Swift's blockchain-based ledger is ready for use, with 17 early adopter banks from six continents preparing to pilot live transactions using tokenised deposits, the interbank messaging network said in a statement from Brussels on 9 July 2026. The move takes the initiative from concept to activation in nine months and represents one of the most significant industry-wide pushes into on-chain wholesale payments to date, with a participant list that spans many of the largest correspondent banks in the world.
The ledger is designed to enable 24/7 cross-border payments and to allow overnight and weekend movement of value before final settlement is completed through existing systems. It is built on an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible architecture based on Hyperledger Besu, aligning with widely used enterprise blockchain standards and giving participating banks access to a familiar technical foundation for their integration work.
PARTICIPATING BANKS AND USE CASE
The 17 early adopter banks span six continents and cover a broad cross-section of global wholesale banking. Participants named by Swift include ANZ, BNP Paribas, BNY, Citi, DBS, First Abu Dhabi Bank, FirstRand Bank, HSBC, Itau Unibanco, Lloyds Bank, Mashreq, MUFG Bank, OCBC, Standard Chartered, UBS, UOB and Wells Fargo.
By pooling institutions from Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia Pacific, the pilot is set up to test genuine cross-border flows rather than a narrower single-region use case. The use of tokenised deposits, rather than a new instrument, keeps the value being transferred within the existing regulatory perimeter of commercial bank money, which the participants have argued is important for maintaining supervisory clarity as the pilot progresses.
Swift moved from concept to activation of the blockchain ledger in nine months, a compressed timeline for financial market infrastructure work of this scale. That speed reflects both the co-operative structure of Swift and the pressure from wholesale banks to converge on a shared approach to tokenised money movement rather than each build a bespoke set of bilateral connections with peers and infrastructure providers.
TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE AND OPERATING MODEL
The ledger is built on an EVM-compatible architecture based on Hyperledger Besu, one of the most widely deployed enterprise blockchain platforms. Choosing EVM compatibility gives participating banks and their technology partners access to a large ecosystem of tools, standards and skills that already exist around Ethereum-style networks, reducing the marginal cost of engineering integration and easing recruitment of the specialist talent needed to run the ledger in production.
Operationally, the ledger enables 24/7 cross-border payments and allows movement of value overnight and at weekends, before final settlement is completed through existing systems. That hybrid design — always-on messaging and ledger updates alongside conventional final settlement — is intended to bridge the world of tokenised deposits with existing correspondent banking arrangements, allowing banks to modernise the user-facing experience without simultaneously replacing the underlying settlement plumbing.
Swift said the initiative is part of its work to provide a trusted global infrastructure for tokenised cross-border payments. The activation of the ledger with 17 pilot banks now sets the stage for live testing across the participating institutions, with the results of that testing set to shape how the platform is developed and how it interoperates with other emerging tokenised payment networks over the coming period.