Chainlink and Swift are addressing a structural problem that Ripple’s approach with RLUSD was never well positioned to solve for banks. Using RLUSD for cross-border payments enables atomic settlement on-chain, but without settlement in (or as) commercial bank money that stays on the banks’ own balance sheets, the capital still ends up sitting idle in new “nostro/vostro-style” positions. As @TomZschach has framed it, you are essentially just moving the capital into a new waiting room. Swift’s ledger enables atomic (or near-atomic) orchestration and matching of tokenized deposits. However, if banks still have to pre-fund nostro/vostro accounts with those tokenized deposits, the waiting-room problem remains. This is where @Chainlink’s turnkey tokenized deposits come in, a solution announced at Link:NYC (no detailed information was provided, so the following is my own reading of how the product is likely to work). Turnkey tokenized deposits should allow banks to move quickly and efficiently between traditional balance-sheet deposits (and their underlying liquidity, including central-bank reserves where relevant) and tokenized deposits. This would make it possible to transact instantaneously on the Swift ledger without having to pre-fund accounts with idle tokenized deposits. In practice, a bank could start from its existing balance sheet and an ISO 20022 message. Chainlink’s solution would then translate that into a tokenized deposit that can be used for the transaction on the Swift ledger (and reverse the process afterward). I can also see Chainlink using similar infrastructure to bridge into stablecoins or CBDCs when needed. We still have almost no public details on the exact design, but this is a realistic and coherent direction for the product.