Swift Declares Blockchain Ledger Ready as 17 Banks Prepare to Pilot Tokenised Cross-Border Payments #

Swift has declared its blockchain-based shared ledger ready for initial use, with seventeen banks across six continents set to begin piloting live transactions using tokenised deposits. The cooperative made the announcement on July 9, 2026, less than nine months after the system’s public unveiling last September.

The new system extends Swift’s global messaging infrastructure with a distributed ledger layer supporting around-the-clock cross-border payments. According to the company’s press release, it is designed to address limitations in international money movement, including rigid operating hours and trapped liquidity, by letting participating banks settle using tokenised representations of commercial bank deposits rather than traditional correspondent-banking flows.

The ledger runs on an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible architecture built on Hyperledger Besu, an open-source platform. The design is compatible with the broader digital asset ecosystem, including emerging central bank digital currency infrastructure. Swift operates the system’s orchestration layer, coordinating transaction workflows and validating funding commitments, while individual institutions retain custody of their own keys and assets.

Among the seventeen banks preparing to go live are ANZ, BNP Paribas, Lloyds Banking Group, Mashreq, and MUFG Bank, from Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The pilot group is drawn from a wider community of more than 40 financial institutions that contributed to the ledger’s design phase, which expanded from a founding consortium of around thirty banks named at Sibos 2025 in Brussels.

Executives at participating banks described the initiative as consequential for corporate and treasury clients. Kim Verhaaf, Managing Director for Payments at Lloyds Banking Group, said the project showed the value of industry collaboration in building on-chain ecosystems. MUFG’s Masahiro Matsumoto said the network could serve as next-generation financial market infrastructure. BNP Paribas’ Pierre Fersztand said the pilot is part of the bank’s effort to industrialise digital finance at scale.

Swift connects roughly 11,500 institutions in more than 200 countries and territories. The shared ledger sits as a new layer within that existing infrastructure rather than operating as a standalone system, drawing on the cooperative’s established compliance frameworks, security standards, and institutional relationships. The roadmap beyond the initial minimum viable product is expected to cover additional settlement assets, programmable money use cases, and support for agentic commerce flows.

Source: Business Wire