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In the world · Finance · 28 September 2026

Sibos Miami 2026: Swift's ledger goes into use

At Sibos 2026 in Miami, Swift showed its blockchain ledger for tokenized deposits. What this changes for those who export food.

bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published

Swift, the messaging network that links banks around the world, brought its blockchain ledger for international payments with tokenized deposits to Sibos 2026, in Miami, from September 28 to October 1. In July, the cooperative had already announced that the tool was ready for initial use, with 17 banks on six continents, among them Itaú Unibanco, preparing the first live transactions.

What happened

Sibos is Swift's annual conference. At the 2025 edition, the cooperative announced that it would add a shared, blockchain-based ledger to its infrastructure, with the initial design built in partnership with Consensys and more than 30 financial institutions involved.

On July 9, 2026, Swift announced that the ledger was ready for initial use. Seventeen banks were preparing to pilot live transactions: ANZ, BNP Paribas, BNY, Citi, DBS, First Abu Dhabi Bank, FirstRand, HSBC, Itaú Unibanco, Lloyds, Mashreq, MUFG, OCBC, Standard Chartered, UBS, UOB and Wells Fargo. The idea is for each bank to issue tokenized deposits on its own ledger and use Swift's ledger as an orchestration layer, moving value at night and on weekends, with final settlement through the systems that already exist.

For the first time, Sibos was held in Miami, at the Miami Beach Convention Center. According to FXC Intelligence's coverage, at the opening plenary Swift CEO Javier Pérez-Tasso said the ledger is up and running and that "at least 19 banks" are expected to use it by the end of 2026, in five major currencies. The same week, technology companies such as IBM and Oracle announced connections to the ledger, according to The Block.

Why it matters

For decades, Swift was a messaging system: it told one bank that another bank was going to pay. The money itself traveled by other routes, during business hours and through a queue of intermediaries. A shared ledger changes the nature of the thing. The message and the record of value come to live in the same place, and the record can run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

For foreign trade, this has a concrete effect. A shipment of fruit does not wait until Monday. A refrigerated container has a deadline. When international payments stop depending on the banking hours of two countries, the exporting grower gains predictability, and the buyer gains confidence to close faster.

There is also a message about the type of blockchain the financial system is adopting. It is not a network open to anyone: it is a permissioned ledger, among regulated institutions, that speaks the ISO 20022 messaging standard. Distributed ledger technology entered the heart of the system through the door of regulation.

In Bairo's view

Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez has followed this movement since he began designing CEASA Bank, when, as he tells it, he heard from banks that the solution he was proposing, with ISO 20022 messaging, blockchain and tokenization, would not be integrated. In his reading, Swift's announcement confirms the direction: the world's money is learning to move together with the record of what happened.

For Bairo, the question that matters is who stays connected to this new infrastructure. The 17 banks in the pilot are large. The grower who delivers tomatoes to a wholesale supply center at five in the morning is not on the list. The infrastructure that connects agribusiness to the world only delivers on its promise when it reaches the end of the chain, and that is the bridge he says he wants to build.

There is also the yardstick he uses for everything: lifetime. Every weekend a payment sits idle is time someone spends waiting. In his view, a system that runs 24 hours gives time back to people, and that, more than the technology, is what is worth celebrating.

Where this meets the ecosystem

CEASA Bank is an agribusiness financial platform, founded by Bairo, that operates on the infrastructure of an authorized institution. Its design calls for speaking ISO 20022 from the start and linking the quote, the invoice and the payment for a food shipment between countries. Connection to networks such as Swift's always depends on participating, authorized institutions.

The BTZ Chain follows a different, complementary logic: it is a public network that anyone can check in the explorer, proposed to record what is true and to prove there is a real person behind each act. BICOIN, this network's governance coin, carries the yardstick "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life", which measures purpose and is neither a price nor an invitation to buy.

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