SWIFT Discovers Blockchain. Now What?

SWIFT recently announced on its website that it is preparing to launch a new infrastructure for international transfers - one that will be built on blockchain technology.

That immediately brings to mind how blockchain was originally positioned as an alternative to SWIFT. And not just because blockchain transfers are faster and cheaper. There were other important points of comparison:

• In the SWIFT system, a payment can effectively disappear, leaving the recipient dependent on their bank to investigate and trace the funds. Without active cooperation from banks, no one really knows where the money went. On a blockchain, everyone can see exactly what happened.
• Within SWIFT, banks can take advantage of the opacity of transfers to facilitate money laundering schemes. In public blockchains, that kind of activity is much harder - everything is visible to everyone.

So has SWIFT finally accepted that change is inevitable and decided to embrace it? I doubt it.

What kind of blockchains do you think banks will actually use for payments:

• public ones, where everything is transparent,
• or private ones, where things remain as opaque as ever?

The answer seems obvious. Even banking secrecy laws would make true transparency impossible.

So what exactly is new here, SWIFT? Faster transfers? We already know how to do that without banks. Rabbit.io regularly processes even cross-chain swaps in a matter of minutes.

USDT to USDC?
BTC to XMR?
From America to Africa?

All of that is trivial.