Swift moves the instructions behind the equivalent of global GDP every two to three days. So when it builds a blockchain, the industry pays attention. Swift announced in July that its blockchain-based ledger is ready for initial use. Now, 17 banks are preparing to pilot live tokenized cross-border transactions on it.
The design is deliberate. The ledger runs on an EVM-compatible Hyperledger Besu architecture, and it settles nothing on its own. Instead, it records and validates interbank payment commitments, then hands final settlement back to RTGS systems and correspondent banking rails. Banks keep their keys, their assets, and their funding.
Nick Kerigan is Managing Director and Head of Innovation at Swift. He answered eight questions on the architecture, onboarding considerations for banks, how stablecoins and tokenized deposits coexist, and his honest read on tokenization forecasts that range from under $2 trillion to well past $10 trillion. His answers appear below in full.
1) Swift’s blockchain-based ledger went live this month, with 17 banks preparing to pilot tokenized cross-border transactions. How does this new ledger work, and how much of the transaction volume moving across Swift’s network do you expect to run through it once it scales beyond the initial pilot?
The MVP of the ledger is an important milestone and one that has generated strong interest across the industry. Our focus is simple: enabling faster, more predictable and more efficient cross-border payments. To get to live transactions quickly, we’ve started with a specific use case that reflects the priorities of our community – enabling 24/7 cross-border interbank payments using tokenized bank money, while ensuring interoperability between banks’ individual tokenized deposit platforms.
Within nine months of the initial announcement, the ledger was ready for use, marking an important step from concept to live implementation. The blockchain-based ledger introduces a shared digital orchestration layer that records and validates interbank payment commitments, leverages existing compliance processes, and supports multiple settlement options.
When a payment is initiated, Swift’s shared ledger records and validates commitments between institutions, allowing banks to move funds for customers at any time, including overnight and at weekends, before completing final settlement through existing systems. Banks continue to operate their own environments and retain full authority over keys, assets, funding and settlement through RTGS systems, correspondent banking relationships, or other agreed mechanisms between participants.
Looking ahead, we’ll explore how the platform can support evolving payment models and emerging use cases, including programmable money and, over time, agentic payments. Our focus remains on enabling interoperable, secure, and resilient infrastructure that can support regulated forms of digital value. The specific applications will ultimately be shaped by our community, regulatory frameworks, and market demand.
Sharing a big milestone for the Swift ledger: it’s ready to use and we’re excited to be working with a strong group of banks to show 24/7 tokenised cross-border payments.
— Nick Kerigan (@Nick_kerigan) July 9, 2026
Go team Swift!@swiftcommunity https://t.co/XAxjv7AjMm
2) This new system is built on public blockchain infrastructure. How do you see the future of regulated settlement evolving across public and permissioned blockchain environments, and what role can Swift play in enabling interoperability?
Built on open-source foundations with an EVM-compatible Hyperledger Besu architecture, the ledger combines distributed ledger technology with Swift’s global reach, security and standards, creating a foundation for more scalable, predictable and efficient cross-border transactions.
As new forms of value emerge, the key challenge will be ensuring they can work seamlessly together. We believe the future will be about choice, not only in the rails institutions use, but also in the forms of regulated value they use to transact. Our ledger supports private-sector participation and innovation, while allowing banks to connect with existing central bank settlement systems.
As financial institutions explore tokenized deposits, stablecoins, CBDCs and other forms of regulated digital value, the ability to connect these ecosystems securely and seamlessly will be critical. That is where Swift can play a unique role. By leveraging existing Swift connectivity, institutions can access and transact across multiple networks while maintaining the trust, resilience and compliance standards that underpin global finance.
Ultimately, our focus is on keeping the world connected. We are building an infrastructure that enables interoperability across platforms, unlocks liquidity across networks, and supports a future where regulated forms of value can move seamlessly across borders, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
3) What are the determining factors for a bank onboarding onto DLT: risk, compliance, correspondent banking relationships?
As the technology matures and regulatory clarity increases, institutions are increasingly adopting tokenisation to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and enhance risk and liquidity management. For many, the determining factor is where they are on their tokenisation journey and their readiness to support tokenized deposits in a way that meets regulatory and operational requirements.
Tokenization also has significant potential when it comes to programmable payments, providing the capability to orchestrate transactions with events, alongside strengthening liquidity in markets. Swift’s existing infrastructure can help ensure these benefits are realised early, by as many market participants as possible.
As a cooperative, we see our role as providing a globally inclusive infrastructure, and this is reflected in the participation in our blockchain-based ledger. We already have institutions participating from all major regions, reflecting the scale of our community. The key requirement is that institutions have the necessary tokenized deposit capabilities to align with our solution design specifications, enabling them to connect using the trusted Swift infrastructure they already rely on.
4) Swift’s network already carries the instructions behind trillions of dollars in transactions every day, across thousands of banks worldwide. What steps need to happen, or are already happening, for flows at that scale to move onto DLT rails?
One of the biggest challenges in scaling distributed ledger technology is avoiding financial fragmentation. As new networks emerge, different blockchains can operate under different rules, standards and market practices, creating complexity and friction when institutions need to move value across ecosystems. That’s why interoperability is so important. Institutions need to be able to connect across multiple platforms and move value seamlessly, regardless of the underlying technology.
With more than 11,500 financial institutions connected across over 200 countries and territories, Swift brings together global reach, operational resilience and trusted infrastructure to support cross-border transactions at scale.
