Ripple broke through the crack in the wall, but Swift directly demolished the entire wall.

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Written by: Sanqing, Foresight News

During the Sibos 2025 conference in Frankfurt, Swift Chief Business Officer Thierry Chilosi and Standard Chartered Bank's Global Head of Transaction Banking Michael Spiegel discussed the significant transformation of global finance. As tokenization moves from pilot to reality, Swift officially announced the addition of a blockchain-based shared ledger to its infrastructure, aimed at achieving trusted and interoperable digital finance on a global scale. This ledger will serve as a secure, real-time transaction record between financial institutions, verifying transaction sequences and executing agreed rules through smart contracts, with the aim of complementing existing systems and seamlessly connecting traditional finance with tokenized assets.

Image source: Swift official website

Although Swift did not directly specify the technology platform when it initially announced this major news for the banking industry, Consensys CEO Joe Lubin revealed at the Token2049 conference in Singapore that Swift is utilizing the Ethereum Layer 2 network Linea to build its new payment settlement platform. By adopting Linea's zk-EVM aggregation technology, Swift is able to meet the financial industry's stringent requirements for 24/7 real-time settlement and security while significantly reducing costs and latency. Currently, more than 30 of the world's top financial institutions, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citibank, are ready to participate in this Linea-based new blockchain payment track pilot.

The in-depth development and current situation of Ripple

Before discussing Swift, we must review the pioneer that challenged the old system for over a decade: Ripple.

In 2012, Ripple emerged with the XRP Ledger (XRPL), aiming to replace the inefficient SWIFT correspondent banking model. During this time, Ripple successfully built the global payment network RippleNet, connecting over 300 financial institutions, and in fragmented markets like Southeast Asia, demonstrated that XRP as a bridge currency could reduce cross-border settlement times from several days to 3 to 5 seconds through its On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) service.

Entering 2020, affected by the SEC lawsuit in the US, Ripple faced a blockade and stagnation in the US market due to securities allegations, but its scale continued to expand globally. By 2022, its business had reached over 40 payment markets, with the total payment amount doubling to approximately $30 billion.

In 2023, Ripple迎来了转机, as the court ruled that XRP itself is not a security, bringing a milestone victory for Ripple and the industry.

By August 2025, with the SEC completely abandoning its appeal, this five-year legal tug-of-war will come to an end, and the full clarification of the legal status will facilitate the approval of the XRP spot ETF, marking its official entry into the asset allocation list of mainstream institutions.

Nowadays, Ripple has launched cross-border payment services in various real-world scenarios, ranging from To C retail remittances to To B enterprise-level payments.

In the retail sector, Japan's SBI Remit utilizes XRP to bridge real-time remittance channels to the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia, significantly reducing the pre-funding costs for overseas workers; Santander Bank provides customers with transparent real-time transfers through the One Pay FX app. Meanwhile, Southeast Asian payment platform Tranglo has significantly improved the exchange efficiency of the peso and baht with the support of Ripple ODL.

At the enterprise level, American Express and PNC Bank have both utilized RippleNet to optimize B2B trade settlement and international payment experiences.

In addition, Ripple has collaborated with over 20 countries, including Palau, Montenegro, and Bhutan, to develop CBDC platforms in national infrastructure, applying blockchain technology to the issuance and settlement system of sovereign currencies.

Why did Swift choose Linea?

When the giants are laying out the Ethereum ecosystem, they have shown a high degree of consistency regarding Layer 2 technology: Coinbase's Base chain is built on the OP Stack, while Robinhood also announced this year the launch of the Robinhood Chain based on Arbitrum technology, to support the tokenization of RWA and 24/7 trading.

This preference stems from the fact that L2 can leverage Ethereum's security while meeting high-performance demands through a modular architecture. Swift chooses Linea over OP or Arbitrum, with the core difference lying in the underlying verification logic.

OP and Arbitrum use Optimistic Rollup, which operates on the logic that transactions are assumed to be valid by default and are only verified when challenged. Asset withdrawals typically require a multi-day challenge period, which undoubtedly represents a significant time cost for financial settlements that prioritize liquidity.

Linea uses zk-EVM, which provides instant validity proof through mathematical means. For Swift and its partner banks that need to handle massive value settlements, zk-EVM can not only provide final confirmation faster but also ensure compliance verification while protecting transaction privacy.

Swift's choice of Linea embodies the first principle of capital operation: maximizing the rate of liquidity.

Capital will flow like a fluid, migrating from the traditional telegram instruction systems with low flow rates (requiring large amounts of reserve deposits in Nostro/Vostro accounts), high friction (with layers of fees taken by correspondent banks), and slow settlement (settling over several days), to high flow rates, low friction, and fast settlement in blockchain digital systems.

Swift processes approximately $150 trillion in global payments annually. If atomic-level reconciliation and 24/7 real-time settlement can be achieved through Linea's technology stack, it means that tens of trillions of dollars in reserves, which were previously held to hedge against settlement delays in the global financial system, will be released and reinjected into the real economy.

As Joe Lubin, CEO of Consensys, stated at the Token 2049 conference in Singapore, this is not just a technological iteration, but a true convergence of TradFi and DeFi, marking the transition of global value transfer protocols from the “telegram directive era” to the “mathematical verification era.”

The significance of Swift embracing blockchain.

As a global financial backbone network handling approximately 150 trillion USD in transactions each year, Swift has decided to build a ledger on Linea, an Ethereum Layer 2 solution, which means blockchain technology will become the heart of mainstream finance.

Swift will eliminate the fragmentation between different tokenization networks through unified technical standards, breaking the long-standing barriers between TradFi and DeFi, and embedding the efficiency genes of decentralized finance into the traditional clearing system.

Through a 24/7 real-time shared ledger, global financial institutions will no longer be constrained by the cumbersome manual reconciliation and time zone delays associated with the correspondent banking model. The substantial idle capital that was originally tied up in correspondent bank accounts to hedge against clearing risks will be effectively released, allowing the speed of capital flow to truly match the demands of the modern economy, thereby ushering in a new era of global value transfer that is more transparent, lower in cost, and more interoperable.

Ripple has been striving for ten years to build a new city based on the XRP Ledger outside the old system, but the scale of the financial institutions it currently connects appears weak compared to the existing network of Swift, which covers over 200 countries and more than 11,000 institutions.

The core threat from Swift lies in its “asset neutrality”. Unlike Ripple's ODL model, which heavily relies on XRP as a bridge currency, Swift's blockchain ledger is designed to support a variety of assets including fiat currencies, stablecoins, and CBDCs.

Banks within the Swift system do not need to bear the volatility risk of a single asset and can achieve instant settlement by upgrading existing tracks. This combination of “stock advantage + technical compliance” is making Ripple face the coldest chill since its inception.