Switzerland's principal stock exchange, SIX Swiss Exchange, has chosen to use blockchain consortium R3’s Corda Enterprise platform for its forthcoming blockchain-powered digital exchange. The news was revealed during the R3-hosted Corda Day event in Singapore on March 6.
The SIX Swiss Exchange sees roughly 4.62 billion Swiss Francs (CHF) (~$4.6 billion) in daily turnover, and has a market capitalization of over 1.67 trillion CHF ~($1.6 trillion). As Cointelegraph reported in July 2018, SIX previously unveiled its plans to launch a digital asset ecosystem, dubbed Six Digital Exchange (SDX).
In February 2019, the company announced it would be testing blockchain integration for SDX, and would use the technology to tokenize stocks, bonds and possibly exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
At the time, SIX exchange chairman Romeo Lacher said he expects the new blockchain-powered SDX digital exchange to supersede SIX’s existing marketplace within a decade, and also revealed that the company plans to roll out its own security token offering.
Corda Enterprise is the paid-for offshoot of R3’s open source Corda blockchain platform, and can be used across applications that include capital markets infrastructure, trade finance, identity, insurance, and other financial service or commercial applications.
Adoption by a major financial market infrastructure provider such as SIX represents a first for Corda Enterprise, which saw its first commercial licensing deal in January 2019 with Dutch international bank ING. ING had notably jointly completed the first live transaction in securities using R3’s open source Corda back in March 2018.
As Cointelegraph has reported, in parallel to its ongoing SDX development, SIX listed an advanced multi-crypto-based exchange-traded product (ETP) in fall 2018, which tracks five major cryptocurrencies. Earlier this week, the exchange’s Ethereum (ETH)-based ETP also began trading.