Swift adopts blockchain for cross-border payments, with broader crypto market and industry news
A solo presenter from Digital Asset News covers Swift's blockchain ledger launch, PayPal's stablecoin expansion on Polygon, geopolitical market impacts, and several crypto industry updates.
Summary
The host covers Swift's launch of a blockchain-based ledger for cross-border payments, joined by 17 major banks in a pilot program. He explains that while the move is a positive step forward, the system is built on a permissioned chain — meaning it is closed to the public and controlled by a bank consortium — and still relies on Swift's older infrastructure to complete transfers. He also covers PayPal's expansion of its PYUSD stablecoin onto Polygon, US military strikes on Iran and their surprisingly muted effect on markets, the steep decline of Eric Trump's American Bitcoin mining company, and Michael Saylor's Strategy stock performance. The host then addresses Senator Cynthia Lummis's push for the Digital Asset Clarity Act before closing with an extended live Q&A session with viewers, covering topics including midterm election buy timing strategy, the host's personal take-profit rules developed across multiple bear market cycles, and an extended revisiting of the Michael Saylor 'never sell' debate — with the host reiterating that advice appropriate for billionaires is not appropriate for ordinary investors.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Swift Launches Blockchain Ledger With 17 Bank Partners
Host: Great news — it finally happened. Swift has come out and embraced blockchain. Here's what it actually means for you.
Swift, which has been around since the 1950s or '60s — correct me in the comments section — is essentially a messaging service used to distribute and move money around the globe. Swift is just one of those processes where they say, "Hey, I'm going to send you a hundred bucks, or a thousand bucks, or ten thousand — did you get it? Okay, I got it. Okay, great. Now we can finalize everything." That's pretty much how it's been going since 1960, with no upgrades.
I've been hearing about this blockchain shift for quite some time, and they finally got it going — and 17 banks came along with them. The headline: "Swift blockchain ledger ready for use as 17 banks set to pioneer tokenized cross-border payments on trusted global infrastructure."
Before we get into it, I'm just going to tell you: don't get too excited, because this is a permissioned chain. This is nothing you can really get into. And if you're thinking of three letters — X, R, and P — you're not going to be too happy with this one.
What Swift's Blockchain Ledger Actually Does
Here's what we actually have. Swift today announced that its blockchain-based ledger is ready for initial use, enabling early adopters — early adopter financial institutions, that is — to support 24/7 cross-border payments with tokenized deposits. I like this whole aspect of it. This is moving things in the right direction. It just took them a very long time to do it, which is fine — legacy systems.
The ledger will expand in functionality and availability after the initial controlled go-live phase, and it builds upon improvements already made by Swift and its community to existing rails. A full 75% of payments on the network reach beneficiary banks within 10 minutes, and often in seconds.
If you've ever done an international wire, good luck — it takes quite a bit of time, there's a lot of jumping around, and issues do come up. But if Swift is willing to embrace blockchain, I think they've got the right track.
Here are the banks that will pilot initial live transactions: ANZ, BNY, Citi, First Abu Dhabi Bank, FirstRand Bank — never heard of them — HSBC, which people in the XRP community will always remind me of, Lloyd's Bank, Mashreq, MFG Bank, OCBC, Standard Chartered, UBS, UOB, and Wells Fargo, my least favorite bank of all time.
So this is good news. This is fantastic. And of course, XRP and such — just wait.
The Permissioned Structure and Its Implications
Same day, different article. "Swift's blockchain ledger goes live, but old bottlenecks persist. 17 major banks now prepping for real transactions, though the system will still lean on Swift's older infrastructure to finish each transfer." So again, don't get too excited. That's pretty much where we're at.
The permissioned design is drawing scrutiny. Do you think the banks were going to give up that easily? Swift built the ledger on Linea, which is an Ethereum Layer 2 network developed by Consensys. You might think to yourself, "Wow, Layer 2 — that sounds pretty good. Where can I buy Linea?" You can't. It's an EVM-compatible model based on Hyperledger Besu, but access stays fully permissioned. Only the bank consortium controls who can transact on it.
