By South China Morning Post | Created at 2024-11-01 00:28:11 | Updated at 2024-11-01 02:35:27
2 hours ago
At SmartCon 2024, one of the major Web3 conferences the Hong Kong government courted to the city this year, companies made their pitch for integrating blockchain into the global financial plumbing amid rising geopolitical risks.
Event organiser Chainlink, a blockchain infrastructure firm, said 2,000 people attended the two-day conference that kicked off at Kerry Hotel in Hung Hom on Wednesday. SmartCon is larger this year than in the past, according to the company.
Joseph Chan Ho-lim, under secretary for financial services and the treasury, gave opening remarks to kick off the event, highlighting Hong Kong’s role as a virtual-asset hub even as some of the momentum in that effort appeared to slow this year.
“Hong Kong is uniquely positioned to link virtual assets to traditional financial instruments,” Chan said. “I’m glad to see that Chainlink’s vision and tech – in particular the cross-chain interoperability protocol, CCIP – have made remarkable progress in being adopted in the traditional finance world.”
Chainlink has been pushing to make its technology part of the back-end for what it sees as a future of blockchain-driven finance. It has been working with the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift) since last year to enable blockchain transactions on the dominant global financial messaging network. Banks will be able to start trials of digital asset transactions over Swift starting next year.
“We’ve made a lot of progress integrating existing payment flows like Swift into blockchain events, and we’ve made a lot of progress in getting central banks more comfortable with interconnecting their chains,” Sergey Nazarov, co-founder and CEO of Chainlink, told the Post on the sidelines of the event. “I think at the end of the day, it’ll be a mix of interconnected central bank chains and existing payment systems like Swift interoperating with all of them.”
