Ripple chipped away at the wall, but Swift tore down the entire wall
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Ripple chipped away at the wall, but Swift tore down the entire wall
Ripple breaks through alone, Swift channels the river into the sea.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy: Sanqing, Foresight News
During the Sibos 2025 conference in Frankfurt, Swift's Chief Business Officer Thierry Chilosi and Standard Chartered Bank's Global Head of Transaction Banking Michael Spiegel discussed major transformations in global finance. As tokenization moves from pilot to reality, Swift has officially announced the addition of a blockchain-based shared ledger to its infrastructure, aiming to enable trusted and interoperable digital finance at a global scale. This ledger will serve as a secure, real-time transaction record among financial institutions, using smart contracts to validate transaction sequences and enforce agreed-upon rules—designed to complement existing systems and seamlessly connect traditional finance with tokenized assets.
Image source: Swift official website
Although Swift did not explicitly disclose the technical platform when initially announcing this major development to the banking industry, ConsenSys CEO Joe Lubin revealed at Token2049 in 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 significantly reduce costs and latency while meeting the financial sector’s stringent requirements for 24/7 real-time settlement and security. Currently, more than 30 top global financial institutions—including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citibank—are preparing to participate in the pilot of this new blockchain payment track based on Linea.
Ripple's Deep Roots and Current Status
Before exploring Swift, we must revisit 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 RippleNet, a global payment network connecting over 300 financial institutions, and demonstrated in fragmented markets like Southeast Asia that XRP, as a bridge currency through its On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) service, could shorten cross-border clearing times from days to just 3–5 seconds.
By 2020, Ripple faced a blockade and stagnation in the U.S. market due to securities allegations from the SEC lawsuit. However, its global footprint continued to expand. By 2022, its operations had reached over 40 payment markets, with total payments doubling to approximately $30 billion.
In 2023, Ripple gained momentum when a court ruled that XRP itself was not a security—a landmark victory for both Ripple and the industry.
By August 2025, after the SEC fully dropped its appeal, the five-year legal battle came to an end. With full legal clarity, spot XRP ETFs were approved, marking XRP’s formal entry into mainstream institutional asset allocations.
Today, Ripple is actively conducting cross-border payment operations across multiple real-world scenarios—from consumer retail remittances to enterprise-level B2B payments.
In the retail space, Japan’s SBI Remit uses XRP to enable instant remittance channels to the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia, greatly reducing pre-funded capital costs for overseas workers. Santander offers transparent, real-time transfers to customers via its One Pay FX app. Meanwhile, Southeast Asian payment platform Tranglo has significantly improved peso-to-baht payout efficiency with support from Ripple ODL.
On the enterprise side, American Express and PNC Bank have used RippleNet to optimize B2B trade settlements and international collections.
At the national infrastructure level, Ripple is collaborating with over 20 countries—including Palau, Montenegro, and Bhutan—to develop CBDC platforms, applying blockchain technology to sovereign currency issuance and clearing systems.
Why Did Swift Choose Linea?
When tech giants enter the Ethereum ecosystem, they show strong alignment toward Layer 2 solutions: Coinbase’s Base chain is built on OP Stack, and Robinhood recently announced Robinhood Chain based on Arbitrum technology to support RWA tokenization and 24/7 trading.
This preference stems from L2s’ ability to leverage Ethereum’s security while meeting high-performance demands through modular architecture. Swift chose Linea over OP or Arbitrum primarily due to differences in underlying validation logic.
OP and Arbitrum use Optimistic Rollups, which assume transactions are valid by default and only verify them if challenged. Asset withdrawals typically require multi-day challenge periods—an unacceptable time cost for financial clearing systems demanding liquidity.
In contrast, Linea uses zk-EVM, providing immediate validity proofs through cryptographic mathematics. For Swift and its partner banks processing massive value settlements, zk-EVM offers faster finality, ensures compliance verification, and protects transaction privacy simultaneously.
Swift’s choice of Linea embodies the first principle of capital operation: maximizing flow velocity.
Capital will behave like fluid, migrating from legacy telegraphic systems characterized by low velocity (requiring large dormant reserves in Nostro/Vostro accounts), high friction (layered fees from intermediaries), and slow settlement (multi-day cycles) to blockchain-based digital systems offering high velocity, low friction, and instant settlement.
Swift processes around $150 trillion in global payments annually. If it can achieve atomic reconciliation and 24/7 real-time settlement via Linea’s tech stack, trillions of dollars currently trapped as precautionary reserves to hedge settlement delays would be freed up and reinjected into the real economy.
As ConsenSys CEO Joe Lubin stated at Token2049 in Singapore, this is not merely a technological upgrade—it marks the true convergence of TradFi and DeFi, signaling a shift in global value transfer protocols from the “telegraph instruction era” to the “mathematical verification era.”
The Significance of Swift Embracing Blockchain
As the backbone of global finance handling approximately $150 trillion in transactions annually, Swift’s decision to build a ledger on Linea—an Ethereum Layer 2—means blockchain technology is becoming the heart of mainstream finance.
Swift will eliminate fragmentation across disparate tokenized networks through unified technical standards, breaking down the long-standing barrier between TradFi and DeFi, and embedding decentralized finance’s efficiency into traditional clearing systems.
With a 24/7 real-time shared ledger, global financial institutions will no longer face cumbersome manual reconciliations and time-zone delays inherent in the correspondent banking model. The vast amounts of capital previously immobilized in intermediary accounts to hedge settlement risk will be effectively released, enabling capital flows to match the pace of modern economic activity—ushering in a new era of global value transfer that is more transparent, lower-cost, and highly interoperable.
Ripple spent a decade trying to build a new city outside the old system on the XRP Ledger, but its network of connected financial institutions appears dwarfed by Swift’s existing reach across over 11,000 institutions in more than 200 countries.
The core threat from Swift lies in “asset neutrality.” Unlike Ripple’s ODL model, which heavily relies on XRP as a bridge currency, Swift’s blockchain ledger is designed to support multiple asset types, including fiat currencies, stablecoins, and CBDCs.
Thousands of banks within the Swift ecosystem can achieve instant settlement by upgrading their current rails without bearing volatility risks tied to any single asset. This combination of “installed base advantage + regulatory compliance” is delivering Ripple its coldest chill since inception.
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