Ripple slit the wall, but Swift just ripped off the whole wall.

Photo by Sanqing, Foresight News

During the Frankfurt Sibos 2025 Congress, the Swift Chief Operator, Thierry Chilosi, and Michael Spiegel, the global head of Standard Chartered Bank Trading, discussed major global financial transformations. As monetization moved from pilot to reality, Swift officially announced the addition of a shared book to its infrastructure based on a block chain aimed at achieving credible and interoperable digital finance on a global scale. The book will serve as a secure, real-time record of transactions between financial institutions, validate transaction sequences through smart contracts and implement agreed rules aimed at complementing existing systems and seamlessly linking traditional financial and monetizing assets。

Source: Swift Network

Although Swift did not provide a direct description of the technology platform when it was first released to the banking industry, CEO Joe Lubin of Consensys revealed at the Singapore Token2049 Congress that Swift was building its new payment settlement platform using the Layer 2 network. Through the use of zk-EVM aggregation technology in Linea, Swift is able to meet the financial sector ' s stringent requirements for 24/7 real-time settlement and security while significantly reducing costs and delays. Currently, more than 30 top global financial institutions, including Morgan Chase, Bank of the United States and Citibank, are ready to participate in the new Linea-based block-chain payment track pilot。

Deep tillage and the status quo of Ripple

Before talking about Swift, we have to look back at the pioneer who has challenged the old system for over a decade: Ripple。

Ripple was born with XRP Ledger (XRPL) in 2012, with the central objective of replacing the inefficient Swift proxy model. During this period, Ripple successfully built the global payment network RippleNet, connecting more than 300 financial institutions, and demonstrated that the XRP as a bridge currency can reduce the time for cross-border clearing from three to five seconds through on-demand liquidity (ODL) services in a fragmented market such as South-East Asia。

In 2020, Ripple, affected by the US SEC case, was blocked and stalled in the US market on securities charges, but its global scale continued to grow. By 2022, its operations had reached more than 40 payment markets, doubling total payments to about $30 billion。

In 2023, when Ripple welcomed the opportunity, the Court found that XRP was not a security in itself, which had brought a landmark victory to Ripple and the industry。

UNTIL AUGUST 2025, WITH THE COMPLETE ABANDONMENT OF THE APPEAL BY THE SEC, THIS FIVE-YEAR-OLD LAW-SAW WAR ENDED AND THE COMPLETE CLARITY OF LEGAL STATUS LED TO THE APPROVAL OF THE XRP SPOT ETF, MARKING ITS FORMAL ENTRY INTO THE MAINSTREAM ASSET ALLOCATION LIST。

Today, Ripple has undertaken cross-border payments in a number of real scenarios involving to C retail remittances to To B enterprise-level payments。

In the area of retailing, the Japanese SBI Remit used the XRP Bridge to connect real-time remittance channels to the Philippines, Viet Nam and Indonesia, significantly reducing the pre-financing costs of overseas workers; and the Santander Bank provided transparent real-time transfers to clients through the One Pay FX application. At the same time, the South-East Asia payment platform, Triglo, with the support of Ripple ODL, has significantly improved the efficiency of the peso and Thai baht。

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

Also in the national infrastructure, Ripple has worked with more than 20 countries, such as Palau, Montenegro and Bhutan, to develop the CBDC platform to apply block chain technology to sovereign currency issuance and clearing systems。

Why Swift chose Linea

The giant shows a high degree of consistency with the Layer 2 technology in the layout of the Etheran ecology: Coinbase’s Base chain is based on OP Stack, while Robinhod announced this year the introduction of Robinhod Chain, based on Arbitrum technology, to support the 24/7 monetization and trading of RWA。

This preference stems from L2 ' s ability to take advantage of the security of the Ether Workshop and to meet high performance needs through modular structures. Swift selects Linea instead of OP or Arbitrum, the core difference lies in the bottom validation logic。

OP and Arbitrum use Optimistic Rollup, the logic of which is that the default transaction is valid, is validated only when questioned, and asset extraction usually takes a challenging period of many days, which is undoubtedly a significant time cost for financial liquidation in pursuit of liquidity。

And Linea uses zk-EVM, which provides immediate proof of validity in mathematical terms. For Swift and its cooperating banks that need to deal with mass value settlements, zk-EVM not only provides final confirmation more quickly, but also ensures compliance verification while protecting the privacy of transactions。

Swift chooses Linea with the first principle of capital operation: maximizing the flow rate。

Capital will move from the traditional system of telegraphic commands, like fluids, to high-flow, low-wielding, fast-liquidation block chain digitization systems, which require the pre-positioning of large amounts of sedimentation in the Nostro/Vostro account, to high-flow, low-wielding, quick-settlement systems。

Swift handles large global payments of about $1.5 trillion a year, and if atomic reconciliation and 24/7 real-time settlement were to be achieved through Linea ' s technology warehouse, this would mean that the trillions of dollars of reserves in the global financial system that had been accumulated in order to delay hedges would be released and reinvested in the real economy。

As the CEO of Consensys, Joe Lubin, at the Token 2049 Congress in Singapore, said, this is not just a change of technology, but a real convergence between TradFi and DeFi, marking the official launch of the Global Value Transfer protocol from the "Cable Command" era to the "Mathematical Validation Age."。

Swift, the meaning of the hug block chain

As a global financial backbone that handles approximately $1.5 trillion of transactions per year, Swift decides to build books on Linea, the Taipei Layer 2, which means that block chain technology will become the heart of mainstream finance。

Swift will remove debris between different monetized networks through unified technical standards, crack the long-standing diaphragm between TradFi and DeFi and embed the decentralized financial efficiency gene into the traditional clearing system。

Through 24/7 day-to-day real-time shared books, global financial institutions will no longer be constrained by cumbersome manual reconciliations and time lags under the agent-line model, and the huge amount of deposited capital that would have accumulated in the agent-line account to hedge the risk will be effectively released so that the speed of financial flows can truly match the demands of the modern economy, thereby opening a new era of more transparent, lower-cost and interoperability global value transmission。

Ripple has been struggling for 10 years to build a new XRP Legger-based city outside the old system, but the size of the financial institutions that it currently connects appears to be thin in the face of the stock network of over 11,000 institutions in over 200 countries worldwide。

The core threat from Swift lies in the "assets neutrality" model, unlike the Ripple ODL model, which relies heavily on XRP as a bridge currency, with Swift’s block-chained books designed to support a wide range of assets, including statutory currency, stable currency, and CBDC。

In the Swift system, immediate settlements can be achieved by upgrading the existing track without the risk of volatility of a single asset. This combination of "stock advantage + technical compliance" is exposing Ripple to the worst cold since birth。