• Ripple Investor SBI and the SIX Group intend to work together to build the most important liquidity hub for institutional investors and digital assets in Singapore.
• R3 and Ripple are expected to serve as the core technology.

Ripple investor SBI, through its subsidiary SBI Digital Asset Holdings, Inc. and SIX Digital Exchange, announced today that they have formed a joint venture to issue, trade and store digital assets for institutional investors in Singapore. The plan, which is subject to approval by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, provides for the formalization of operations in Singapore next year with the goal of launching active offerings no later than 2022, the official press release said.

SIX Digital Exchange, headquartered in Zurich, is a service provider for trading in digital assets and a member of the SIX Group. It operates the SIX Swiss Exchange (SDX), a trading and settlement service for digital assets in Europe with a focus on Switzerland. The company’s services enable the secure issuance, trading and management of digital assets as well as the tokenization of existing securities and other assets.

Ripple and R3 as technical basis

The newly formed joint venture aims to directly address the institutional demand from insurance companies, banks and pension funds for digital assets such as digital securities and cryptocurrencies. Specifically, the joint venture will offer exchange services such as issuing, listing, trading, CSD infrastructure and custody of digital assets and cryptocurrencies.

These services are expected to be based on both Ripple and R3 technologies, as stated in the announcement:

The Group’s strategic investments and alliances with R3 and Ripple, both of which have advanced distributed ledger technology (DLT), as well as with B2C2, a market maker in the crypto-asset field, have made it possible for the Group to develop blockchain technology, which is expected to become a core technology for the next generation in the financial sector.

It is expected that the joint venture will be fully regulated by existing Singapore law. Through its investment in Japannext Securities, “Japan’s largest proprietary trading system (PTS), the Group has extensive expertise in the exchange business, including the operation of exchanges for digital assets”.

Furthermore, the joint venture will benefit from SBI’s network and influence in Asia, as well as the contacts of SIX Digital Exchange in Switzerland and Europe. In this sense, Tim Grant, head of SDX, said:

Our reach as soon as go live will be across the whole of Southeast Asia and we expect to have market participants from across the region as soon as we launch. The real play is global liquidity. That’s what the institutional market wants. It doesn’t want to trade 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in its own market then go to the next and the next.

The CEO of SBI Digital Asset Holdings, Fernando Vazquez Cao, also stressed the big plans for the joint venture. “We are trying to disrupt ourselves,” said Cao.

SBI is the most important promoter of Ripple in Asia

SBI Holdings is one of the largest supporters of Ripple in Asia. Yoshitaka Kitao, CEO of SBI Holdings, is considered one of the key players in the partnership. Kitao is a member of Ripple’s board of directors and has been the driving force behind new XRP-based projects in the past.

Most recently, FXCoin, which is financially supported by SBI, announced that it has launched a proof of concept with Sumitomo Corporation Group for the settlement of receivables and debts using Ripple’s XRP. The platform is intended to serve as a global cash management system in the long term. Other projects being driven by SBI include the joint venture SBI Ripple Asia and MoneyTap.

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