TradFi Meets DeFi: SWIFT Experiments With Ethereum L2
The SWIFT network—aka the buttoned-up Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications—is the go-to messaging club for more than 11,000 financial institutions across 200+ countries. According to The Big Whale, SWIFT is dipping its toes into the onchain pool—tinkering with Ethereum’s layer two ( L2).
The Big Whale’s co-founder Grégory Raymond says journalist Aleksandar Bukovski spilled the tea: “SWIFT and several major global banks (including BNP Paribas and BNY)”—have hitched their onchain trial run to Linea, the Ethereum L2 whipped up by Consensys.
Raymond noted the project’s still cooking. Linea uses zero-knowledge rollup (zk-rollup) tech to batch transactions off-chain and send lean cryptographic proofs to Ethereum’s mainnet—cutting gas fees and easing congestion.
He added that a source, who kept their name off the record, said:
“The project will take several months to materialize, but it promises an important technological transformation for the international interbank payments industry.”
If SWIFT’s onchain experiment matures, it could reshape how traditional finance (TradFi) views blockchain efficiency. What begins as an exploratory trial with Linea might quietly signal a broader institutional shift. Whether banks embrace or resist, the fact remains: the lines between legacy infrastructure and decentralized rails are blurring faster than most expected.
