No SWIFT, not even the Internet: Bitcoin in Russia still has potential
With a combination of external punitive measures and internal strife, Russian financial turmoil looks set to continue – and the mood about Bitcoin’s future role is definitively mixed. In a resolution adopted Thursday last week, the European Parliament called on member states to move to block Russian access to the SWIFT payment system. The legislation will now move forward to the European Commission, whereupon it will rest with individual states to act together if it is to come into force, Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported. SWIFT, or Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial....
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A SWIFT ban could make Russia go nuts again. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered a cascade of consequences that were rapidly felt throughout the world. Apart from property and human life, global finance – and cryptocurrency in particular – took a significant hit. On Saturday, the US and its Western allies blocked certain Russian banks’ […]
The first deputy governor of the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) has been vocal in a recent online meeting, reported by Russia Today (RT), about the topic of digital currencies challenging the SWIFT international payments system and make it redundant. Digital Currencies Could Challenge SWIFT System, Even Replace It According to Olga Skorobogatova, the development of digital coins makes international banking payment systems a topic of discussion, in the way that such traditional logic could become obsolete. She backed her comments on the fact that over 30 financial regulators “are....
Russia would likely welcome replacements for SWIFT as the nation's banks have been threatened with being removed from the network.
The Swift payment network breaches have been making media headlines for several weeks now. But it appears more than three banks may have been breached, as researchers are investigating 12 similar incidents. Although nothing has been confirmed yet, this news does not bode well for the financial ecosystem. A lot of people were concerned about Swift when it became clear more than one bank lost funds due to a breach. To make matters even worse, the scope of these attacks may be much broader than anticipated. FireEye researchers are investigating a dozen incidents involved computer breaches....
Will the blockchain replace SWIFT? No fringe concept, the question has long been openly asked by innovators in the blockchain industry as well as FinTech professionals due to the potential of the technology to replace financial intermediaries. As the "global backbone of the financial industry", this is notably one of the core functions that SWIFT today serves. Accordingly, the question of how SWIFT would respond to this potential threat gained new definition this week with the news that the financial messaging services provider is working to build its own distributed ledger....