Swift Just Admitted Your 'Workaround' Was Better Infrastructure 🏦

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Swift just announced it's building blockchain infrastructure to compete with stablecoins. 

Swift.

The organization that facilitates payments between 11,500 banks globally. 

The backbone of international banking for 50 years.

They're not experimenting. They're scrambling. And it's all happening right now.

Visa is piloting stablecoin payments. Nine European banks are launching a euro stablecoin consortium. VCs are raising $50 million funds exclusively for stablecoin infrastructure.

While traditional finance was excluding frontier industries, those businesses were building payment and financing stacks on the new infrastructure.

They weren't desperate. They were early.

Here's what mainstream stablecoin adoption means for frontier industries and why forced innovation just became a competitive advantage.

Everyone Is Pivoting to Compete

The validation is coming from the top of the financial infrastructure stack.

VCs Are All In

Foresight Ventures launched a $50 million "Stablecoin Infrastructure Fund" targeting startups throughout the stablecoin value chain. 

Circle Ventures, Paxos Labs, a16z Crypto, and Pantera Capital have all made stablecoins a top priority, with Pantera calling them a "trillion dollar opportunity."

Visa's Senior Vice President for CEMEA observed: "In 2025, every institution that moves money will need a stablecoin strategy."

Visa Admits the GENIUS Act Changed Everything

Visa announced last week it will test allowing businesses to fund international payments using stablecoins instead of pre-depositing cash in local accounts. 

The pilot lets banks, remittance firms, and financial institutions pre-fund accounts with stablecoins instead of traditional currencies.

Mark Nelsen, head of product for Visa's commercial and money movement solutions, told Reuters: "The Genius Act changed everything. It made everything so much more legitimate. Before that regulatory clarity, all the big institutions were sort of on the fence."

European Banks Race to Catch Up

A consortium of nine European banks including ING, UniCredit, and Danske Bank announced they're forming a new company to launch a euro-denominated stablecoin by the second half of 2026.

Global stablecoin issuance stands at nearly $300 billion. 

Euro-denominated stablecoins total just $620 million, according to the Bank of Italy. Dollar-pegged tokens are overwhelmingly dominant.

Deutsche Bank's recent report: "Countries should adopt stablecoins or risk being left behind. Europe is under particular pressure."

They're targeting second half of 2026. Cannabis and psychedelics operators have been using this infrastructure for years.

Swift's Capitulation

Swift announced it's building its own blockchain. 

Not to experiment. To survive.

Swift will work with Bank of America, Citigroup, and NatWest to create a shared digital ledger for tokenized products including stablecoins. 

The goal: "instant, always-on cross-border transactions at unprecedented scale."

McKinsey called stablecoins "a direct challenge to traditional global payments rails" like Swift because legacy systems take up to five days to complete transactions, have multiple intermediaries, and use "manual or only semi-automated" compliance checks.

Meaning? 

Swift's 50-year-old infrastructure is slower and more expensive than the payment rails frontier businesses adopted three years ago.

When the organization that IS global banking infrastructure admits it needs to build what frontier businesses have been using since 2022, forced innovation becomes a competitive advantage.

The Numbers Behind the Infrastructure Shift

The scale proves this isn't a niche experiment.

As of mid-2025, the stablecoin market cap surpassed $230 billion. But market cap understates actual usage.

Stablecoins process approximately $800 billion in monthly transactions. Total transfer volume hit $27.6 trillion last year, surpassing the combined volume of Visa and Mastercard in 2024.

The "alternative" payment rail processes more volume than Visa and Mastercard combined.

Transaction fees average 2.5%, compared to 5% in traditional banking for remittances. Settlement happens 24/7.

While traditional banks still discriminate by industry, stablecoin-backed lending doesn't ask what you sell.

Crypto-collateralized lending hit $53.09 billion in Q2 2025, up 27.44% from Q1. 

On-chain cryptocurrency collateralized loans grew 42% in Q2 alone, reaching $26.5 billion.

As of July 1, 2025, DeFi lending has a Total Value Locked of $54.211 billion.

The Lending Mechanics

Cannabis businesses usually can't get SBA loans. Psychedelics clinics get rejected by traditional lenders. Betting platforms face banking restrictions.

But a DeFi protocol lending against ETH or USDC collateral evaluates collateral, not business models.

Typical parameters:

• Interest rates: 2-12% APY depending on collateral and demand

• No credit checks or personal liability

• Industry-agnostic: protocols don't discriminate

Average interest rates on DeFi stablecoin loans stand near 4.8% annualized. 

Over-collateralization ratios dropped from 163% in 2024 to 151% in 2025, indicating more efficient capital use.

The $53 billion in crypto-collateralized lending is capital that traditional banking discrimination can't touch..

The Payment Revolution Already Happened. You Were Part of It.

Remember Strainly from the August newsletter? The cannabis genetics marketplace using crypto payments since 2016?

They were forced into crypto because payment processors wouldn't serve hemp businesses despite federal legality. 

Now Visa is piloting the same infrastructure.

Frontier businesses have 5 years of operational experience with the infrastructure everyone else is discovering.

Visa's Mark Nelsen said "The Genius Act changed everything." 

But not the way he thinks.

It didn't make stablecoins legitimate. 

Stablecoins were already processing $27.6 trillion annually, more than Visa and Mastercard combined.

It forced institutions to admit they were wrong to exclude this infrastructure.

When payment processors labeled entire industries "high-risk" and walked away, those businesses built operations on infrastructure that's faster, cheaper, and more accessible.

The question isn't whether to use stablecoins anymore. It's how aggressively to scale the advantage.

The forced innovation just became a 5-year competitive advantage.

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