Distributed ledger

Huge news between two major banks.

DBS and Citi complete weekend USD payment via SWIFT's digital ledger using tokenized deposits.

Now, we've talked about tokenized deposits.

They're more so between the banks versus retail, right? So it's B2B.

Crypto, I think...

Bitcoin did more damage to digital ledger technology, DLT, than I think we can fathom.

Because the technology is incredible.

And when I think about where we are on the process of web, web 1.0 was HTML.

That was understanding social media and everything like that.

And, you know, the MAGA movement all came out of that and they took over the world.

Web 3.0 is DLT.

Own it.

Himself was a mortgage trader in their prior life.

And he was using DLT, digital ledger technology, to help originate loans.

We all, having spent a career in mortgages, appreciated what the problem was and what DLT could do to unlock or to reduce origination time.

We got it.

It's not just Bitcoin.

It wasn't for crypto spot trading with Bitcoin, although I wish I bought Bitcoin a lot earlier on.

But it's actually where digital, uh, distributed ledger technology, DLT, really starts to change the world of, of people in society.

Everything will be quicker, faster.

You won't even know you're dealing with, uh, a crypto asset or a blockchain.

You'll be doing it on, you say, on your phone, it'll be an app, but it'll just be immediacy, speed will be faster, and everything will be more transparent.

Buying a house, you'll be buying on a DLT data set and where everything will be shared in real time.

Your hospital records will be on DLT.

It'll be shared across different hospitals with your GP, with your hospital, all real time.

Because if you want the use cases to get the liquidity, you need to relentlessly integrate in everything.

And then again, it was, and then the year after is when David Schwartz, when he was working for the three-letter agency, that's when he gets the patent on distributed computer systems, which is technically DLT patent.

Exactly.

Okay, so I want to argue, and I'm not arguing with you, but I'm just arguing the point.

So tokenized deposits we're seeing it's collapsing parts of the correspondent banking journey into this on-ledger transfer between two accounts.

So it's still leveraging the DLT technology, the on-chain technology under the hood, but it's not leaving the banking system, but it's still getting those benefits.

And what the life for us already today, so we've, we've started using tokenized deposits to fund some of our network partners.

So this is cross-border on-chain settlement within the banking ecosystems.

Uh, it s- it feels...

It is instant, but it's on the same bank ledger, and so you have, you have to, you have to have your payout partner to be a, a customer of the bank that you're working with.

And so essentially, you know, whether it's DLT or not DLT, as long as it feels instant, uh, then that, that's what's necessary.

Um, but then also you mentioned that, um, well, the banks are getting together and starting to create, you know, a, a network between these things.

HSBC and Standard Chartered run first tokenized deposit on Swift Ledger.

HSBC and Standard Chartered completed the first live tokenized deposit transaction on Swift's blockchain Ledger, according to a report from Coindesk published on August 19, 2026.

The transaction moved a tokenized bank deposit between the two institutions using Swift's own distributed Ledger infrastructure, rather than a private test environment.

The detail that matters is the word live.

I started off by looking into Bitcoin as a vehicle of remittance between emerging markets and the kind of Western economies.

And then pivoted on to join actually Nordea in 2017 as the head of DLT and blockchain.

So I worked for five years with different kinds of projects at Nordea using DLT and blockchain, and then kind of grew our understanding on those topics and actually launched two different systems into production using blockchain technology.

Later on, we've been looking into things like public blockchain, stablecoins, tokenized deposits, of course, and other forms of digital currencies.

But we've been doing less experimentation with blockchain now lately because of these lessons that we learned between 17 and 22 when we did a lot of experiments.

And you have to be in a bank to sign the documents and handle the kind of deposits and everything related to money.

Now, Diaz saw this problem and said, okay, we need to make a digital version of this.

And the decision, especially back in 2018, because everybody remembers, it was the time when DLT hype was really kind of hitting its peak, especially in banks.