Stablecoins are the Death of SWIFT?

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, better known as SWIFT, was invented in 1973 in Brussels, Belgium, by a group of international banks. Its creation marked a major turning point in the way financial institutions communicate and transfer money across borders.

Before SWIFT, global payments relied heavily on telex — a slow, manual, and error-prone system where messages had to be typed, interpreted, and confirmed by bank staff. This outdated method was not only inefficient but also insecure, especially as global trade and finance began to grow rapidly in the post-World War II era.

Recognizing the need for a standardized, secure, and automated system, 239 banks from 15 countries came together to form SWIFT. Their goal was to replace telex with a faster and more reliable messaging infrastructure.

SWIFT launched its network in 1977, initially handling just 500,000 messages a year. The system enabled banks to send payment instructions and other financial messages in a standardized format, drastically improving both speed and security.

Today, SWIFT connects more than 11,000 financial institutions in over 200 countries, facilitating the secure exchange of millions of messages daily — including payments, securities transactions, and trade finance instructions. While SWIFT itself doesn’t move money, it provides the critical messaging backbone that underpins much of the global financial system.

From its humble beginnings in the 1970s, SWIFT has become the nervous system of international banking, playing a silent but essential role in the global economy.

It all sounds like a success story and it surely has been one but - it's 2025 and since it's inception SWIFT hasn't improved a lot. The power of the SWIFT network is in the existing connections and established infrastructure but that's about it. In today's world where main services are available 24/7, where the payments is mostly instant SWIFT payments feel slow and outdated and they are.

Enter the stablecoins and blockchain technology. Despite all the bad rep that crypto have accumulated over the years and will continue to accumulate, we can say for sure that the blockchain itself is a proven piece of tech. Combined with stablecoins the tech duo becomes one of the best ways to move money around the world in a fast and reliable way.

So, why non of the banks have switched to using the stablecoins and blockchain yet?

The answer is relatively simple: security and convinience and I'm not talking about the convinience of a customer to send the money abroad. I'm talking about the banks' convinience. With SWIFT they don't have to change anything. No new infrastructure, no tests, no time spent on new technology, no potential hiccups. 

The banks being slow, wealthy and risk averse are not interested in improving their technology as long as it doesn't hurt financially really bad. The only hope for the banks to use the newest tech and offer cheap and instant payments to their customers is a startup that will build a SWIFT alternative based on stablecoins and blockchain. There will be a trust problem though, so we are almost destined to end up with a newer version of SWIFT that will be faster but not cheaper for the end consumers.