That closed structure sits awkwardly next to Swift's own past criticism of public networks like the XRP Ledger, which Swift executives have questioned over validator trust. Swift's ledger sidesteps that debate entirely by keeping governance inside one consortium rather than distributing it across independent validators.
So this is a pretty big day. They've identified what they need to do and they did it. It just took a heck of a long time.
Why Banks Want Permissioned Chains — And What Comes Next
Now you might think that's the end of the story, and that this is just the most awful thing. But this is just step one. I think there actually is going to be an improvement. I think they're going to figure out that they can only do so much with centralized systems and will have to decentralize some of this.
If you look at what banks do and why they want to do it, it makes a lot of sense. When they have a permissioned blockchain, they can remain compliant — KYC, know your customer; AML, anti-money laundering; audit trails — they've got it all right there. This is the same reason why CZ Binance went to jail: lax KYC and AML. Banks know how to do it. That's why they want to keep it permissioned.
It's centralized and private. It is super cheap and fast. Of course, they will probably charge other people an arm and a leg — that's what banks do. And then there's a big one: they can undo stuff. Let's say you fat-fingered something and sent too much. You can call the bank and say, "Hey, I messed up," and they can actually reverse it. With decentralized systems, you really can't do that, especially wallet to wallet, unless you know somebody. And then of course there's data privacy — banks and funds don't want you to know how much they're moving around.
However, as time goes on, they're going to see how great this is and how much they can save. There's a lot more money sloshing around in the liquidity sector. It's not just about how much there is — some people say it's between two trillion and eighteen trillion, and I have no exact data — but I can tell you there's a lot of people outside the banking system, and banks want to bring that in. Bankers are greedy and they want to get everything in there.
So I think at some point they'll have a permissioned list, they'll open up rails, and they'll bring everything together because they want that liquidity. Because of that, I think there will still be a positive aspect for both permissionless and permissioned chains. The best of both worlds: 24/7 global liquidity, global interoperability, internet, smartphone — whatever you want to use. And again, it just comes down to who do you trust. Some countries don't trust other countries, and some people don't trust other banks. So because of that, I think it will be both permissioned and permissionless. It's just going to take a lot longer.
PayPal Expands PYUSD Stablecoin on Polygon
As far as stablecoins go, PayPal looks like they want to increase the use of PayPal USD with native issuance on Polygon. Congratulations to all you Polygon holders — looks like those days are paying off.
Aside from native issuance of PYUSD on Polygon, businesses are now also able to use the stablecoin more seamlessly using Polygon's open money stack. I would not have had this on my bingo card. Polygon said more than $2.6 trillion in stablecoin transactions have been settled on its network. Now, I don't know if that's per year or all-time — it just says $2.6 trillion. I'm sure we could look that up via on-chain data, but just for that to be happening — $2.6 trillion — that's a nice chunk of change.
According to PayPal, more than $2.6 trillion in stablecoin payments have settled on Polygon, with both Revolut and Stripe using the network. So people are actually using stablecoins out there. I personally don't use them, but I'd like to know why you are — let me know in the comments section. What are you using stablecoins for? Someone was doing $2.6 trillion in stablecoin transactions in payments on Revolut and Stripe. What's going on? Was that just to buy more crypto, or what were you doing with that?
PayPal USD is issued by Paxos with a total supply of $3 billion — but don't think that's anything great. It puts it far behind Tether and USDC. The lion's share right now is still USDC and Tether, with Tether dominating. PYUSD hopefully catches up, and Polygon holders can see some nice gains.
US Strikes on Iran and Market Reaction
Let's change hats to geopolitical expert — just kidding. But here's what's going on. The US just bombed Iran again.
The news report: US forces launched a second round of strikes within 24 hours in response to Iran firing on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, hitting approximately 90 Iranian targets. Iran responded by firing on American allies across the region. The back-and-forth attacks came just weeks after a hard-fought deal to end the conflict, with President Trump renewing his threat to "finish the job."
