17 min ago4 min readThe American western expansion in 1800s also opened the way for attacks stagecoach transfers. (Dan Cutler/Unsplash)SummaryFinancial innovation has repeatedly replaced the physical movement of money with trusted messages or digital records, reducing some dangers while creating new risks such as fraud, bank runs and cyberattacks.Swift, which routes about $5 trillion daily, has introduced a blockchain ledger that enabled HSBC and Standard Chartered to settle a transaction in seconds rather than days.Stablecoins and tokenized securities could become multitrillion-dollar markets by 2030, pressuring traditional financial networks to offer faster and cheaper cross-border transfers.Finance has spent a thousand years trying to move wealth virtually. But every time innovators engineer a faster, more secure way to transfer capital, malicious actors hit back with new, sometimes highly sophisticated, attack vectors.For over 50 years, the messaging system developed by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (Swift) has been the dominant infrastructure for cross-border settlement, routing roughly $5 trillion daily. However, facing pressure to improve speed, reduce cost and compete with the growing number of blockchain rivals, the bank-owned organization is under pressure to evolve.In recent years, stablecoins and tokenized deposits have emerged as potential "SWIFT killers", a phrase coined in a 2017 Brave New Coin analysis about Ripple, a blockchain designed to handle cross-border transactions. It took almost nine years for Swift to respond. Just last month, it unveiled a blockchain ledger and, shortly after, HSBC and Standard Chartered executed the first live transaction, settling in seconds rather than days.Swift’s potential inspirationIn the 8th century, Islamic merchants moving goods between Baghdad, Cairo and the Indian subcontinent had a problem. Moving gold physically was dangerous, with bandits on the lookout for victims. No amount of armed escorts could solve that issue.So they created a network of brokers called hawaladars who moved value through trust and a code word rather than hard currency. A merchant handed cash to a hawaladar in Baghdad, and a counterparty picked up the same amount in Cairo. A merchant in Baghdad could build a trading empire from Cairo to Calcutta without a coin moving internationally.The suftaja followed, replacing the secret code and broker with an encrypted message on paper. By the 1200s, Florence and Venice had a similar idea. Their letters of exchange moved fortunes across Europe without a coin on any road.The goldsmith bankers of 17th-century London came next. The receipts they issued for gold deposits circulated as paper money. That worked until too many people asked for their gold back at once, triggering the first bank run and a new kind of risk.Then came the South Sea Bubble of 1720, one of the first large-scale financial frauds involving paper instruments. Investors were sold shares in a company with no real assets. Paper replaced gold, while speculation and fraud replaced robbery.In the early 1800s, central banks and correspondent banking were established. Banks settled debts with each other through correspondent accounts, creating a new type of risk. If one failed, so did the others.A backward stepAfter Europe spent five centuries learning to move money, the colonization of the American continent sent systems into reverse. As settlers pushed west into territory with no banks, the physical movement of money returned, and so did the bandits. Even when banks were established, transferring funds across the continent was risky.Wells Fargo and its peers responded with stagecoaches and armed guards, but that was not enough. The bank's stagecoaches were robbed nearly 350 times between 1870 and 1884, and 129 more were hit in Arizona between 1875 and 1903. Jesse James derailed a train in Iowa in 1873. Butch Cassidy blew open an express car in Wyoming in 1899.The movement of money was back, and so were the risks.America’s wild frontier did away with armed escorts only when money stopped being transferred physically, and instead sent telegraphically in the second half of the 19th century.Three billion people still use cash. Ricardo Salinas knows why. His Mexico City-based Grupo Elektra has been in remittances for nearly 30 years. It pays out $500 million in peso bills every week through retail stores, half of U.S.-to-Mexico remittances.“In Mexico, 80% of all remittances are cash payout,” he said, because that is how senders and recipients want it. “If you want to pay remittances, you’ve got to have the money to pay them.”The cash does not sit safely in a store. Migrants sending or collecting remittances are frequently targeted by criminals, robbed on the way to transfer offices or after collecting payouts. The physical risk the hawaladar eliminated in 8th-century Baghdad never left the world’s most vulnerable money movers.The digital eraInterbank messaging took a step forward in 1977, when Swift went live with 518 banks across 22 countries. Within three decades, it had reached 11,500 institutions across 200 countries.“The equivalent of the world’s GDP flows over our network every two to three days,” said Jack Pouderoyen, Swift’s head of digital asset strategy. But it still costs between 1% and 4% per transaction and takes one to five business days to settle.Still, no bandit could reach it, at least not directly. In the 2016 Bangladesh Bank heist, attackers used compromised bank systems to send fraudulent messages, stealing $81 million. Swift said the attack occurred outside its network.Then came the blockchain, offering a faster and cheaper way to transfer assets. Even so, malicious actors have found ways to exploit it directly and indirectly.Social engineering scams are indirect ways to target crypto users and projects alike, and they are on the rise. Bybit is a rare example of a direct and indirect scam. It began with social engineering, which led to a technical exploit. North Korea-linked cyberthieves stole an estimated $2 billion in crypto last year, including an estimated $1.5 billion from Bybit, according to Chainalysis.Many blockchains operate outside the traditional financial system. Many, in fact, were specifically developed to avoid it. Stablecoins, the fiat-currency pegged tokens often used to transfer value internationally, could grow into a $3.7 trillion market by 2030, according to BNY. Citi predicts tokenized securities, another way to transfer assets across borders, will grow to $5.5 trillion by 2030. It's a market that cannot be ignored.12345678910Anvil: The Missing Collateral LayerAnvil: The Missing Collateral LayerAnvil is a shared on-chain collateral layer built on a programmable letter of credit: reserve assets as a guarantee -no loan, no interest, keep custody & yield.Jul 29, 2026Anvil is a shared on-chain collateral layer built on a programmable letter of credit: reserve assets as a guarantee -no loan, no interest, keep custody & yield.Why it matters:Anvil is a shared on-chain collateral layer built on a programmable letter of credit: reserve assets as a guarantee -no loan, no interest, keep custody & yield.View Full Report