Chainlink links 17 banks to Swift's new blockchain ledger

Chainlink said on September 28, 2026 that banks can connect to Swift's new blockchain ledger through its software while keeping control of their own keys. Seventeen large banks, Citi and HSBC among them, are set to test moving tokenized deposits across borders.

The announcement came from Chainlink Labs, the company behind the Chainlink network. It builds on a ledger that Swift, the messaging system thousands of banks use to move money, launched in July with the same group of institutions. Until now, that ledger was Swift's own project. This is the piece that lets each bank plug in.

A tokenized deposit is a bank IOU recorded on a blockchain. It represents real money in a customer's account, and it can move at any hour, weekends included, without waiting for the settlement windows that govern payments now. That is the appeal for cross-border transfers, which can still take days to clear.

Chainlink's work with Swift is not new. In a pilot last year, the two firms tied Swift's ISO 20022 messaging standard to the Chainlink Runtime Environment alongside UBS Tokenize, handling tokenized fund orders. The latest step widens that from a single trial to a shared ledger that many banks can reach at once.

How banks keep their keys

Access runs through the Chainlink Runtime Environment, which the company calls CRE. A bank connects its own systems and signing setup to Swift's ledger, and it holds the keys that approve every transfer. Banks keep their keys. It works a bit like a safe deposit box: the bank still holds the only key, and Swift provides the vault.

That design matters to compliance and risk teams, who are wary of anything that moves control of customer money outside the bank. A firm that hands over its keys hands over authority. That is the pitch.

The banks lining up

The pilot group spans six continents. It includes ANZ, BNP Paribas, BNY, Citi, DBS, First Abu Dhabi Bank, FirstRand, HSBC, Itau Unibanco, Lloyds, Mashreq, MUFG, OCBC, Standard Chartered, UBS, UOB and Wells Fargo. More than 40 financial institutions helped shape the ledger before it went live, and Swift said it took the project from idea to a working system in nine months.

Sergey Nazarov, the chief executive of Chainlink Labs, said he was "very excited about the Swift ledger and what it will mean for tokenized deposits." Nazarov has spent years selling Chainlink as the wiring between banks and blockchains. This deal puts well-known names behind that claim. The same tokenized-deposit push is drawing in other players, from banks piloting tokenized deposits with Quant to card networks testing stablecoin payments through Citi and Coinbase.

What the deal does not prove

A pilot is not a rollout. None of the 17 banks has reported live customer payments on the ledger, and neither Swift nor Chainlink has given a date for full service. The two companies have also not said how much money the pilot will move, or when real transfers begin.

Final settlement still runs on the old rails. The ledger coordinates the tokenized deposits, but the money itself clears through existing bank systems, the same way it does today. So the plumbing is new. The settlement is not. For customers, nothing changes yet.

What to watch

Volume is the first real test. Watch for the pilot banks to report actual tokenized deposit transfers rather than readiness, and for a public go-live date to follow. Regulators will want to see how a bank-issued token behaves when it crosses a border and lands under another country's rules. For now, the banks are testing, not switching. Swift first showed the ledger at its Sibos conference a year ago, so the next update may land at the same event. Not yet, though.