President Trump: "We just hit them very hard — I say we hit them 20 to 1. Every time they hit us, we're going to hit them 20. And we did it last night. They did a little something today, but it was really retribution for last night. They hit actually three boats, not two. And when they hit, we hit back much harder."
Host: 20 to 1. So we worked pretty hard on that peace deal, but I guess it's just not going to happen — not in the cards.
You would think that because of a strike and a peace deal going out the window, the market would respond — and it did, but not badly. It's actually doing pretty well. Usually when something like this happened, Trump would go on Truth Social, say something and the market would collapse. Now we're just like, we've got Trump fatigue and we're thinking, "Yeah, whatever happens, happens."
Over the last 24 hours, we're actually up — which is kind of surprising for the S&P 500. Over five days, not too bad. One month, up 2%. Six months, up 8%. One year — take it as it is.
The digital asset market is also green. Bitcoin is up 1.6% over 24 hours. Everything's green across the board. Maybe we're just tired of it all. Ethereum up 0.8% — congratulations Tom Lee, you're still underwater. BNB up 1.2%. Tron, not too bad. Still a green day.
American Bitcoin Down 95% From Peak
Eric Trump apparently is losing big time. I hate to see this because I like people who invest in our infrastructure — I appreciate it greatly. Unfortunately, maybe Eric should have just taken a cue from his dad and bought a bunch of meme coins.
American Bitcoin was supposed to be a simple bet on mining and holding Bitcoin. Instead, the Eric Trump-linked company is down more than 95% from its peak, wiping out $600 million in value. The stock just hit an all-time low and was forced into a 1-for-5 reverse split just to stay on NASDAQ.
95% down for a Bitcoin mining operation. Maybe they should do what other Bitcoin miners do, which is pivot and allow AI infrastructure to fold into that sector — for space, for electricity — with Bitcoin mining operations running side by side with Nvidia chips and compute. Everything else should be just a little bit better. But I can't give Eric Trump financial advice. He knows what he's doing.
Michael Saylor's Strategy Stock and the "Never Sell" Debate
Michael Saylor — we talked about this today on NFA Live. It was a good one. We had Nick from Coin Bureau, hosted on Ben's site, The Cryptoverse. Pretty great stuff. The question was: are you mad at Michael Saylor? I can't be mad at Michael Saylor. He tried. I did not like the whole thing where he said you should never sell your Bitcoin — but then Strategy can. He kind of left that out. I get the intricacies, and I hate going through this every single time I talk about Strategy, but if I don't, I get bombarded in the comments section.
Here's the news: Bitcoin treasury company MicroStrategy surpasses investment banking giant Goldman Sachs in trading volume and is now back in the top 50 most-traded US stocks. That sounds good. But what they're doing is selling. Over the last day or so it's been up 2%. Five days, down 4%. One month, down 18%. Six months, down almost 40%. One year, down roughly 77%.
So maybe it's being traded a lot, but it's going in the opposite direction.
As a reminder, I still don't mind Strategy so much. Back in the 2022 era, it went from a high of almost a hundred dollars down to sixteen dollars — that's roughly an 84% drop in a brutal bear market. I think we're still in a brutal bear market, but the good news is we're only down 77%.
Tip of the hat to Strategy. Hopefully it works out for them. We can't afford companies to go down. I don't think they have an issue. Yes, they sold some Bitcoin like they were supposed to do.
Senator Cynthia Lummis and the Digital Asset Clarity Act
Shout out to Senator Cynthia Lummis from Wyoming, fighting the good fight and trying to get the Clarity Act passed. She states it perfectly: "Every month without clear digital asset rules is a month another country writes them for us. That's not a risk — it's already happening." I sure hope the Clarity Act gets passed.
Live Q&A With the Audience
Host: We did the NFA Live today and those guys are into soccer. You watch Ben — he goes crazy. Argentina wins, I don't know.
