SWIFT has officially launched its blockchain-based shared ledger, with 17 major banks from six continents preparing to pilot live cross-border payment transactions.
The initial group includes Citi, HSBC, Standard Chartered, UBS, Wells Fargo, BNY, BNP Paribas, DBS, Lloyds Bank, MUFG Bank, OCBC, UOB, ANZ, First Abu Dhabi Bank, FirstRand Bank, Itaú Unibanco, and Mashreq.
The ledger enables participating institutions to support 24/7 cross-border payments using tokenized deposits, including overnight and on weekends, before completing final settlement through existing systems.
SWIFT built the ledger on Linea, an Ethereum layer-2 network developed by ConsenSys, using an EVM-compatible model based on Hyperledger Besu with fully permissioned access.
Only the bank consortium controls who can transact on the network, meaning the system remains closed rather than distributed across independent validators as public blockchain networks are.
SWIFT said the ledger was designed and built in nine months with feedback from international financial institutions, and that existing compliance, credit, risk, and control standards carry over into the new infrastructure.
Thierry Chilosi, SWIFT’s chief business officer, said the ledger’s addition to the network marks a milestone for regulated digital assets and could support future applications including programmable money and agentic commerce.
SWIFT already reports that 75% of transfers on its network reach their destination within 10 minutes, with many arriving in seconds, narrowing the speed advantage long claimed by crypto networks.
Global crypto ownership reached 741 million people by the end of 2025, growing 12.4% in a single year, and SWIFT’s 2026 outlook projects the figure could reach between 800 and 900 million users globally.
The launch lands as a direct challenge to XRP and XLM, both of which built their value propositions around enabling fast, low-cost cross-border settlement that traditional banking infrastructure could not match.
XRP was specifically designed to help large financial institutions settle global payments quickly and cheaply, but if banks can now accomplish the same outcome through SWIFT using tokenized deposits, demand for the token weakens considerably.
The system uses tokenized bank deposits rather than XRP, meaning nothing in SWIFT’s architecture requires the token, and Ripple’s business model faces direct pressure from a network its own banking partners already use.
SWIFT’s closed governance structure also sidesteps a long-running debate, as SWIFT executives have previously questioned public networks like the XRP Ledger over validator trust, while their own ledger keeps governance inside a single consortium.
The counterargument centers on scale, as a 17-bank pilot represents a narrow slice of SWIFT’s more than 11,500 connected institutions, and enterprise blockchain history includes high-profile failures such as IBM and Maersk’s TradeLens.
Roughly 45% of major remittance providers in Asia-Pacific now use blockchain or digital-asset rails alongside or instead of SWIFT, and corridors like Japan-to-Philippines and UAE-to-Philippines remain corridors where Ripple’s partnerships run deepest.
Public stablecoin rails already move money around the clock without requiring a bank consortium to build and maintain shared infrastructure, offering another competing layer to SWIFT’s new offering.
Whether SWIFT’s pilot evolves into a true network-wide standard or stalls like earlier enterprise blockchain initiatives will determine just how severe a threat this development ultimately poses to XRP and XLM.
