SWIFT (Society for World Interbank Financial Telecommunications) plans to build its recently announced blockchain payments platform on top of Ethereum Layer 2 Linea, ConsenSys CEO Joe Rubin has confirmed.
SWIFT revealed on Monday that it has used ConsenSys and more than 30 TradFi institutions to build the infrastructure for a 24/7 real-time crypto payments system, but did not say which chain it would build on, despite widespread speculation that it could be Linea.
However, at the Token2049 conference in Singapore on Thursday, Rubin confirmed Linnea’s choice in a chat with Cointelegraph’s Gareth Jenkinson.
Rubin said SWIFT CEO Javier Pérez Tasso did not mention Linea by name during SWIFT’s announcement to the banking sector. Rubin said SWIFT had to do a “soft rollout” of “big news”, which was received fairly positively.
“I think it was like, ‘Thank you for doing this.’ It’s time to integrate the two streams: DeFi and TradFi,” Rubin said.
Cointelegraph’s Gareth Jenkinson and Joe Rubin, Snow Crash author Neil Stephenson. Source: Cointelegraph
Developed by Consensys, Linea is a scaling-focused layer 2 that leverages zk-EVM rollup technology to process approximately 1.5 transactions per second at 1/15th the fees of Ethereum.
According to L2BEAT data, the total amount locked is worth $2.27 billion, making it the fourth largest Ethereum Layer 2, behind Arbitrum One, Base Chain, and OP Mainnet.
SWIFT’s entry into the blockchain payments space could be massive, as SWIFT processes approximately $150 trillion worth of global payments each year through traditional banking rails.
Several major banks are involved
Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan Chase, and Toronto-Dominion Bank are among the TradFi companies scheduled to participate in the trial of SWIFT’s new blockchain payment rail on Linea.
This could be a serious competitor to Ripple’s XRP Ledger, one of the few prominent blockchain-based payment systems customized for banks.
SWIFT’s move to build blockchain payment rails has been anticipated for some time, benefiting from near-instantaneous 24/7 payments without intermediaries through blockchain, while reducing costs, errors, and delays.
Linea could enable “user-generated civilizations,” Rubin says.
Rubin highlighted Linea’s broader potential beyond payments, describing it as a platform that “allows you to create content in a user-generated way.”
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“We plan to bring user-generated civilizations and user-generated content to Linea and other places,” Rubin said, explaining that by leveraging Ethereum’s trustless payment layer, Linea will allow communities to build infrastructure, rules, and apps from the bottom up. This is in contrast to the top-down approach found in traditional government and banking hierarchies.
Decentralized autonomous organizations are already trying to operate without centralized leadership, often implementing smart contracts and decentralized voting systems for financial management and decision-making. However, few DAOs have achieved large-scale success so far.
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