Jupiter asked a solid question about whether we're all waiting for midterm election day to buy. We did a video a couple of days ago — maybe it was yesterday — about the midterm election day here in the United States. It varies. It's always the first Tuesday — in 2018 I think it was November 8th, in 2022 it was November 6th, and this time it's November 3rd. Every single time going back to the 1940s, if you just bought the S&P 500 and waited seven months, you were always up over 10% in profits just in seven months. We took a look at how that correlates to the Bitcoin and digital asset market, and it holds water.
The thing is, if you buy just on that day — and Jupiter knows this — the S&P 500 actually goes down too, and Bitcoin even went down. So what I'm going to do is probably start buying a lot more heavily, especially if we go to the 250-day moving average, heavy around October and November. We'll take a look at the risk levels, but I think this is prime time. If I had just done this in 2022, I'd have been way more ahead.
On the Michael Saylor discussion — I can't be mad at him. Being mad about what someone does or says harms you and nothing Trump or Saylor has done or said hurts unless you're triggered by it. Look, we're all not perfect. A couple of days ago I lost my temper on one of these live streams — these things happen.
As far as getting mad at Saylor, it was just good that Strategy could sell some and people could get off this kick. What I was trying to do this whole cycle is explain the rules. The very last rule was: take some profits, because no one ever went broke taking profits. The big thing I was trying to get across is that you're not a billionaire. Billionaires play by different rules.
With Michael Saylor, it makes a lot of sense to hold on forever because he's already got his hundred million in the bank and he can afford to wait. But the normies — the regular people — they'd like to be able to reduce their mortgage payment, save some for their kids, get out of debt, or buy that kidney. They're kind of important. You only need one, but it'd be great to keep it.
So it was just good that we can finally get off the island of "never ever sell your Bitcoin." It was a very difficult uphill battle.
Keith says: "Hey Rob, community's been busy. Only take-profit rule — Saylor buys and holds never made sense." It did make sense in a way, because people were like, "Hey, if the biggest bull, Michael Saylor, says he's never going to sell, I'm never going to sell." But I'm telling you — and this is the great thing about being in a bear market — everybody learns their lesson. Doesn't matter if it takes you one cycle or two or three or four, but we all learn at some point. Now we're like, okay, maybe that diamond hands statement was kind of ridiculous.
It took me two cycles to figure it out. 2018 was my first bear market and I learned about what Bitcoin is and these concepts like M2 money supply, MVRV scores, risk levels, things like that. And now I'm still learning. In 2022, that's why I made those rules, and it worked out pretty well. I could have done better — I'll take more profits next time.
On the kidney comment — I actually worked in dialysis for a couple of years and I can tell you you only need 15% functioning of either kidney to stay off dialysis. You don't need both kidneys.
It can make sense — just like stocks — if you can afford to put more money away and speculate that it keeps going. It's not wrong, but it all depends on the individual. That's why we can't give financial advice — everybody's situation is different.
Ben brought up a good point today — or maybe it was Nick — about how Saylor in 2020 and 2021 said things like, "Sell your house, take out a second mortgage." And Ben said, "That's dumb." And Saylor came on his show and explained why it actually makes sense. For Saylor as a billionaire, it probably did make sense. Grant Cardone — selling real estate and putting it into Bitcoin — over the long haul it's probably pretty good. But for the normal average person, they've got to sleep somewhere. There's a dichotomy between what you should do and what somebody else recommends based on your situation.
On the midterm election timing — what I'm going to do is probably start buying more heavily, especially around the 250-day moving average, heavy around October and November. We'll take a look at the risk levels. I think this is prime time. If I had just done this in 2022, I'd have been way more ahead.
Cricket, by the way, is apparently the most popular sport in the world. I don't know how that works out, but sure.
The markets are kind of boring, so you've got to keep everybody entertained. There are a lot more people interested in soccer than in crypto, so we let it go. That was on Ben's channel anyway. Maybe next week on my channel we'll talk about preseason Cowboys football or something.