SmartCon Viewpoint | UBS Head of Digital Assets: Will Collaborate with Chainlink to Solve On-Chain/Off-Chain Interconnection Issues and Achieve Seamless Integration Between Traditional Finance and Distributed Systems

Chainlink's annual flagship conference, SmartCon, opened yesterday in New York. Laurens Schepens, Head of Digital Assets at UBS, and Fernando Vazquez, President of Capital Markets at Chainlink, held a fireside chat on the theme "UBS Tokenization Platform and Chainlink: Empowering Institutional Tokenization." According to Laurens, UBS Tokenize is a unified tokenization service platform within the UBS Group, covering the entire process from structuring, issuance, tokenization, custody, and distribution. On the same day, UBS officially announced that its internal tokenization platform, UBS Tokenize, had completed its first blockchain-based fund subscription and redemption transaction in a production environment. This is also the world's first transaction based on the Chainlink Digital Transfer Agent (DTA) standard, achieving compliant and secure cross-network transfer of fund units with instant processing. This transaction used UBS's Singapore-issued money market fund, uMINT, as its base product, utilizing Chainlink DTA to achieve on-chain fund registration, subscription, and redemption. Laurens pointed out that this standard provides traditional funds with on-chain scalability, enabling fund management processes to run directly on the blockchain. At the Sibos conference in late September, UBS, Chainlink, and Swift announced a move to advance the tokenization of the $100 trillion fund market through Swift workflows. In the pilot, the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) used the ISO 20022 standard to process subscriptions and redemptions of tokenized funds, receiving Swift messages directly from UBS's existing systems and triggering on-chain operations. Laurens stated that the collaboration between UBS, Chainlink, and Swift focuses on resolving the interconnectivity issues between on-chain and off-chain systems, achieving seamless integration between traditional finance and distributed systems. "Currently, we are in a convergence phase, with most liquidity still in traditional systems. The key is to enable the two systems to operate collaboratively, rather than requiring all participants to immediately replace their core systems." UBS plans to expand the functionality of its Tokenize platform in the future, including improving product efficiency using stablecoins and on-chain cash settlement mechanisms, and exploring multi-chain asset management through the Chainlink DTA technology standard. Laurens emphasized that UBS will continue to maintain a hybrid architecture while preparing for a fully blockchain-based financial ecosystem.