Ripple made a crack in the wall, but Swift tore down the entire wall.

Ripple breaks through alone, while Swift channels the river into the sea.

Written by: Sanqing, Foresight News

During the Sibos 2025 conference in Frankfurt, Swift Chief Business Officer Thierry Chilosi and Michael Spiegel, Global Head of Transaction Banking at Standard Chartered Bank, jointly discussed the major 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, aiming to achieve trusted and interoperable digital finance on a global scale. This ledger will serve as a secure, real-time transaction record between financial institutions, validating transaction sequences and executing agreed rules via smart contracts. The goal is to supplement existing systems and seamlessly connect traditional finance with tokenized assets.

Image source: Swift official website

Although Swift did not directly specify the technology platform when initially releasing this major news to the banking industry, Consensys CEO Joe Lubin revealed at Token2049 Singapore that Swift is leveraging the Ethereum Layer 2 network Linea to build its new payment settlement platform. By adopting Linea’s zk-EVM rollup technology, Swift can 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 top global financial institutions, including JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Citibank, are ready to participate in this Linea-based new blockchain payment rail pilot.

Ripple’s Deep Cultivation and Current Status

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

In 2012, Ripple burst onto the scene with the XRP Ledger (XRPL), with the core goal of replacing the inefficient Swift correspondent banking model. During this period, Ripple successfully built the global payment network RippleNet, connecting more than 300 financial institutions, and in fragmented markets such as Southeast Asia, proved through its On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) service that XRP as a bridge currency could reduce cross-border settlement times from several days to just 3 to 5 seconds.

Entering 2020, affected by the US SEC lawsuit, Ripple was blocked and stalled in the US market due to securities allegations, but its global scale continued to expand. By 2022, its business had reached more than 40 payment markets, with total payments doubling to about $30 billion.

In 2023, Ripple saw a turning point when the court ruled that XRP itself is not a security, marking a milestone victory for Ripple and the industry.

By August 2025, with the SEC completely dropping its appeal, the five-year legal tug-of-war officially ended. The full clarification of XRP’s legal status led to the approval of the XRP spot ETF, marking its official entry into mainstream institutional asset allocation lists.

Today, Ripple has already carried out cross-border payment and collection services in multiple real-world scenarios, ranging from To C retail remittances to To B enterprise-level payments.

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

At the enterprise level, American Express and PNC Bank have respectively used RippleNet to optimize B2B trade settlements and international collection experiences.

Furthermore, in national infrastructure, Ripple has cooperated with more than 20 countries, including Palau, Montenegro, and Bhutan, to develop CBDC platforms, applying blockchain technology to sovereign currency issuance and settlement systems.

Why Did Swift Choose Linea?

When deploying in the Ethereum ecosystem, giants have shown a high degree of consistency in their preference for Layer 2 technology: Coinbase’s Base chain is built on OP Stack, and Robinhood also announced this year the launch of Robinhood Chain based on Arbitrum technology to support RWA tokenization and 24/7 trading.

This preference stems from L2’s ability to leverage Ethereum’s security while meeting high-performance demands through modular architecture. Swift chose Linea over OP or Arbitrum, with the core difference lying in the underlying verification logic.

OP and Arbitrum use Optimistic Rollup, which assumes transactions are valid by default and only verifies them if challenged. Asset withdrawals usually require a multi-day challenge period, which is a huge time cost for financial settlements that pursue liquidity.

Linea, on the other hand, uses zk-EVM, which provides instant validity proofs through mathematics. For Swift and its partner banks, who need to process massive value settlements, zk-EVM not only provides faster finality but also ensures compliant verification while protecting transaction privacy.

Swift’s choice of Linea embodies the first principle of capital operation: maximizing liquidity velocity.

Capital will flow like a fluid, migrating from traditional systems with low velocity (requiring large pre-funded reserves in Nostro/Vostro accounts), high friction (multiple layers of correspondent bank fees), and slow settlement (multi-day settlements), to blockchain digital systems with high velocity, low friction, and fast settlement.

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

As Consensys CEO Joe Lubin said at Token 2049 Singapore, this is not just a technological upgrade, but a true convergence of TradFi and DeFi, marking the global value transfer protocol’s official transition from the “telegraphic instruction era” to the “mathematical verification era.”

The Significance of Swift Embracing Blockchain

As the backbone network of global finance processing about $150 trillion in transactions annually, Swift’s decision to build a ledger on Linea, an Ethereum Layer 2, means blockchain technology will become the heart of mainstream finance.

Swift will eliminate fragmentation between different tokenization networks through unified technical standards, breaking the long-standing barrier between TradFi and DeFi, and implanting the efficiency gene of decentralized finance into the traditional settlement system.

With a real-time shared ledger operating 24/7, global financial institutions will no longer be limited by the cumbersome manual reconciliation and time zone delays of the correspondent banking model. The huge amounts of dormant capital previously tied up in correspondent bank accounts to hedge settlement risks will be effectively released, allowing the speed of capital flows to truly match the needs of the modern economy, thus ushering in a new era of global value transfer that is more transparent, lower cost, and more interoperable.

Ripple has struggled for ten years to build a new city based on the XRP Ledger outside the old system, but the scale of financial institutions it currently connects pales in comparison to Swift’s existing network covering more than 200 countries and over 11,000 institutions worldwide.

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

The thousands of 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 rails. This combination of “stock advantage + technical compliance” is making Ripple face the coldest challenge since its inception.