SIX Digital Exchange launches in Switzerland with full regulatory approval
SIX Digital Exchange (SDX), the first fully approved digital asset exchange in Switzerland, has finally thrown open its doors with its first transaction which was the issuance of a blockchain bond worth $150 million.
Regulation has been a keyword in the crypto industry in recent times. Till a year or so back, none of the regulators took the crypto industry very seriously as they felt that it was a trading fad that would gradually lose steam and people would then forget about it and would be long gone. But the industry has managed to survive the various periods of a trough and has gone from strength to strength in recent times so much that it now threatens to overwhelm the existing financial ecosystem. This has been a wake-up call for the regulators around the world who are now scrambling to catch up. Switzerland has been one of the countries that have been at the forefront of embracing crypto and rather than trying to shut it down, it has been trying to regulate the industry and it has also been trying to persuade and encourage the players in the industry to get regulated so that they can all grow and flourish.
The SDX was one of the first to apply for the same and it managed to receive 2 licenses from the regulator FINMA last year and it says that this was the first transaction that was performed with full regulated market infrastructure. Credit Suisse, UBS Investment Bank, and Zürcher Kantonalbank acted as the joint lead managers on the bond issuance.
“The first issue of a tokenized bond on the SIX Digital Exchange as well as its listing and placement in the market proves that the forward-looking distributed ledger technology (DLT) also works very well in the highly regulated capital market,” said Thomas Zeeb, global head of markets at SIX.
The blockchain architecture used by SDX is based on permissioned Corda architecture supplied by R3 and an important point to note here is that it doesn’t use any of the other privately owned blockchains like Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and others. This is likely to be the way ahead chosen by most of the large production companies and regulated entities as they would like to build their infrastructure to ensure the security and reliability of the data.
