The collaboration between the global interbank financial telecommunications association SWIFT and the ZK-Rollup network Linea is not only a technical partnership but also a profound dialogue about the future direction of finance.
At the end of September 2025, SWIFT announced a partnership with the Ethereum Layer 2 network Linea developed by ConsenSys to test a blockchain messaging system, a news that quickly caused a stir in the global fintech community. SWIFT, long regarded as a bastion of traditional finance, chose to collaborate with the decentralized financial infrastructure Linea, marking a shift in the traditional financial system's attitude towards blockchain technology from cautious observation to substantial exploration.
The reason this cooperation is noteworthy is not only because SWIFT holds a pivotal position in global financial communication—connecting over 11,000 financial institutions in more than 200 countries and processing over 4 billion financial messages annually—but also because it reveals the deep challenges and transformation needs faced by traditional financial infrastructure.
01 The Dilemma of SWIFT: Pain Points of Traditional Financial Infrastructure
SWIFT, as a pillar of global financial communication, has faced increasingly severe challenges in recent years. Its message transmission system, based on decades of history, has shown obvious limitations in today's pursuit of real-time, low-cost, and transparent digital payment era.
The traditional cross-border payment process is complex, involving multiple intermediary institutions, leading to settlement cycles of 2-5 days and costs of up to $30-50 per transaction. This efficiency and cost structure has become increasingly outdated in the era of digital currencies.
More fundamentally, SWIFT is merely a message transmission system, not a funds account system. It addresses the issue of information flow rather than funds flow, and actual fund settlement still needs to be completed through the banking systems of various countries. This separation architecture leads to efficiency losses and increased risks.
Blockchain technology offers the possibility of solving these pain points. Systems based on distributed ledgers can compress transaction times from days to minutes or even seconds while reducing costs by over 80%. SWIFT's choice of Linea for testing indicates that it is actively responding to this disruptive trend rather than passively waiting to be replaced.
02 Technical Selection Logic: Why Linea and Not Other Blockchains?
Among many blockchain platforms, SWIFT's choice of Linea has its profound technical logic. This choice reflects the core demands of traditional financial institutions regarding blockchain technology: security, compliance, and scalability.
As a Type 2 zkEVM, Linea is fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, meaning that traditional financial institutions can leverage existing Ethereum development tools and smart contract knowledge, significantly lowering development barriers. At the same time, Linea's zero-knowledge proof technology ensures the privacy of transaction data, which is crucial for strictly regulated financial institutions.
Linea, developed by ConsenSys, adds to its credibility. ConsenSys is not only the creator of MetaMask and Infura but has also raised $725 million from institutions such as Microsoft and SoftBank, demonstrating a solid technical foundation. More importantly, Linea's Ethereum-priority economic model aligns with SWIFT's neutral positioning.
Compared to choosing other public chains, SWIFT opted for an Ethereum-based Layer 2 solution, effectively taking a relatively conservative but reliable path. As the public chain that emphasizes security and decentralization the most, Ethereum's ecosystem maturity and institutional acceptance are clearly higher than its competitors.
03 Analysis of Cooperation Content: From Concept Validation to Production-Level Application
This cooperation is of a conceptual validation nature, focusing on testing the feasibility of on-chain messaging + using existing/simulated stablecoins for settlement. According to public information, the testing content is divided into two core parts.
On-chain messaging maps the traditional SWIFT GPI message structure onto the blockchain, ensuring that transaction context is synchronized with the flow of funds. This is equivalent to migrating SWIFT's existing MT/MX message standards to the blockchain, with each payment instruction acting as an on-chain transaction.
Tokenized settlements execute actual or simulated stablecoin transfers on-chain, verifying settlement finality. When payment instructions transfer value through on-chain stablecoins, 'transaction equals settlement' can be achieved, eliminating the complexity of reconciliation caused by the separation of message flow and funds flow.
The project design emphasizes compatibility with existing banking infrastructure and multi-chain environments. Banks do not need to completely reconstruct their core systems but can interact with the Linea network through API gateways, lowering the threshold for institutional adoption. This gradual path aligns more closely with the transformation needs of traditional financial institutions.
