SIX, Switzerland’s stock exchange, has announced that it is working on a ‘digital asset ecosystem’, SIX Digital Exchange (“SDX”), which will be a regulated market just like the traditional financial one.

SDX is going to be the first market infrastructure in the world which will allow  “a fully integrated end to end trading, settlement and custody service for digital assets.” Its creators promise that its ecosystem will be safe for “issuing and trading digital assets, and enable the tokenization of existing securities and non-bankable assets to make previously untradeable assets tradeable.”

Thomas Zeeb, Head Securities & Exchanges, SIX, acknowledged that the digital world is currently experiencing multiple problems with safety and security among them. Indeed, the recent news of Bithumb hacking and suspicious activity concerning Syscoin and Binance is undermining the traders’ trust which is a crucial problem along with stability, transparency, and accountability. SDX is planning to fix this by attempting to officially tackle these problems.

“Do you adopt a model with many sub-custodians, including inefficient interfaces and with inherent risks, or do you go with a recognized and regulated infrastructure provider who provides all steps of the chain in an integrated and secure model? We believe that the latter has significant value. As the stock exchange infrastructure for Switzerland, we know what it takes to build and run mission-critical and scalable, systemically important services,” says Zeeb.

Concurrently, Jos Dijsselhof, CEO SIX, emphasizes that by creating SDX we enter a new era for capital markets infrastructures in which digital assets will be a critical component.

“The financial industry now needs to bridge the gap between traditional financial services and digital communities,” he stresses.

The service will be based on DLT and is expected by mid-2019. It is noteworthy that Switzerland is extremely fast at adopting cryptocurrency and blockchain comparing to other countries which are still exploring the matter, like Norway. 

For example, the state is already actively testing blockchain voting inside the country. Thus, after the canton of Zug carried out a successful municipal blockchain-based vote, Lausanne, a city which is located in the French-speaking part of the country, has announced that it is planning to do the same and is working on a blockchain-based voting system. 

 

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