Digital Assets Take Center Stage at Swift’s Sibos 2025 (BS-S40)

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Since Monday, Sibos, the largest global conference for payments and financial services, has been underway in Frankfurt. For four days, the city has become the center of global finance, bringing together central banks, regulators, banks, payment providers, and market infrastructures. As Swift’s flagship event, it also served as the stage for several big announcements.

Swift’s blockchain

The conference opened with a major headline. On Monday morning, Swift CEO Javier Pérez-Tasso announced the development of a blockchain prototype with Consensys for 24/7 cross-border payments. The initiative already involves around 30 banks, including BNY Mellon, BNP Paribas, JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, and NatWest.

“Over the past couple of years, we’ve shown that Swift can move tokenized value across public and private blockchains and link CBDCs globally. Banks are ready for it, and they want us to play a bigger role,” Pérez-Tasso told the audience.

Stablecoins in the spotlight

Among the use cases, Swift is exploring the exchange of stablecoins for fiat currencies. Financial institutions are now starting to adopt them at scale, driven by regulatory clarity, rising demand for onchain cash and the promise of cross-border payments with 24/7 settlement.

The expansion of stablecoins beyond crypto-native markets was highlighted by Clearstream’s announcement that it will integrate Circle’s USDC and EURC into its existing environment for securities and crypto. In our conversation, Thilo Derenbach of Clearstream framed stablecoins as a form of commercial bank money, while the market awaits the arrival of CBDCs

Central banks on watch

CBDCs themselves were a central theme at Sibos, too. The European Central Bank, one of the frontrunners in development, emphasized the digital euro and wholesale CBDC as critical to safeguarding monetary sovereignty. In a panel, ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone, also highlighted the central bank’s potential role in avoiding liquidity fragmentation with Project Appia.

“Should we have one big ledger with central bank money, commercial bank money, tokenized deposits, stablecoins, and assets, or an ecosystem of interoperable ledgers? […] Those are very fundamental questions, because we will stay in this new world for a long time. So we better not mess it up from the beginning.”

The push for standards

Efforts to achieve such interoperability were evident across the conference. Euroclear and Clearstream demonstrated their newly announced eurobond digitisation standard, while Swift introduced a tokenization platform positioned as a step toward establishing common standards.

“Standards are no longer abstract ideals. What was mere talk in 2024 has become a tangible pilot in 2025,” explained Zakaryae Boudi, CEO of FeverTokens, a startup that supplied much of the smart contract technology behind Swift’s new platform.

Taken together, these initiatives underscored a broader theme running through Sibos: Swift is pushing to establish itself as the connective tissue of the tokenized economy and the industry seems to welcome that role. As Nicholas Soo, Head of Payment Products at HSBC, put it :