SWIAT received its eWpG license from BaFin in 2025, making it a crypto-securities registrars in Germany. What does this regulatory milestone mean for your business model, and how does operating under the German Electronic Securities Act differentiate you from other blockchain infrastructure providers?
Receiving the eWpG license was a major milestone for SWIAT. It allows us to operate as a regulated crypto‑securities registrar in Germany, meaning we are no longer just a software provider, but also a fully licensed financial service provider. This places us at the intersection of traditional capital‑market infrastructure and blockchain technology.
By operating under the eWpG framework, our platform meets the regulatory requirements across issuance, settlement, and custody of digital securities. For institutional participants, this translates into legal certainty and operational trust and clearly differentiates us from blockchain providers that focus on technology alone.
You describe SWIAT as promoting ‘co-opetition’ — cooperating at the platform layer while competing at the product layer. How does this philosophy manifest in practice, particularly through your involvement in the Regulated Layer One initiative?
A blockchain achieves its full potential when many participants, including competitors, use a shared infrastructure that is neutral and open. Thus, this infrastructure should be treated as a public good or utility, with competitive differentiation occurring at the service or application level on top of the shared infrastructure. Participants can then innovate and develop their own products without duplicating the core infrastructure. Regulated Layer One (RL1) is designed exactly for that and for being regulatory compliant at the same time.
Your ConneX platform bridges traditional and digital assets by allowing participants to onramp traditional assets onchain as collateral. What specific use cases are you seeing gain traction, and which asset classes are institutions most eager to tokenise first?
Through Collateral ConneX (CCX), we enable participants to tokenise traditional assets onchain and use them as digital collateral. Use cases gaining traction we see in derivatives margining, repo, and securities lending, with high-quality liquid asset (HQLA) fixed income and investment-grade (IG) credit emerging as the first wave of tokenised collateral. CCX gives them a seamless path to make that leap by turning traditional assets into real-time, onchain collateral — fully reconciled with their custodians.
You highlight cost reductions of up to 80 per cent and real-time global settlement. Where specifically do these efficiencies come from?
The efficiency gains come from several factors:
- Reduction of intermediaries, because traditional clearing and custodial layers are streamlined onchain.
- Reduction of reconciliation efforts because participants in a transaction use one shared ledger as the single source of truth.
- Programmability allows for process automation, such as settlement and corporate actions, that enables real or near-real-time execution.
Beyond Germany’s eWpG framework, we are seeing regulatory progress across Europe with MiCA, DLT Pilot Regime, and various national initiatives. How fragmented is the European approach to tokenised securities, and does this create challenges or opportunities for infrastructure providers like SWIAT?
Europe is advancing quickly with MiCA, the DLT Pilot Regime, and national initiatives, but fragmentation remains.
While this presents challenges for infrastructure providers in terms of compliance and interoperability, it also creates opportunities to provide a unifying, compliant platform that can operate across multiple jurisdictions, offering clients a consistent approach to tokenised securities.
Still, it remains significantly important for Europe to continue with the consolidation, for instance through initiatives like the capital markets union.
With an efficiency gap compared to other regions, Europe cannot afford further having frictions through national flavours in regulation.
The tokenised asset market has grown significantly, but secondary market liquidity remains relatively thin compared to traditional markets. What needs to happen — technologically, operationally, or culturally — for institutional traders to embrace onchain secondary markets?
The development of digital asset markets requires the convergence of several essential elements.
Firstly, it is necessary to establish regulatory frameworks and market infrastructure capable of supporting the trading of DLT assets; the Pilot Regime in the EU serves as an example of progress in this area.
Secondly, implementing delivery-versus-payment mechanisms with various forms of money, such as stablecoins, tokenised deposits, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), is crucial to accommodate different use cases. In this regard we have progressive initiatives in the EU like MiCA for stablecoins and ECB’s Pontes and Appia for wholesale payments with central bank money.
Thirdly, DLT assets must achieve first-class status from an eligibility standpoint, for instance by expanding collateral eligibility criteria at central banks. Currently, both the public and private sector are collaboratively addressing these components. As these efforts come together, the volume of digital asset transactions is expected to increase significantly.
One of the biggest questions in digital assets is whether we will see convergence between traditional custodians offering crypto services or crypto-native firms building institutional-grade infrastructure. Where do you see the custody landscape heading, and how does SWIAT fit into that evolution?
We expect custody to converge, with traditional institutions adopting digital‑asset services while crypto‑native firms mature toward institutional standards. Both will coexist, but trust, regulation, and interoperability will give established custodians an advantage. SWIAT and Regulated Layer One contribute to this evolution by enabling banks to establish everything necessary for scaling digital assets within a regulatory-compliant environment.
The digital assets ecosystem is developing across multiple blockchains — public, private, permissioned. How critical is interoperability to the long-term success of tokenised securities, and are we solving for it effectively through initiatives like RL1?
Blockchain technology achieves optimal results when assets and counterparties are consolidated onto a single ledger, which minimises friction, dependencies, and reconciliation overhead. While complete consolidation is near to impossible, it remains a valuable objective to pursue.
Public, permissionless blockchains come close to this ideal but often lack accountability and service-level assurances required by regulated institutions.
This shortcoming is significant for organisations with stringent risk management and regulatory requirements.
Permissioned blockchains were developed to address these issues, yet initial implementations tended to create excessively restrictive and insular ecosystems. The next generation of permissioned blockchains strives to balance openness and neutrality versus regulatory compliance. This is precisely the objective of Regulated Layer One.
Given that a unified global ledger for all participants and transactions is unlikely to materialise soon, interoperability continues to be an essential factor in blockchain success. Infrastructure and protocol consolidation improves the ease of interoperability between networks and assets; however, realising this will require time and ongoing effort.
Following 10 years of experimentation and differentiation, the market is now entering a phase characterised by consolidation and convergence.
If we fast-forward five years, what does the digital securities landscape look like? Will tokenisation remain a niche within capital markets, or do you see a fundamental restructuring of how securities are issued, traded, and settled globally?
In five years we expect tokenisation to move beyond a niche and become a mainstream feature of capital markets. SWIAT estimates that an open decentralised financial market will grow to more than €5 trillion by 2030.
Issuance, trading, and settlement of securities will increasingly occur onchain or via hybrid models, combining traditional frameworks with digital efficiencies. This represents a fundamental restructuring of capital markets, improving speed, transparency, and access globally. All puzzle pieces are on the table, and the market is diligently proceeding toward completing the puzzle.
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