The Director of Research at Coin Center Peter Van Valkenburgh raised an interesting point on Monday when he tweeted a screenshot from the SWIFT website detailing the entity’s role in sanctions enacted by “national authorities.”
Comments on the tweet immediately compared the information to Ethereum’s role in processing transactions.
Send tweet. pic.twitter.com/82IRrRLbDR
— Peter Van Valkenburgh (@valkenburgh) August 22, 2022
SWIFT is a global payment messaging service that allows banks to communicate with one another concerning financial transactions. According to February 2022, SWIFT processes transactions between “4 billion accounts and 11,000 institutions in more than 200 countries.”
Van Valkenburgh’s tweet stated that SWIFT “does not monitor or control the messages that users send through its system.” Further, it articulated that”
“All decisions on the legitimacy of financial transactions under applicable regulations, such as sanctions regulations, rest with the financial institutions handling them… As far as financial sanctions are concerned, the focus of SWIFT is to help its users in meeting their responsibilities to comply with national and international regulations.”
The rest of the page on SWIFT’s website explains that “SWIFT is only a messaging service provider and has no involvement in or control over the underlying financial transactions.”
Interestingly, in response to the question “does SWIFT expel banks” the response states, “SWIFT is neutral.” However, it confirms that it “disconnected all designated Russian entities” pursuant to E.U. regulation in 2022.
Comparison to sanctions on Ethereum
The Ethereum network has been under scrutiny over the past week following U.S. sanctions on Tornado Cash, an application running on the protocol.
Ethereum handles transactions between 674,265 entities daily, with nodes running from over 64 different countries.
Projects such as Circle’s $USDC, Aave, Uniswap, and Balancer…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Ethereum (ETH) News | CryptoSlate…
