[tannerbrockwell]

"SWIFT does not facilitate funds transfer: rather, it sends payment orders, which must be settled by correspondent accounts that the institutions have with each other."[...] While SWIFT transports financial messages in a secure manner, it does not hold accounts for its members; nor does it perform any form of clearing or settlement.[1]

Both Bitcoin and Ethereum can perform the settlement of transactions. Ethereum currently has support for complex financial transactions with Smart Contracts. A SWIFT replacement could include settlement on chain, but on-chain transactions for SWIFT type co-ordination is probably too expensive with Bitcoin and Ethereum without the use of L2 and Lightning Network support for the co-ordination feature of SWIFT.

If this were done, it would only succeed if the smart contracts are open source, formally verified and audited by a third party. While Taproot adds tapscript support[2] to bitcoin, there still remains the development of sophisticated financial products.

As a net exporter of Energy products, Russia would probably lean more towards Bitcoin or other PoW protocols, as their customers could run mining operations with the energy they are buying. This would exclude Ethereum when the PoS merge occurs.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWIFT [2]: https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/tapscript/

[sarusso]

Thanks, very clear explanation. Curious how a third party is always required to get involved in the end.