Thread by @pumpius

What you were taught about SWIFT is incomplete.

This will change the way you think about #Ripple and #XRP 👇🧵

1/🧵 From its birth in the 1970s, SWIFT wasn’t a neutral “global commons”, it was a U.S.–European financial switchboard built by, for, and under the eye of Western institutions. RippleNet + XRP were engineered to break that dependency with neutral, auditable settlement.

2/ SWIFT’s origin story = a club, not a commons.
In 1973, 239 banks from 15 countries formed a cooperative in Belgium to replace Telex, a Western banking bloc standardizing cross‑border instructions on their terms. The governance model and jurisdiction anchored the network inside the trans‑Atlantic financial sphere.

3/ Oversight baked in from Western central banks.
Because SWIFT is incorporated in Belgium, the National Bank of Belgium leads oversight, supported by the G‑10 central banks, a structure that formalizes Western public‑sector influence over a private member utility. “Neutral,” yet overseen by a small club of advanced‑economy central banks.

4/ Governance concentrates power.
SWIFT is a cooperative under Belgian law; shareholders elect a 25‑member Board via National Member Groups. Representation is proportional to message volume, large Western institutions wield outsize influence by design.

5/ Messaging ≠ money movement.
SWIFT does not move funds; it passes instructions through long correspondent chains. Result: pre‑funded nostro/vostro balances, multi‑day settlement, opaque fees, and poor traceability, the opposite of real‑time finality.

6/ The “neutral” network as a policy tool.
In 2012, under EU decisions welcomed by the U.S. Treasury, SWIFT disconnected sanctioned Iranian banks, a geopolitical use of the network layer itself. That precedent exposed how governance and jurisdiction can be leveraged.

7/ 2022 made it unmistakable.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Western allies pushed Russian banks off SWIFT in stages (initially seven; later expanded), again demonstrating the system’s susceptibility to bloc politics, whatever its self‑description.

8/ Even SWIFT’s modernisation shows legacy drag.
The migration to ISO 20022 (CBPR+) only went live in March 2023; MT decommissioning is slated around late‑2025… a slow, multi‑year retrofit of 1970s plumbing to a richer data standard. Neutral or not, it’s still the cartel’s old switchboard catching up.

9/ RippleNet is a different animal.
RippleNet offers real‑time messaging, clearing and settlement over one API; with On‑Demand Liquidity (ODL) it sources liquidity via XRP as a neutral bridge, eliminating pre‑funded nostros and collapsing settlement to seconds. This is value movement, not just instructions.

10/ XRP Ledger = neutrality by architecture.
The XRP Ledger (XRPL) is a public, decentralized blockchain; XRP is its native asset. Ripple’s ODL uses XRP as a near‑instant bridge between currencies, enabling auditable, final settlement that’s geographically agnostic, precisely what a “non‑bloc” rails system requires.

11/ Why neutrality matters.
A messaging coop overseen by G‑10 authorities can be and has been instrumented geopolitically. A neutral settlement layer with public verifiability (XRPL) and institutional tooling (RippleNet/ODL) minimizes gatekeeper power and reduces the need for political chokepoints at the network layer.

12/ The transition underway.
As SWIFT inches to ISO 20022 and sanctions fragment payment routes, institutions pilot tokenized liquidity and real‑time settlement alternatives. The more global finance needs speed, auditability, and neutrality, the more RippleNet + XRP look like the end‑state rather than an “alternative.”

/END

Deeper dossiers & explainers: t.me/alexanderthewh…