SWIFT Blockchain Pilot With 17 Banks Puts XRP Ledger Back in Focus

XRP News

SWIFT has built a blockchain-based ledger to test cross-border payments settled in tokenized bank deposits, a development that immediately revived comparisons with XRP Ledger, the public network behind XRP. The messaging cooperative said the ledger was developed over roughly nine months and is now ready for bank testing, pairing distributed-ledger technology with its existing secure messaging rails. Seventeen global banks are taking part in the pilot. SWIFT frames the design around round-the-clock settlement, more efficient liquidity use and clearer cash-flow visibility. For an altcoin long marketed as institutional payment infrastructure, the move reopened a debate that has followed XRP for years.

Crucially, the SWIFT pilot does not run on XRP Ledger. The initiative is a bank-controlled test environment rather than a live public chain, and reported details name participants including ANZ, BNP Paribas, BNY, Citi, DBS, HSBC, Standard Chartered, UOB and Wells Fargo. The stated aim is to let these institutions move tokenized deposit flows without abandoning the corporate payment channels they already rely on. That distinction, between a permissioned trial and a production network, sits at the center of the argument. SWIFT is coordinating a controlled process across member banks, using tokenized deposits rather than a native settlement asset like XRP itself.

Supporters of XRP Ledger seized on the news to underscore the network's operating history. XRPL, a public blockchain, has run a live transaction record since 2012, and its backers argue that a multi-year production track record is a meaningful edge over a newly assembled pilot ledger. Our reading is that the market is weighing maturity against distribution: XRPL offers years of continuous uptime, while SWIFT offers direct access to the correspondent-banking network that already routes global value. Technologies such as an atomic swap illustrate how cross-chain settlement can occur without intermediaries, the exact friction both approaches are trying to compress.

In a parallel regulatory development, Sony Bank has won conditional approval from the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to establish a national trust bank that would issue dollar-pegged stablecoins. The subsidiary, Connectia Trust, National Association, is to be wholly owned by Sony Bank and capitalized at 40 million dollars, according to the company's own disclosure. Formation is slated for this month, but commercial operations are not expected until 2027. Sony has signaled it wants US customers of its games and content to pay for subscriptions in stablecoins, giving it a route to offset the fees it currently pays to card networks.

The Sony filing matters to XRP because Ripple walked the same path. Ripple, alongside Circle and Paxos, was among the first wave of OCC national trust-charter approvals in December, and large institutions such as Morgan Stanley have pursued charters of their own. The structure has become the emerging federal route for regulated stablecoin issuers in the United States. That places Ripple's dollar stablecoin ambitions inside the same charter framework now attracting a Japanese financial giant, reinforcing how central compliant issuance has become to the payments narrative around the broader XRP ecosystem and its stablecoin-native competitors.

These charters sit under the GENIUS Act, the federal law that created a framework for permitted payment stablecoins. In June, FinCEN and federal banking regulators proposed customer-identification rules for issuers operating under it, tightening the compliance perimeter. The approvals have not been uncontested: when Sony's application went public in October, banking trade groups including the Bank Policy Institute pushed back in comment letters. For XRP holders watching Ripple compete in this arena, the regulatory scaffolding now being built determines whether payment tokens and issuer chains, from a settlement asset to an appchain, gain durable access to US dollar rails.

On our own signals, COINOTAG's proprietary 42-indicator composite S/R scoring engine rates the 1.1255 dollar resistance at 81 out of 100, its strongest overhead level, driven by the confluence of the R3 pivot, Fibonacci 0.214 and the Ichimoku Senkou A cloud boundary. Immediate support at 1.0711 dollars scores 79 out of 100, anchored by the S2 pivot and the previous day's low. With spot near 1.0945 dollars, derivatives read cautiously bullish: funding is a mildly positive 0.0040 percent, open interest sits at 642 million dollars, and the long/short account ratio of 3.29 shows 76.7 percent of traders positioned long. Yet the Fear & Greed Index at 22 signals Extreme Fear. A reclaim of 1.1255 dollars opens the 1.2151 dollar zone; a daily close below 1.0711 dollars invalidates the bullish thesis and exposes 1.0092 dollars.