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- Chainlink has won the Swift Hackathon 2025 for its cross-border digital asset settlement solution, chosen from a record 104 participants.
- This development arrives shortly after Chainlink and Swift launched a live pilot with UBS Tokenize, showcasing on-chain fund subscription capabilities.
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), which connects 11,000 financial institutions across more than 200 countries through its secure messaging system, held its 2025 Hackathon from July 11 to July 25.
The results are now in. Chainlink (LINK), the decentralized oracle network, took home the top spot in the Business Challenge, while Deutsche Bank claimed victory in the Technical Challenge. The judges also recognized two strong runners-up: Crédit Agricole CIB in the Business Challenge and Currency Network Ltd in the Technical Challenge.
The Swift Hackathon 2025 featured two main tracks designed to push innovation in cross-border payments. The Business Challenge centered on making digital transactions faster, cheaper, and more transparent across different networks, while the Technical Challenge zeroed in on improving interoperability using ISO 20022 standards for seamless cross-currency and cross-network flows.
The event drew an impressive 104 teams from across the globe, marking Swift’s biggest hackathon participation to date, compared to 2024’s 79 companies.
Chainlink’s Winning Solution
Ryan Lovell, Director of Capital Markets at Chainlink Labs, explained that the Chainlink runtime environment addresses key challenges by adding a higher layer of abstraction and orchestration. In practice, this turns individual components into coordinated workflows, allowing institutions to seamlessly connect on-chain and off-chain systems, simplify complex processes, and create outcomes greater than the sum of their parts.
Lovell explained that the solution shows how a transaction can start and be validated on-chain, with compliance and identity checks automatically enforced through policy rules. From there, the fiat payment is handled off-chain via Swift, which then triggers on-chain settlement and delivery of the digital asset.
This, he emphasized, merges traditional and digital finance into a secure and compliant workflow.
The solution leverages Chainlink’s automated compliance framework, a flexible setup of smart contracts and off-chain services integrated within its runtime environment. With the added support of GLEIF’s vLEI identity framework, it streamlines onboarding by automating KYC procedures and sanctions checks.
At the same time, it reduces costs, safeguards user privacy, enhances transparency, and guarantees that every transaction remains securely traceable and auditable on-chain.
Chainlink explained on X that,
The same winning approach can be extended to power regulatory-compliant stablecoins, tokenized deposits, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), digital securities, and other tokenized financial instruments.
This isn’t Chainlink’s first success with Swift; the company had previously won the 2016 Innotribe Industry Challenge, a precursor to the Hackathon.
Since then, the collaboration has deepened. Most recently, we reported that Chainlink and Swift have been working on systems that enable financial institutions to manage tokenized fund processes directly through existing Swift messaging, powered by the Chainlink Runtime Environment.
Last week, Chainlink struck a deal with the Canton Network, a consortium blockchain supported by some of the world’s largest banks and tech leaders. The move incorporates Chainlink’s services into Canton, enhancing data connectivity and cross-chain functionality for institutional finance.
