For fifty years, SWIFT has been the invisible toll booth of global finance, moving messages, not money, while banks queue up on either side waiting days for transactions to clear. That model is now under structural assault. The most visible force leading the charge is private blockchain infrastructure. One example of that is JPMorgan Chase and its project that began as Onyx and quietly evolved into something far more consequential under the new brand name.
Call it Project Onyx 2.0.
In November 2024, JPMorgan rebranded its blockchain division from Onyx to Kinexys — a name chosen to signal global connectivity and expanded ambition. But the numbers behind the rebrand tell the real story. Since its inception, the platform has exceeded $1.5 trillion in notional value, processing an average of more than $2 billion daily, with payment transactions growing 10x year-over-year. Clients span five continents and include Siemens, BlackRock, and Ant International.
The platform’s original product — JPM Coin System, now rebranded as Kinexys Digital Payments — was built to solve a specific and stubborn problem: the friction cost of moving money across borders and time zones through legacy correspondent banking chains. JPMorgan designed the system to enable payments anywhere in the world for a fraction of a penny, reducing friction in cross-border transactions and boosting liquidity. Where a traditional wire transfer through SWIFT can take one to four days and accumulate fees at every intermediary hop, a Kinexys transaction settles in near-real time, around the clock.
The next move is where it gets geopolitically significant. Kinexys Digital Payments is now integrating with J.P. Morgan FX Services to enable on-chain foreign exchange settlement, initially in USD and EUR, laying the groundwork for 24/7 near real-time multicurrency clearing and settlement based on client-defined instructions. That phrase (client-defined instructions) matters. It describes programmable, automated settlement that operates without the intermediary messaging layer that SWIFT has monetized for half a century.
What’s new to Kinexys Digital Payments this March
Close to the end of last month, Mitsubishi Corporation became the first Japanese corporate to adopt Kinexys Digital Payments, using it for intragroup USD cash management, connecting its treasury operations across Singapore, London, and New York in near real-time, 24/7, with no banking cut-off times or holiday delays.
For a conglomerate spanning energy, logistics, and manufacturing across multiple continents, that’s a meaningful operational upgrade. However, that’s also a great reality-check for Kinexys itself illustrating its potential and capabilities on a pretty large scale.
Since its launch, Kinexys has now processed over $3 trillion in total transaction volume, with average daily transactions exceeding $5 billion. Zack Chestnut, Global Head of Business Development for Kinexys, said the goal is to get daily transaction value above $10 billion “in the foreseeable future,” adding that the client pipeline is “very robust” and the market should expect to hear more about client growth over the next 12 months.
This is the degradation of SWIFT’s model playing out in slow motion, ledger entry by ledger entry.
As one analyst put it bluntly: “SWIFT, today, does not transfer value; it sends messages. On-chain, the message and the transfer are the same thing.” When settlement is embedded in the technology itself, the need for a separate messaging layer, which is SWIFT’s entire value proposition, begins to dissolve. The structural problem SWIFT faces is that blockchain exists to remove intermediaries, while SWIFT’s business model depends on being one.
SWIFT is not standing still though. It has confirmed its own blockchain-based shared ledger — a permissioned infrastructure built on Linea, an Ethereum layer-2 network — is progressing toward its first MVP, designed to enable tokenized deposits, regulated stablecoins, and central bank digital currencies to move across institutions in real time.
Ironically, JPMorgan is among the consortium of over 30 banks collaborating with SWIFT on this very ledger, meaning the bank is simultaneously building the private rails that reduce SWIFT dependency while helping SWIFT modernize. That is a position of extraordinary leverage.
JPMorgan has also taken its blockchain infrastructure public, literally. The bank arranged a commercial paper issuance on the Solana blockchain in December 2025, settled in USDC — one of the first such transactions of its kind in the U.S. Moving from a private permissioned chain to public infrastructure is a signal that institutional finance is no longer quarantining blockchain from the mainstream.
The competitive implications are severe for legacy payment intermediaries: firms like Western Union and traditional remittance services face an existential threat as near-instant, low-cost international transfers increasingly bypass the SWIFT network entirely.
What JPMorgan has constructed — from Onyx through to Kinexys and now outward onto public blockchains — is a parallel financial settlement system that is already live, already scaling, and already eating into the transaction volumes that once had no alternative route. SWIFT isn’t dead. But the architecture of global finance is being redrawn around it, one programmable settlement at a time. Surely, more private blockchain initiatives are soon to come once the model proves viable. In that case, the question is whether SWIFT would be able to keep the pace with immense private capital invested in its alternatives.
