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On September 28, Swift, the Global Interbank Financial Telecommunication Network (SWIFT), announced on the opening day of its annual financial industry conference Sibos in Miami that among the first 17 banks using its blockchain ledger, most have already put it into practice for 24/7 real-time cross-border payments, sending tokenized funds between Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. That same day, Swift also announced partnerships with domestic instant payment systems including Spain’s Bizum, Australia’s PayID, and Brazil’s Pix, to explore enabling cross-border remittances to be completed using only a mobile phone number or email address.

Swift CEO Javier Pérez-Tasso said in the opening address: «The issue is no longer whether traditional finance or decentralized finance—this is not an either-or choice. With the Swift platform, you can move any form of regulated value at global scale, whether it is fiat currency or tokenized assets.»

The blockchain ledger has completed transactions using five currencies

According to Swift, these banks completed transactions using five currencies—euro, British pound, Hong Kong dollar, Singapore dollar, and U.S. dollar—with purposes including settlement between financial institutions, corporate treasury management, and interbank funds routing.

Swift announced on July 9 that the ledger can begin operations, when 17 banks from six continents were prepared to pilot it. According to earlier reports, this ledger is built on the Ethereum Layer 2 network Linea, and the first batch of banks includes Citigroup, DBS, HSBC, Standard Chartered, and others. In September, DBS and Citi also completed their first weekend cross-border U.S. dollar transfers through it.

Swift said that in the first phase, it deliberately focuses on always-on, real-time payments, using tokenized deposits—i.e., a digital form of commercial bank money that participating banks are already familiar with. The ledger is designed to be interoperable, and in the future it will expand to areas such as programmable money and AI agent commerce in response to market demand, allowing traditional and digital assets to coexist globally.

Cross-border remittances can be made like domestic transfers—just using a mobile phone number

Another collaboration targets everyday consumers. Swift noted that millions of people have already grown accustomed to making fast domestic transfers using Bizum, PayID, and Pix, without needing to know the other party’s account number. This time, Swift has brought together banks, payments providers, and technology providers across four continents to make the mobile numbers, email addresses, and virtual payment addresses that are already registered in domestic systems also usable safely for cross-border transactions on Swift.

Participating institutions include Australia’s payments provider AP+, Spain’s external banking entity (BBVA), Bizum, Brazil’s Bradesco, Australia’s Commonwealth Bank, DBS, India’s IDFC FIRST Bank, Brazil’s Ouribank, and TerraPay, among others. Bizum described the initiative as a proof of concept for Swift, while Brazil’s Ouribank said it is helping to connect Brazil’s Pix ecosystem to Swift’s global network.

75% of cross-border payments reach the receiving bank within 10 minutes—stuck in the last mile

This nickname transfer plan is built on the consumer payments framework launched by Swift in June. There are now more than 100 banks participating, enabling remittances to arrive in full and with fees and exchange rates confirmed in advance. Swift gave examples: using this framework, a transfer from Turkey to Spain can take just 15 seconds, from Australia to India 37 seconds, and from Brazil to the U.S. about one minute.

Swift said that currently 75% of cross-border payments reach the receiving bank within 10 minutes, but in a typical transaction about 80% of the time is spent on the “last mile”—that is, the time between the funds leaving the Swift network and entering the receiving country’s domestic banks to be credited to the customer. Swift currently connects 12,500 institutions, covering 200 markets and 150 currencies.

This article reports that Swift’s blockchain ledger has already run real transactions, and another study using mobile phone numbers for cross-border remittances first appeared in .