SWIFT — the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication — will build its newly announced blockchain-based payment settlement platform on Ethereum layer-2 network Linea, according to Consensys CEO Joe Lubin.
Earlier this week, SWIFT disclosed that it was collaborating with Consensys and more than 30 traditional financial institutions to create infrastructure for a 24/7 real-time crypto payments system. However, the organization did not specify which blockchain it would use, sparking speculation that Linea was the likely choice.
Lubin confirmed Linea’s involvement during a fireside chat with Cointelegraph’s Gareth Jenkinson at the TOKEN2049 conference in Singapore on Thursday.
He explained that when SWIFT first announced the initiative to the banking sector, CEO Javier Pérez-Tasso avoided naming Linea directly. According to Lubin, the decision was part of a “soft rollout” of the news — one that received a notably positive response.
“I think the general reaction was, ‘thank you for doing this.’ It’s long overdue to bring the worlds of DeFi and TradFi together,” Lubin remarked.
Developed by Consensys, Linea is an Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution that uses zk-EVM rollup technology, enabling it to process roughly 1.5 transactions per second at about one-fifteenth the cost of Ethereum mainnet fees. According to L2BEAT, Linea currently secures $2.27 billion in total value locked (TVL), ranking as the fourth-largest Ethereum layer-2, behind Arbitrum One, Base, and OP Mainnet.
SWIFT’s entrance into blockchain-based payments could be transformative. The network processes nearly $150 trillion in global payments annually through traditional banking channels, and integrating blockchain could deliver faster, cheaper, and more efficient settlement.
Some of the world’s largest banks — including Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan Chase, and Toronto-Dominion Bank — are already lined up to participate in trials of SWIFT’s new blockchain settlement rail on Linea. This move positions SWIFT as a potential challenger to Ripple’s XRP Ledger, one of the few existing blockchain payment systems designed for banks.
The shift has been widely anticipated, as blockchain infrastructure offers near-instant, 24/7 settlement without intermediaries, while minimizing costs, errors, and delays.
Lubin: Linea could power a “user-generated civilization”
Beyond payments, Consensys CEO Joe Lubin emphasized Linea’s broader vision as a platform for community-driven innovation. He described it as an environment where “content can be created in a user-generated fashion,” suggesting that Linea and similar platforms could enable “user-generated civilization.”
By leveraging Ethereum’s trustless settlement layer, Linea allows communities to build infrastructure, rules, and applications from the ground up — in contrast to the top-down structures of traditional finance and governance.
Lubin pointed out that decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are already experimenting with this model, using smart contracts and decentralized voting to govern treasuries and operations. While DAOs have yet to prove sustainable at scale, Linea could provide the framework for such bottom-up systems to thrive.
