You may have heard fintech professionals calling Laser “SWIFT for Blockchain”.

We’re getting some questions about what that means. So, today we’re going to clear the meaning of that up, so you can get involved in the Laser revolution with a complete understanding.

To begin, we’ll start with SWIFT.

What is SWIFT?

If you thought sending money through banks is slow today… it was much worse in 1974.

That’s when a group of banks coordinated to facilitate international money transfers between themselves by forming SWIFT — the Society of Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication.

Before then, it was difficult to move money from one country to another quickly (unless you wanted to travel with a suitcase full of cash). But the SWIFT network made it possible for member banks to transparently communicate with each other in a trustworthy way to enable fast transactions.

Something interesting about the SWIFT network is that it doesn’t actually send money. It simply sends secure messages between banks so they can trust each other to debit and credit between accounts.

SWIFT Transmits 6.5 Billion Cross-Border Financial Transactions a Year, Making $745 Million

Today, the SWIFT network transmits 25.8 million messages every day… facilitating 6.5 billion cross-border financial transactions a year worldwide.

However, over 40 years later, it still takes 1–2 days for most transactions to clear. That is because they are often held up by the receiving bank’s batch processing system. It can take up to a week (or even longer) if one of the parties’ banks holds up a transfer.

Despite this, it’s still a big business that makes plenty of money. SWIFT earned $745 million in revenue in 2016, for simply facilitating information transfers.

With this in mind, let’s take a look at Laser.

Laser is SWIFT for Blockchain

There are over 1,500 cryptocurrencies (and growing) and the crypto ecosystem needs a simple way to facilitate transfers between them, just like SWIFT does for international banks.

That is what Laser does.

Unlike the banking system, there will never be a single globally-trusted central company like SWIFT. Instead, we plan to decentralize this functionality through the Laser servicenode layer.

So, instead of a central company managing the hardware and software for thousands of banks across the world like SWIFT inter-bank network, Laser has a decentralized model shown below…

Stake Your Laser Photons and Run a Laser Servicenode

Anyone can run a Laser servicenode on the Laser inter-chain network by staking our native currency, Photons.

These servicenodes work just like SWIFT, but for cryptocurrencies… providing secure, anonymous, and near-instant transfers between any two supported cryptocurrencies.

But it gets better than that…

Unlike SWIFT, where the $745 million in revenue is passed back to the shareholding banks, the Laser network incentivizes growth of our network by passing the “fees” back to those who run our servicenodes.

So, how can you get started?

It’s very simple…

First, view our recent article that outlines the servicenode incentives and payout rates.

After that, be sure to read our whitepaper for a more in-depth explanation.

And then, be sure to follow the Laser Twitter account to keep up with the latest news.