Swiss Stock Exchange SIX chooses R3 Corda for Blockchain platform

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).

As stated back in July of last year, the goal for SDX is creating a regulated exchange platform for digital assets, starting with stocks and then exploring other tradable instruments and even growing to encompass tokenized versions of more esoteric physical assets such as fine art.

Sven Roth, the chief digital officer at SIX Digital Exchange (SDX), said the fact that Corda spans other areas beyond capital markets such as insurance and stretches to things like identity also was a factor.

Roth said the platform, which will be launching in the second half of 2019, will begin with classical bankable assets such as equities, bonds, funds and structured products “that are directly issued on our DLT.”

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.

The selection of Corda Enterprise, the paid-for version of the platform as opposed to the open source Corda, is a significant win for R3, coming on the heels of last week’s news that blockchain builder MonetaGo had switched its underlying architecture from Hyperledger Fabric to Corda.

Speaking of the SIX deal, Charley Cooper, a managing director at R3 said: “The first thing that’s important is the fact that a mainstream influential financial market infrastructure player has decided to launch an exchange for digital assets and do it on blockchain technology.”

The first commercial licensing of Corda Enterprise was last year with Dutch bank ING, but this is the first sale to a financial market infrastructure (FMI) provider, noted Cooper.

Cooper pointed out that many R3 members and investors are also SIX stock exchange trading members and ready to leverage the combined technologies.

That list includes ABN AMRO, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citi, Commerzbank, Credit Suisse, CS Affiliates, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Natixis, RBC, SocGen and UBS.