Yesterday Australian bank ANZ said it has joined Project Guardian, the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) initiative exploring asset tokenization. The bank’s goal is to explore blockchain interoperability between private blockchains. ANZ’s partners in the project are ADDX, the Singapore tokenized asset marketplace, and Chainlink which has its CCIP interoperability solution.
ANZ has previously worked with Chainlink to explore using the bank’s A$DC stablecoin to settle tokenized carbon credit transactions across multiple blockchains. Hence, a wild guess is that an ANZ stablecoin might be used to settle ADDX securities transactions.
“Tokenised asset markets are highly fragmented, with tokenised assets and related services developed across different blockchains that are not natively interoperable,” said ANZ Banking Services Lead, Nigel Dobson. “This can limit the adoption of tokenised assets, while making the integration process for financial institutions complex.” Hence the need to trial interoperability solutions.
Project Guardian is a kind of international sandbox for tokenization involving 24 international institutions (and counting). It includes regulators from Singapore, the UK, Switzerland and France, and several industry bodies such as ICMA, ISDA and GFMA. Many of the projects use public blockchain. MAS is also working on the Global Layer One, a public permissioned blockchain network for regulated finance.
