The world’s dominant banking messaging network is taking a major step toward integrating digital assets into mainstream finance. On October 3rd, Swift announced that central and commercial banks across North America, Europe, and Asia will begin live trials of digital asset and currency transactions in 2025, marking a significant shift from experimental testing to real-world applications.
The announcement represents Swift’s most ambitious move yet to bridge traditional finance and the emerging digital asset ecosystem, building on years of blockchain experimentation with major financial institutions.
What Swift Is Testing in 2025
The upcoming pilots will focus on enabling financial institutions to conduct transactions across both traditional and digital asset types using Swift’s existing infrastructure. Initial use cases will concentrate on four key areas:
Payments: Cross-border and domestic payment flows using digital currencies and tokenized assets
Foreign Exchange: Multi-currency transactions that may involve both fiat and digital currency pairs
Securities: Tokenized security transfers and settlements
Trade Finance: Digital asset-based trade instruments and settlements
The trials aim to demonstrate multi-ledger Delivery-versus-Payment (DvP) and Payment-versus-Payment (PvP) transactions—critical mechanisms that ensure simultaneous exchange of assets and payments to reduce settlement risk. By enabling these capabilities across different blockchain networks and traditional systems, Swift hopes to provide what it calls “a single point of access to multiple digital asset classes and currencies.”
According to the announcement, the pilots will demonstrate “how financial institutions can transact interchangeably across both existing and emerging asset and currency types,” addressing current fragmentation in the digital asset space.
Building on Proven Blockchain Integration
Swift’s 2025 digital asset trials aren’t starting from scratch. The organization has spent the past two years conducting extensive blockchain and central bank digital currency (CBDC) experiments with dozens of major institutions.
In October 2022, Swift launched its first CBDC interlinking experiments with 14 central and commercial banks, including Banque de France, Deutsche Bundesbank, HSBC, Intesa Sanpaolo, NatWest, SMBC, Standard Chartered, UBS, and Wells Fargo. These initial tests demonstrated that Swift’s infrastructure could successfully link different CBDC networks for cross-border transactions.
The scope expanded significantly in 2024. Swift’s latest CBDC connector trials, completed earlier this year, involved 38 institutions—one of the largest known CBDC experiments to date. Commercial bank participants included ANZ, Citibank, DBS, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Intesa Sanpaolo, NatWest Group, Santander, Société Générale, Standard Chartered, and Westpac, among others. Central banks and monetary authorities from Australia, Czechia, France, Germany, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand participated. Over 125 sandbox users made more than 750 transactions during the project.
In 2023, Swift also collaborated with Chainlink and over a dozen major institutions, including Euroclear, Clearstream, ANZ, Citi, BNY Mellon, BNP Paribas, and Lloyds Banking Group, to demonstrate how tokenized assets could be transferred between wallets on the same blockchain, across different public chains, and between public and private networks.
These successful experiments laid the groundwork for the more ambitious live trials now planned for 2025.
Solving the Digital Islands Problem
Swift’s push into digital assets addresses what the organization calls “digital islands”—the current fragmentation where different blockchain networks, digital currencies, and tokenization platforms operate in isolation from each other and from traditional financial infrastructure.
This fragmentation creates significant barriers to adoption. A bank wanting to transact in digital assets today may need to establish separate connections to multiple blockchain networks, CBDC platforms, and tokenized asset systems. Each connection requires technical integration, operational procedures, compliance frameworks, and staff training.
For smaller institutions, the complexity and cost of building this infrastructure can be prohibitive. Even large banks face challenges coordinating across multiple systems.
Swift’s solution leverages its existing network, which already connects over 11,500 financial institutions across more than 200 countries and territories, handling messages for transactions involving more than four billion accounts daily. By enabling digital asset transactions through the same Swift connections banks already use for traditional messaging, the organization aims to dramatically reduce the barriers to institutional digital asset adoption.
“These trials will demonstrate how financial institutions can transact interchangeably across both existing and emerging asset and currency types,” Swift stated in its announcement, emphasizing the goal of seamless interoperability.
Industry Implications and Timeline
The announcement comes at a pivotal moment for digital asset adoption in traditional finance. Central banks worldwide are actively exploring or piloting CBDCs, with China’s digital yuan already in advanced trials and the European Central Bank progressing toward a digital euro. Meanwhile, financial institutions are increasingly experimenting with tokenized versions of bonds, equities, and other securities.
However, lack of interoperability between these various initiatives has been a consistent concern. If different CBDC systems can’t communicate with each other—or with tokenized securities platforms—the promise of more efficient, instantaneous global finance remains unrealized.
Swift’s trials could provide a crucial missing piece by demonstrating a pathway for legacy financial infrastructure to accommodate digital assets without requiring complete replacement of existing systems. For banks, this approach offers a less disruptive transition path than abandoning established messaging standards.
The 2025 timeline suggests Swift is moving deliberately. While the organization has proven the technical feasibility of blockchain integration, real-world implementation requires addressing regulatory questions, establishing governance frameworks, and ensuring robust security and compliance mechanisms. The live trials will likely surface practical challenges that need resolution before broader deployment.
For the cryptocurrency and blockchain sector, Swift’s embrace of digital assets represents both opportunity and complexity. On one hand, it could accelerate institutional adoption and bring significant capital flows into digital asset markets. On the other, it also brings the traditional financial system’s regulatory frameworks, operational standards, and institutional gatekeeping to an ecosystem that has often valued decentralization and permissionless access.
As 2025 approaches, the financial industry will be watching closely to see whether Swift can successfully bridge the gap between the four billion accounts on its network and the emerging world of digital assets and currencies.
This article reflects information available as of October 6, 2024.