04 Deeper Meaning: The Game and Fusion Between Traditional Finance and DeFi
The cooperation between SWIFT and Linea reveals a complex game and fusion relationship between traditional finance and decentralized finance. This cooperation is far from a simple technological upgrade; rather, it is a readjustment of the power structure of financial infrastructure.
From a strategic perspective, SWIFT is responding to the challenges of blockchain technology through cooperation rather than confrontation, effectively attempting to transform potential disruptive threats into a controllable evolutionary process. By embracing blockchain, SWIFT aims to maintain its central hub position in global financial communication, even as underlying technologies undergo changes.
For Linea and the Ethereum ecosystem, this cooperation signifies unprecedented institutional recognition. If the pilot is successful, it will open the floodgates for traditional finance to be massively integrated onto the blockchain, bringing potentially trillions of dollars in assets and transaction volume to the blockchain industry.
However, this integration also faces deep-seated tensions. One of the core characteristics of DeFi is to reduce financial intermediaries, while SWIFT represents the traditional financial intermediary system. The two have fundamental differences in philosophical foundations and technical implementations, and how to balance the ideals of decentralization with the regulatory and compliance requirements of the real world will be the core challenge faced by the cooperation.
05 Personal Opinion: The Potential and Limitations of Cooperation
From a broader perspective, the cooperation between SWIFT and Linea has significant symbolic meaning, but it also has obvious limitations.
On the positive side, this cooperation marks a significant recognition of blockchain technology by the traditional financial system. As a cornerstone organization of global financial communication, SWIFT's choice of technology has a guiding significance and may drive more traditional financial institutions to explore blockchain applications. Additionally, the cooperation has chosen a privacy-focused ZK technology route, indicating that privacy and compliance are becoming key considerations for blockchain financial applications.
The cooperation adopts a gradual rather than disruptive path, which is conducive to the steady development of blockchain technology in real financial scenarios. By connecting with traditional infrastructure rather than completely replacing it, blockchain technology can generate actual value more quickly and avoid the reckless mistakes of early cryptocurrency projects that often aimed to 'disrupt everything'.
However, this cooperation also has obvious limitations. The current pilot scale is limited, involving only a few banks and transaction types. There are still numerous technical, regulatory, and operational challenges to overcome before moving from concept validation to full production-level application. At the same time, the cooperation does not address the core governance structure issues of SWIFT, and the decentralized advantages of blockchain technology may be difficult to fully realize.
More fundamentally, the path dependency of the existing financial system is extremely strong. Even if technological validation is successful, it is very difficult to change the business processes and commercial relationships formed by global financial institutions over decades. Blockchain technology may first be applied in edge scenarios rather than directly challenging core financial infrastructure.
06 Future Outlook: Gradual Evolution of Financial Infrastructure
The cooperation between SWIFT and Linea suggests that financial infrastructure may move towards a hybrid architecture rather than a completely decentralized model. In this architecture, blockchain is responsible for underlying settlement, while traditional institutions are responsible for compliance, user interface, and complex financial logic, forming a layered collaborative system.
From the perspective of technological evolution, multi-chain or even cross-chain financial infrastructure may emerge in the future. SWIFT may evolve into an aggregator of financial communication, routing messages and value between different blockchain networks rather than just connecting traditional banks.
For developing countries and emerging markets, this cooperation may accelerate the 'leapfrog' development of financial infrastructure. These regions can bypass the stage of building traditional financial infrastructure and directly build modern financial systems based on blockchain technology, achieving more inclusive and efficient financial services.
As the pilot project progresses, the financial community will closely monitor its developments. This concerns not only technological validation but also the possibility of power redistribution—between traditional centralized institutions and decentralized protocols, between national boundaries in finance and global networks, and between closed finance and open finance.
True transformation may not happen overnight, but the direction is clear: financial infrastructure is inevitably moving towards greater transparency, efficiency, and openness.$LINEA @Linea.eth #Linea
