Swift Launches Blockchain Ledger for 24/7 Cross-Border Payments

On July 9, 2026, Swift announced that its blockchain-based shared ledger is ready for initial use to support 24/7 cross-border payments with tokenised deposits — digital representations of bank account balances that can move over blockchain rails. The controlled rollout phase has already begun, the Las Vegas Sun reports.

Seventeen banks from six continents are piloting it: ANZ, BNP Paribas, BNY, Citi, DBS, First Abu Dhabi Bank, FirstRand, HSBC, Itaú Unibanco, Lloyds Bank, Mashreq, MUFG Bank, OCBC, Standard Chartered, UBS, UOB and Wells Fargo. The ledger gives banks a shared orchestration layer for their own tokenised deposits, letting them move customer funds overnight and on weekends ahead of final settlement through existing systems.

The system was built over nine months based on feedback from international financial institutions. According to FinTech Weekly, it runs on the open-source, EVM-compatible Hyperledger Besu client — a private, permissioned network with no public access and no native cryptocurrency or token.

Executives at Swift and the participating banks described the initiative as a step toward carrying the trust of established finance into digital money: Swift says 75% of payments on the network already reach the receiving bank in under 10 minutes.

The upshot: unlike most crypto projects, there's no token, no public blockchain and no retail user base here — it's infrastructure built by banks, for banks. But it runs on the same EVM-compatible tech most crypto networks use, meaning the line between "traditional finance" and blockchain keeps blurring at the infrastructure level rather than through speculation.

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