Last week the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) granted AsiaNext a provisional Capital Markets Services license. The digital asset startup is a joint venture between the Swiss stock exchange SIX and Japan’s SBI Digital Asset Holdings.
AsiaNext has big plans as an institutional grade trading venue for cryptocurrencies and digital securities. Each spot market requires more licenses that are still a work in progress, so the target is cryptocurrency derivatives in the meantime.
Both its backers, SBI and the SIX Digital Exchange (SDX), are active in the crypto sector. And even more so with tokenized securities. SDX was the first regulated digital securities exchange to go live. A year ago, SBI launched the Osaka Digital Exchange (ODX), a proprietary trading system (PTS) for equities. It plans to provide a secondary market for security tokens this year.
Together the organizations link Switzerland, Singapore and Japan with the potential to provide international liquidity for digital securities.
Given they’re all regulatory compliant, one of the keys is the central securities depository (CSD). Last year, SDX linked its digital CSD to the conventional SIX CSD, enabling investors that are not blockchain savvy to buy some of the CHF 375m ($419m) UBS digital bond, the largest digital security issued to date.
That interlinking between CSDs will also happen geographically, enabling global liquidity in a regulated manner.
