A reading from the book of Mickey:
The SWIFT banking system allows transactions (debits and credits) between different countries and banking systems.
Much like different blockchains, different banking systems (Like the US, Russia, China, the EU) have different functioning mechanisms, for example, they might use a totally different currency to operate than your bank, or they might need a series of intermediary banks to manage the liquidity between banks with differing monetary systems. They might also have different accounting systems.
Before SWIFT, banks used a teletext messaging system for international wires which would essentially email information between banks to help facilitate transfers, but there was fear that teletext was too centralized (it was from the United States). Thus, a cooperative of many banks formed the SWIFT system in Belgium in 1973.
SWIFT is essentially a messaging service that uses several thousand standardized codes—SWIFT Codes, to facilitate messages between banks.
When you send an international wire transfer, let’s say between your bank in the United States to a friend’s bank in India, your bank doesn’t actually send your funds to India.
Rather, your bank gets a standardized SWIFT message and deducts your money and credits an intermediary bank (think of an intermediary bank like a cross-chain bridge) and that intermediary bank debits/credits to the Indian bank. Intermediary banks hold big buckets of Rupees and Dollars, which allow them to take money from different monetary systems. This allows them to take fees for the exchange, because of the huge amount of capital and work required to make the exchanges possible.
Like the old banks, blockchains are starting to see the need for sending assets back and forth between them. Many crypto projects seeking to build cross-chain, or interchain projects are essentially becoming intermediary banks. They have pools of various assets and then take fees as money is moved in and out.
But this is not 1973 and the technology outlined in the Satoshi Whitepaper and subsequent work has meant we can do a lot more than teletext 3.0.
Phonon is not an intermediary bank.
One way to think of Phonon is a natively digital asset SWIFT on steroids, one which is fee-less, scales infinitely, and (rather than centralized via a collective in Belgium) is entirely peer-to-peer. But instead of a messaging service, it is the physical rails to send both the SWIFT metadata and the asset. Phonon essentially makes the old method of a SWIFT+Intermediary banking model obsolete.
This is possible because Phonon is a technology built below the blockchain, it is, at its very core, pure cryptography. And cryptography is the foundation on which all of web-3 is built. Phonon allows you to exchange assets themselves (their entire private key) on a digital peer to peer network. In effect, its a digital way of you loading up any digital asset you can think of onto a hardware wallet and handing it physically to your friend.
What does this mean? It means Phonon has rails on it to to accept not just currency payments (which it can do natively).
But it gets better.
Phonon has rails on it to accept ANY digital asset, at zero marginal cost. Remember, Other cross-chain protocols are essentially intermediary banks, they require huge pools of liquidity to debit/credit cross chain transfers. Think about how many things are going to become digital assets. Stocks, Bonds, Currencies, Art, Commodities, Video Game Skins, Messages, Health Records, Books, Movies. All on different blockchains, all networked peer to peer via Phonon Protocol.
Every blockchain system can integrate phonon natively, like putting adamantium on wolverine’s bones, Phonon turns every blockchain into a super chain.
Put your seatbelt on, Phonon Protocol is going to rip in 2022.
Yes you're right. Has to be funny.