SIX, the owner and operator of Switzerland’s principal stock exchange has announced plans to launch the SIX Digital Exchange – a crypto assets exchange fully regulated by the country’s financial regulator and central bank. In an announcement on Friday, Swiss Exchange operator SIX revealed its new crypto-initiative which it claims ‘will be the first market infrastructure in the world to offer a fully integrated end to end trading, settlement and custody service for digital assets.’Dubbed the SIX Digital Exchange (SDX), the blockchain-powered platform will facilitate the tokenization of clients’ existing securities as well as enable the issuance and trading of digital assets.”The digital exchange will allow clients of SIX to trade, settle and custodize digital assets in the same way they currently do in the traditional world,” explained SIX head of securities and exchange Thomas Zeeb, describing SDX as an all-in-one platform. SIX further stressed that the platform will see ‘the same standard of oversight and regulation’ from FINMA, Switzerland’s financial regulator and the Swiss National Bank, the country’s central bank.”This is the beginning of a new era for capital markets infrastructures,” said SIX chief executive Jos Disjsselhof, heralding the launch of the upcoming exchange which will launch services in mid-2019. He added:For us, it is abundantly clear that much of what is going on in the digital space is here to stay and will define the future of our industry. The financial industry now needs to bridge the gap between traditional financial services and digital communities. To this end, SIX will also facilitate its clients offer their own tokens through initial coin offerings (ICOs) to raise funds. “We’re putting together a team of developers and advisors that will help clients create ICOs and new products around that,” Zeeb added, underlining SDX as “an ecosystem”. Pointedly, the exchange operator noted that SDX will not be used to enable the direct trading of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum and will instead help introduce traditional financial market participants to tokenize their bankable and non-bankable assets into digital assets. Featured image from Shutterstock