The revolution of global regulation: when blockchain meets traditional financial infrastructures

Global finance is at a crucial crossroads. Every year, approximately 150 trillion dollars flow through international payment networks, yet the underlying system remains inefficient, fragmented, and constrained by geographic and temporal boundaries. During Sibos 2025 in Frankfurt, Swift executives outlined a new course: integrating blockchain technology directly into the heart of the global financial infrastructure.

Swift breaks down walls: the game-changing move

In Singapore, during Token2049, Consensys CEO Joe Lubin revealed a startling fact: Swift is building its new settlement system on Linea, the Ethereum Layer 2 network based on zk-EVM. This is not a random decision but the result of a rigorous technical assessment.

Swift announced the integration of a distributed ledger and blockchain-native infrastructure. This ledger will serve as a single, real-time source of truth, capable of operating 24/7 without interruptions due to time zones in the US, Asia, or Europe. Smart contracts will automatically verify transaction sequences, executing the agreed-upon rules between financial institutions with immediate finality guaranteed by Linea’s cryptographic proofs.

The choice of Linea warrants particular attention. While other Layer 2 chains like Arbitrum and Optimism use Optimistic Rollup—a mechanism that presumes validity and verifies only in case of dispute, with waiting periods of days—Linea employs zk-EVM. This means each transaction receives an instant mathematical confirmation, eliminating the dispute times that have historically paralyzed the financial world.

Over 30 major global banking institutions, including JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Citibank, are preparing to participate in the pilot project. The scope is enormous: if fully implemented, the system could free dozens of trillions of dollars currently immobilized in nostro/vostro accounts of correspondent banks, capital that is today used solely to cover settlement risk.

Ripple: the pioneer that paved the way

To fully understand the significance of Swift’s move, one must look back at Ripple, which since 2012 has challenged the monopoly of traditional financial infrastructure with XRP Ledger.

Ripple built RippleNet, a network that now connects over 300 financial institutions. Its ODL (On-Demand Liquidity) service demonstrated that using XRP as a bridge currency could reduce cross-border settlement times from days to just 3-5 seconds. In fragile markets like Southeast Asia, this innovation revolutionized remittance flows: SBI Remit in Japan now instantly connects channels to the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia; Tranglo has significantly improved payment efficiency between peso and baht.

However, Ripple faced a forced disruption. In 2020, the SEC lawsuit in the United States froze its growth in the US market for years. The situation changed only in 2023 when the court ruled that XRP itself does not constitute a security, followed in 2025 by the SEC’s definitive withdrawal of its appeal. This verdict opened the door to the approval of spot ETFs on XRP and its inclusion in mainstream institutional portfolios.

Currently, Ripple operates in various real-world scenarios: from retail transfers via apps like Santander One Pay FX to B2B corporate payments between American Express and PNC Bank. Additionally, it collaborates with over 20 countries—Palau, Montenegro, Bhutan, and others—for CBDC platform development, applying blockchain technology to sovereign currency issuance and settlement systems.

The fundamental contrast: asset neutrality vs. asset dependence

Despite Ripple’s successes, Swift poses a potentially devastating threat to the Ripple model. The reason lies in a fundamental principle: asset neutrality.

The Ripple system heavily depends on XRP as a bridge asset. While this has proven effective, banks must assume the risk of volatility of a single asset. Conversely, Swift’s blockchain ledger was designed to support a multitude of assets: fiat currencies, stablecoins, CBDCs, and even real-value tokens. The thousands of institutions already connected to the Swift network—covering over 200 countries and more than 11,000 banks—can achieve instant settlement simply by updating existing infrastructure, without risking reliance on a single bridge asset.

This combination represents the decisive advantage: the existing network advantage combined with a technical framework that eliminates historical compromises. While Ripple had to build a new city outside the old system, Swift is demolishing the old walls from within.

The underlying principle: the speed of capital flow

Swift’s decision to adopt blockchain is not a technological fad but a fundamental economic law. Capital, like any fluid, migrates from low-speed systems to high-speed ones. Traditional systems require enormous pre-funded reserves, involve multiple correspondent bank fees, and see settlements extend over days due to geographic time zones and processing times.

In contrast, blockchain systems guarantee atomic settlements, immediate finality, and 24/7 operation regardless of time zones. As highlighted by Consensys CEO, this represents the true convergence of TradFi and DeFi—the historic shift from the transfer protocols of the “telegram era” to the “era of mathematical verification.”

What it means for the industry

The integration of blockchain into Swift’s infrastructure marks a point of no return. It is not a marginal experiment but the beginning of a structural transformation of global finance. Unified technical standards will break down the historic barriers between traditional and decentralized finance, embedding DeFi efficiency directly into the core of institutional settlement systems.

For Ripple, the landscape has become more competitive. It broke a fissure in the old armor with ten years of persistence and innovation, but Swift is demolishing the entire structure and rebuilding it anew. Ripple’s historic advantage—demonstrating early on that blockchain could solve real payment problems—is now being absorbed by a much larger actor already integrated into the global financial system.

The real battle in the coming years will not be between Ripple and Swift, but between the tokenized and decentralized finance system and the old infrastructures that will resist change. Swift has chosen to evolve. The question now is whether it will do so quickly enough to capture the entire revolution it has just embarked upon.