Swift's Shared Blockchain Ledger Goes Live With 17-Bank Tokenised Deposit Pilot

Swift has declared its blockchain-based shared ledger ready for initial use, with 17 banks spanning six continents preparing to run live cross-border payment transactions using tokenised deposits. Citi, HSBC, and UBS are among the named participants. The infrastructure is now operational, though first transactions have not yet occurred. Swift unveiled the ledger at Sibos in September 2025, completed its design phase in March 2026, and has moved to readiness status within months.

The ledger functions as an orchestration layer rather than a standalone payments platform. Each participating bank issues tokenised deposits on its own ledger; the Swift shared ledger records and validates interbank payment commitments, enabling client funds to move continuously, including overnight and on weekends. Interbank settlement between payer and payee banks still flows through conventional infrastructure such as real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems or correspondent banking relationships. The ledger runs on Besu, the open-source Ethereum-compatible framework.

Because the design requires each participant to maintain its own tokenised deposit capability, the question of which banks have completed meaningful integration is immediately material. HSBC has confirmed it connected its Tokenised Deposit Service to the ledger, which is a meaningful signal given how often the gap between infrastructure availability and actual bank integration has historically stretched. Two structural questions now dominate the operator-level read: how interbank settlement is coordinated in practice, and how the ledger interoperates with tokenised deposit infrastructure that banks have already deployed independently.