Bitcoin, Fiat & Rock'n'Roll Architecting DLT Financial Infrastructures with SWIAT-CTO Ivica Aračić
In this episode of BFRR – Bitcoin, Fiat & Rock ’n’ Roll, co-host Michael Blaschke sits down with Ivica Aračić, CTO of Swiat and former IT architect at DekaBank, to map the real architecture of DLT-based financial market infrastructures—beyond pilots and press releases. With two decades in software engineering and hands-on work in TradFi since 2016, Ivica explains how the industry is shifting from “zero-to-one” experiments to “one-to-many” scale.
We introduce and use the ASAP model (Access, Service, Asset, Platform) as a simple, powerful lens:
- Platform: permissioned Ethereum and other ledgers now run reliably, but governance and neutral coordination matter.
- Asset: tokenization is real (bonds, fund shares, money-like instruments), yet standards beyond ERC-20 remain fragmented.
- Service: the hard part—DvP/DvD, cross-ledger settlement, secondary markets, and payment legs (central bank money, tokenized deposits, stablecoins). Progress is tangible (e.g., Eurosystem trials, Pontus Track), but consolidation is key.
- Access: institutions want convenient, custody-driven access; UX should hide the blockchain while preserving its benefits.
We discuss why convergence and consolidation are finally happening (industry coalitions, neutral shared utilities, and big-tent moves like ledger interoperability) and how Swiat’s Regulated Layer 1 aims to provide a credibly neutral meeting place for European finance—so competition can move to assets and services, not base infrastructure. Ivica shares a pragmatic roadmap: finish the payment leg across money types, enable liquid secondary markets under the Pilot Regime, and achieve eligibility so tokenized assets are first-class collateral.
Long view? Success is when no one talks about wallets or chains—just better, safer markets.
ASAP: A Conceptual Model for Digital Asset Platforms SWIAT Research Ivica Aračić’s Newsletter Ivica Aračić at LinkedIn Bitcoin, Fiat & Rock'n'Roll Website Bitcoin, Fiat & Rock'n'Roll Telegram Channel
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