Global Digital Finance (GDF) and the FIX Trading Community have created a working group for the FIX-FINP2P Protocol Interoperability Alliance. FinP2P is a routing network aiming to provide an interoperability protocol between different blockchains that host tokenized digital assets. It was founded by JP Morgan-backed Ownera.
Today there are numerous private and public blockchains hosting digital bonds, funds and other digital assets. A payment token might exist on a separate network. Rather than connecting to each network separately, FinP2P allows buyers to connect to a single network which performs the integration.
On the FIX side, it’s a widely used messaging standard in traditional finance front-office trading systems. Hence, by integrating the two it potentially allows trading of traditional and digital securities from a single interface.
The combination of the two helps to address the interoperability between blockchains and with legacy systems, at least the front office ones.
“The biggest challenge facing tokenization initiatives today is to connect market supply and demand at scale and make it easy for buy-side institutions to access the pipelines of high-quality assets now being tokenized by the sell-side,” said Anthony Woolley, Co-Chair of the GDF Tokenization Forum and Head of Business Development and Marketing at Ownera.
“The FIX-FinP2P Alliance will be tackling that problem head-on by enabling institutions to use their existing FIX Gateways to connect to the world of tokenization without having to worry about the expense and complexity of integrating technologies such as blockchain and digital custody into their existing systems.”
FinP2P and the GDF have been working together for several years with institutions including the DTCC and ING testing FinP2P has far back as 2021. As a routing network, it offers an alternative to native blockchain interoperability and APIs.
“Both FIX and FinP2P were conceived as open peer-to-peer protocols and the potential for our community to use their FIX gateways to instruct the orchestration and settlement of tokenization transactions over FinP2P will be a testament to the power and flexibility of the FIX messaging language,” said Jim Kaye, Executive Director at FIX Trading Community.
