Blockchain company Chainlink, küresel financial messaging platform Swift and the asset management unit of Swiss bank UBS said they successfully wrapped up a pilot testing the ability to settle and redeem fiat cash from tokenized funds.

The project, completed as part of the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Project Guardian, showcased how Swift’s infrastructure can facilitate off-chain cash settlements for tokenized funds. It also demonstrates how tokenization and blockchain can work to improve, not replace, Swift, which connects over 11,500 financial institutions in more than 200 countries.

As Singapore and other jurisdictions around the world offer more tokenized funds, the ability to gain quick and efficient access to cash — which is what the multitrillion dollar traditional finance (TradFi) industry wants to settle in — is important.

“I think this shows where we’re going with our work with Swift and how it can be useful for various parts of the financial services industry,” Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink, said in an interview.

Nazarov said the pilot enables the huge market of TradFi investors to subscribe to tokenized funds via a Swift transfer they are already familiar with, and not a stablecoin, central bank digital currency (CBDC) or other digital asset.

“We’ve been emphasizing for years the need for the large institutional market, where most of the world’s value currently resides, to flow into the blockchain industry. We’re now helping facilitate this shift in a reliable, technical and secure way,” Nazarov said.

As part of the pilot, Swift’s system, combined with Chainlink’s platform, also facilitated the automatic minting and burning of UBS tokenized fund tokens.