In September 2025, at Sibos in Frankfurt, JPMorgan’s EMEA payments lead, Katja Lehr, said something worth writing down: the bank now handles around $10 trillion a day across 60 million transactions in 170 countries, and a growing share of that is done using blockchain technology. I’m not a pilot. This is not a whitepaper. We have the production infrastructure to make this happen.
That’s one number. Here’s another one: SWIFT is the system that allows banks to send messages to each other. It has been in use since 1973. At a meeting, SWIFT announced it will create a new blockchain-based system for sending money between countries. JP Morgan Chase, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, and Bank of America have agreed to help develop this new system. The blockchain firm Consensys is building the prototype. The ledger will record, order, and check transactions through smart contracts.
When the system that moves money between banks starts using blockchain, it will be more than just a small technology.
What Enterprises Actually Use It For
The idea that many people are using this is true, but it is easy to misunderstand. Almost 90% of businesses have already started using blockchain or are thinking about it. As of mid-2025, 48 of the Fortune 100 use at least one important business process on permissioned or hybrid blockchain networks. Between 2020 and 2024, banks alone invested more than $100 billion in blockchain infrastructure, according to research from Ripple.
But not every use case works the same way. There are three areas where the technology has moved from experimental to everyday use.
Payments and settlement. JPMorgan’s Kinexys unit – the evolution of JPM Coin, launched in 2019 – provides blockchain-based deposit accounts and tokenised deposits for its wholesale clients. Its Onyx platform processed more than $300 billion in transactions during the day, with most of these backed by government bonds. The IIN (Interbank Information Network) built on the Quorum blockchain now connects over 400 banks for compliance and payment verification. These are not marketing announcements. You can find this information in the company’s quarterly reports.
The ability to track products and their origins. The use of blockchain in supply chains and logistics grew by 32% in 2023 because people needed to verify where products came from across networks involving many different parties. The main problem it solves is that a normal supply chain relies on everyone trusting each other’s records. A shared, unchangeable record means everyone sees the same information, and nobody can change or delete anything that has already been recorded.
Healthcare data. The healthcare sector spent $2.9 billion on blockchain in 2024, and it is expected to spend $52.6 billion by 2033. The use case isn’t exciting, but it’s vital for how we work: patient records shared securely across hospitals, insurance providers, and researchers, without any single institution controlling the main database.
The Mechanism That Makes This Different
It’s important to explain why blockchain changes platform architecture rather than just saying it does.
A normal digital platform – such as a sportsbook, a marketplace, or a bank – stores its data in a single, controlled database. People trust the platform to record transactions accurately and to keep their access information up to date. If the platform decides to change a record, delay a payout, or restrict an account, it can do so. There is no extra layer to check the information.
A blockchain-based platform records transactions on a shared ledger distributed across a network of computers. Once a transaction is recorded and confirmed, it can’t be changed without rewriting the whole next chain of transactions. This would take too long to do. Smart contracts are computer programmes that run automatically when certain conditions are met. They don’t need a person to approve each step.
This is especially important when people who don’t fully trust each other need to do business together. The global banking system has always done this by using many intermediaries, each of whom charges a fee and adds processing time. Blockchain technology removes some of those layers. This is exactly why so much attention is being given to blockchain development for cross-border payments and SWIFT latency.
Where Crypto Meets Platform Design
The same architectural principles apply at the consumer end of digital platforms.The Dexsport crypto betting platform is a clear example of this model applied to sports wagering: smart contracts hold funds while a bet is live, decentralised oracles verify outcomes, and payouts are executed automatically without operator approval. The platform never holds user assets in a custodial account. The code holds them.
This solves a particular problem that betting platforms run by a single company can cause: when a sportsbook delays withdrawals for business days, limits winning accounts, or cancels bets without permission, users have no way to take action. The way blockchain is set up makes it impossible to solve this kind of problem in the first place – it’s not that it’s managed better, but that it can’t be solved.
The same idea is used in decentralised exchanges, peer-to-peer lending protocols and NFT marketplaces. The pattern repeats: replace the trusted intermediary with verifiable code.
The Adoption Curve and Its Honest Limits
In 2024, a record-breaking $10 trillion worth of transactions were processed by blockchain networks. VC funding into blockchain reached $11.5 billion across more than 2,150 deals. The EU’s MiCA regulation, which came into effect at the end of 2024, gave European institutional investors the clear regulations they had been waiting for. By 2030, about a third of the world’s financial systems will use blockchain, according to current predictions.
This doesn’t mean the transition will be easy. There are still three real problems.
Ethereum’s scalability is an important factor. It could handle 7-15 transactions per second when it was first developed. Visa handles around 24,000. Layer-2 solutions have made a big difference, but some business applications still need careful planning.
The EU has MiCA, but the US still doesn’t have a federal framework. Instead, it relies on a mix of SEC guidance, CFTC jurisdiction, and state money transmission laws. A platform that operates worldwide has to follow at least three different sets of rules simultaneously.
The user experience of connecting a crypto wallet, managing private keys, and understanding gas fees is still much harder than entering a card number. The platforms getting the best results are those that borrow onboarding patterns from fintech, rather than expecting users to learn blockchain mechanics.
What 2025 and 2026 Actually Look Like
The development of the SWIFT blockchain is a clear sign of where this is going. More than 11,500 financial institutions use SWIFT’s infrastructure in over 200 countries. Adding a blockchain layer to it doesn’t replace what exists – it adds smart contract execution, real-time settlement capability, and a shared record that all participants can verify.
Most enterprise implementations use a hybrid model, combining traditional infrastructure with a blockchain trust layer. JP Morgan isn’t replacing its payment systems with a public blockchain. It adds programmable settlement, tokenised deposits and on-chain compliance verification to existing infrastructure.
The idea that blockchain is just a buzzword and the idea that decentralisation is the only solution are both wrong. The technology is real, the adoption is real, and the economic logic is straightforward: when you need multiple parties who don’t fully trust each other to share a verifiable record, a distributed ledger is better infrastructure than a centralized database controlled by one of them.