But connecting networks is only part of the story. Interoperability is not just a technical challenge – it also depends on common business standards, shared market practices, and broad industry alignment. Swift can help convene the industry around common standards and market practices, bringing together different parts of the ecosystem to help ensure new networks can work seamlessly with one another.
Swift has helped financial institutions adopt common standards that make global payments more efficient, secure, and reliable. In the digital asset ecosystem, we see a similar opportunity to support interoperability across emerging networks and help enable adoption at scale.
5) Stablecoins, tokenized bank deposits, and public crypto assets often get lumped together, but they behave very differently for a bank. How do you see those three coexisting over the next few years?
Swift is agnostic to forms of value and technology and we do not dictate how our members transact with one another. As a global cooperative, we’re driven by the needs of our members and how they want to transact internationally. We believe the future will be multi-asset, multi-rail, and multi-chain, with different forms of value coexisting to meet different use cases and market needs. That’s why interoperability has been fundamental to our innovation agenda for many years. Our focus is on enabling secure, trusted connectivity across ecosystems, regardless of the underlying asset, rail, or technology. Different forms of digital value will coexist to meet different needs, but successful adoption and scale will require clear regulatory foundations, strong governance and trust.
6) The payments landscape is changing rapidly. What do you think the future of global payments will look like, and what needs to happen for new and existing systems to work together effectively?
The future of payments will be defined by simplicity and convenience. People will expect to move any form of regulated value, anytime and anywhere, without needing to understand the technology behind those transactions. Meeting those expectations requires infrastructure that can connect multiple networks while enabling cross-border transactions to be fast, predictable, and reliable.
Our ledger is part of our broader strategy to enable faster, more predictable and more efficient cross-border payments. It provides infrastructure that can allow banks to leverage their tokenized deposit platforms and, over time, support payment processing capabilities that operate on a 24/7 basis.
At the same time, we’re already seeing how today’s technology can deliver a significantly enhanced customer experience. Through Swift’s retail payments framework, banks can offer faster, fully traceable cross-border payments with upfront transparency on costs. In some corridors, payments are being completed in minutes, and even seconds.
As a tangible example of what that can mean in practice, Westpac recently became the first bank to send an international payment using Swift’s retail payments framework. Working with Standard Chartered, it successfully completed an Indian rupee payment to India in just 37 seconds, demonstrating how greater interoperability can help deliver faster, more seamless cross-border payments for customers.
What’s most important is the ability to connect different forms of payment infrastructure as the ecosystem evolves. Whether through enhancements to existing payment rails or new innovations such as tokenized deposits, interoperability will be key to ensuring these solutions can work together and deliver value at a global scale.
⚡ A better cross-border payment experience is here.
— Swift (@swiftcommunity) July 22, 2026
Consumers can now send money across borders with greater speed, transparency and predictability through Swift's scheme, a shared framework for retail payments. Payments from Australia to Spain have been completed in as little… pic.twitter.com/g6Y6QJAElu
7) HSBC, Citi, and BNP Paribas are among the institutions participating in the initial testing. How do you see adoption evolving across the broader Swift network?
We were deliberate in engaging institutions around the world to ensure that the infrastructure reflected the needs, priorities, and operational realities of our members and the markets the ledger is designed to serve. The 17 banks that are participating in the pilot span six continents and represent significant corridors in global wholesale payment flows, whilst more than 40 institutions contributed insights that helped inform the ledger’s design.
In future, we see the ledger evolving and growing in three ways: 1) we will add more institutions to the 17 early adopter institutions who are preparing to pilot live transactions, 2) we plan to extend its capabilities, and 3) we will explore further use cases in line with the wants and needs of our community.
8) Forecasts for how much gets tokenized by 2030 range from under two trillion dollars to well over ten trillion. What’s your honest read on how much of global finance actually ends up onchain, and on what timeline?
Today, the value of tokenized assets on public blockchains, including stablecoins, is estimated at around $333 billion. Some estimates suggest that could grow to over $10 trillion by 2030.
I tend to agree with Bill Gates’ observation that things often take longer than expected, but ultimately have a bigger impact than expected. We’ve seen that pattern before. Transformation rarely happens overnight, and predicting a precise number or timeline is less important than ensuring the industry is ready when adoption accelerates.
Our focus is on supporting that journey. As the needs of our community evolve, we’ll continue to provide the trusted infrastructure, connectivity and standards needed to support new capabilities while maintaining the resilience and security that underpin global finance.
With more than 11,500 institutions connected across over 200 countries and territories, and the equivalent of the world’s GDP flowing over our network every two to three days, Swift is helping the industry bridge the transition to new forms of digital value while maintaining the trust and reliability that global commerce depends on.
Our role is to help the industry innovate with confidence, enabling new capabilities to scale while remaining connected to the broader financial ecosystem.
Kerigan’s answers point at a consistent thesis. Swift is not betting on one chain, one asset, or one settlement model. It is betting that banks will use several at once, and that somebody has to connect them. The ledger reflects that view. It orchestrates rather than settles, and it leaves final movement of funds inside systems banks already trust.
The near-term test is narrow and measurable. Seventeen banks across six continents need to move real tokenized deposits between separate platforms, at any hour, without breaking compliance workflows. Success there does not shift trillions overnight. Instead, it establishes whether tokenized bank money can travel between institutions the way messages already do.
The longer question stays open, and Kerigan declines to pin it down. He would rather the industry be ready than be right about a date. Given that the equivalent of world GDP crosses Swift’s network every two to three days, that caution reads less like hedging and more like operating discipline.
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