SBI Group (SBI), one of Japan’s largest financial conglomerates with the USD equivalent of over $200 billion in total assets, and Chainlink, the industry-standard oracle platform, announced a strategic partnership focused on accelerating blockchain and digital asset adoption across global markets. Japan’s sophisticated financial market and rapidly evolving digital asset ecosystem provide an ideal environment to launch and validate initial use cases. This strategic collaboration combines SBI’s deep market expertise with Chainlink’s secure and reliable infrastructure for data and interoperability, used by leading financial institutions and DeFi applications worldwide.

As a recent survey from SBI Digital Asset Holdings, the digital asset arm of SBI, covering over 50 financial institutions revealed, exposure to and demand for digital assets have increased significantly over the past 12 months. 76% of respondents intend to invest in tokenized securities to benefit from lower costs, shorter settlement periods, among other key benefits. However, the lack of institutional-grade market infrastructure for digital assets was cited as the primary barrier to wider market adoption. As blockchains underpin digital assets, an institutional- grade blockchain interoperability solution is pivotal to fostering adoption and developing an end-to-end digital asset ecosystem.

SBI and Chainlink’s strategic partnership focuses on a number of key use cases for financial institutions in Japan and the APAC region. This includes enabling cross-chain tokenized real-world assets, such as real estate and bonds, utilising Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), a protocol that enables secure transactions across any chains while ensuring compliance and privacy. CCIP and Chainlink SmartData will also be leveraged to bring net asset value (NAV) data onchain for tokenized funds, which helps to unlock liquidity and improve operational efficiency. The partnership will also focus on facilitating payment versus payment (PvP) for FX and cross-border transactions using Chainlink CCIP, whilst also leveraging Chainlink Proof of Reserve to provide transparent onchain verifications of the reserves backing stablecoins.

“It has been great working with the SBI team, they are one of the most forward-looking and technically advanced groups in the blockchain industry. We have been building very advanced fund tokenization and stablecoin DvP use cases with SBI for a while now, and I am excited to see our great work move towards a state of production usage at a large scale. SBI’s choice to rely on the Chainlink standard for their digital asset transactions shows that the security/reliability, compliance features, and cross-border connectivity of Chainlink are what is needed to do high-value institutional transactions.”—Sergey Nazarov, Co-Founder, Chainlink

“Chainlink is a natural partner for SBI complementing our financial footprint with their market leading interoperability and reliability onchain. With our combined strengths, we are delighted to be working together on developing groundbreaking, secure, compliance-focused solutions, including powering compliant cross-border transactions using stablecoins, that accelerate the widespread adoption of digital assets in Japan and the region.”— Yoshitaka Kitao, Representative Director, Chairman, President; CEO of SBI Holdings

The SBI team and Chainlink have already proven seamless collaboration in the past. Chainlink, UBS Asset Management, and SBI Digital Markets (an SBI subsidiary in Singapore) previously completed an initiative for automated fund administration and transfer agency using smart contracts under the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Project Guardian.

Source: Chainlink