The FIX Trading Community and Global Digital Finance have established a joint working group aimed at bridging buyside trading desks with the realm of tokenized assets.
This initiative, known as the FIX-FinP2P Protocol Interoperability Alliance, seeks to enhance existing financial systems to work seamlessly with distributed ledger technology by promoting interoperability between traditional finance and blockchain-based platforms.
The alliance focuses on facilitating communication between conventional finance and digital securities, including regulated institutional tokenized real-world assets such as bonds, loans, securities lending, alternative investments, repos, and money market funds. It involves the integration of the open-source FIX Trading Community with the FinP2P tokenization interoperability protocol, with Ownera serving as the integration partner.
The Joint GDF and FIX Trading Community Working Group, which convened for the first time on June 20th, will operate over a four-month period. During this time, participating GDF and FIX community member firms, along with relevant blockchain technology firms, will collaborate to test the integration of a FIX-based trading system with a FinP2P router in a sandbox environment.
Anthony Woolley, co-chair of the GDF Tokenization Forum and head of business development and marketing at Ownera, stated: “The biggest challenge facing tokenization initiatives today is connecting market supply and demand at scale and facilitating easy access for buy-side institutions to high-quality assets now being tokenized by the sell-side. The FIX-FinP2P Alliance aims to address this issue directly by allowing institutions to utilize their existing FIX Gateways to connect to the tokenization landscape without the burden of integrating complex technologies such as blockchain and digital custody.”
The efforts of the Alliance will culminate in the release of a white paper summarizing the outcomes of sandbox testing, insights gained, and recommendations for enhancing FIX to support digital assets.
Jim Kaye, executive director at FIX Trading Community, remarked: “This Alliance is a natural partnership. Both FIX and FinP2P were developed as open peer-to-peer protocols. The potential for our community to use their FIX gateways for orchestrating and settling tokenization transactions over FinP2P showcases the power and flexibility of the FIX messaging language.”
For more information about the FIX-FinP2P Protocol Interoperability Alliance and opportunities to participate in the Working Group, please contact Anthony Woolley at anthony.woolley@ownera.io.