Tokenized Deposits Move Onto Shared Interbank Infrastructure: Swift’s Ledger Goes Live

On July 9, 2026, Swift announced that its blockchain-based ledger is ready for initial use. Seventeen major banks across six continents are preparing to run pilot live transactions using tokenized deposits. A tokenized deposit is an ordinary deposit of a bank’s customer, which the bank records on a distributed ledger rather than in a conventional banking system.

For the customer, the substance of the claim on the bank does not change: it remains a claim for the return of the funds. What changes is where the bank keeps the record of it.

Under the experiment, part of the bank customer’s funds will be placed in a tokenized deposit. This placement makes part of the customer’s funds available for transfers on a distributed ledger, which creates two possibilities for the customer: