIX Group plans to launch the Swiss Digital Exchange (SDX) later this year for trading digital shares, bonds and other assets on a blockchain platform.
“The SIX board is open to having a minority stake in SDX made available to strategic investors,” said Zeeb. “We are in discussions with a number of firms – such as large banks and broker-dealers – who are extremely interested in taking a stake in SDX because it gives them skin in the game in driving the ecosystem forward.”
“We are not just creating a new exchange; we are creating a new market environment. To create that environment, we want to have the flexibility of allowing partners with the same vision to accompany us on that journey.”
This approach is similar to the governance structure of the SIX Group, which is owned by 120 financial institutions, who are also the primary users of its services.
SIX Group is leading the development of the digital asset in Switzerland and launched the prototype of SDX a few months ago. It features digital security token issuance, live trading, and instant settlement. Initially, SDX’s focus was on large enterprises and it announced plans to list tokenized shares of Nestle and Novartis.
However, two months ago, SIX and Singapore’s digital asset bank Sygnum announced an investment in daura, the SME share registry and tokenization firm. This brought together two different efforts of digital assets in the country. daura is a unit of Swisscom, which was working with digital asset custodian Custodigit, Sygnum and Deutsche Börse for digital assets. Deutsche Börse exited the space and said it would focus on developing digital assets in Germany and the rest of Europe.
Last year, Ledger Insights reported that Citibank, JP Morgan and Credit Suisse were exploring applications on the platform.
Meanwhile, SIX is experimenting with the Swiss National Bank (SNB) and the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) for a wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC). The SNB and SIX will apply the currency to the settlement of tokenized assets.
