🚨 The US JUST targeted Chinese banks - The financial WAR has begun !

One Ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them What if the one ring from

the Lord of the rings wasn't a fiction? Not literally, but the idea behind it. One mechanism that gives whoever holds it

control over everyone else. That mechanism is real. It's called swift swift swift. Swift, swift. a tool so powerful that nations bow

to it, economies collapse without it, and nobody has managed to build

an alternative that actually works 90% of every international dollar

transfer on Earth passes through this single choke point. The banks technically own it,

but Washington and Brussels holds the kill switch And when they use it,

entire economies go dark. Iran lost 80% of its currency value

overnight. Russia's stock market shut down

completely. This isn't just infrastructure. It's the most powerful

financial weapon ever built. And the people who control it

get to choose who trades and who doesn't. China, Russia, India

and dozens of other countries across the BRICS

bloc are all trying to escape, but none of them have broken free

by the end of this video. You know exactly

who really runs the global payment system. Why and what this means for your business. my name is Bertrand. I'm the CEO of Statrys We move money

across borders for entrepreneurs. That means I see this system

from the inside. The mechanics, the cost,

the things nobody explains to you. That's what this channel is. The view from behind the curtain. Subscribe if you want the insider

perspective on global money. So how

does one network get this kind of power? SWIFT doesn't move money. That's the part that most people get wrong

it moves messages, instructions between banks telling each other

what to send, where and how much. Without those instructions,

international transfers don't happen. A bank cut from Swift

can still hold your money. it just control to anyone

outside its own borders. That's what makes the weapon so clean. No assets seized. No military operation. Just silence. Your bank tries to send a payment abroad,

and nobody picks up. The first time this weapon was deployed

at scale was Iran in 2012. 30 banks disconnected overnight. the country's oil exports

dropped by nearly 40% in a single year. The Rial lost 80% of its value. Iran's government

went looking for any door still open. They tried to make deals with other

countries, but none of it was enough. Three years later,

Iran came back to the negotiating table. Reconnecting to Swift

was the only way out. Russia was watching closely In 2014,

when the US threatened to disconnect Russia from swift over the annexation

of Crimea, nothing happened. But the threat alone was enough. Moscow didn't wait to find out

if Washington was bluffing. the Russian central bank quietly

started building its own messaging system. They had eight years to prepare. They needed every one of them. when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, seven

Russian banks were cut from Swift within days. VTB, the country's second

largest bank, went dark internationally. The ruble lost

nearly half of its value in 24 hours, and the Moscow Stock Exchange shut down. The central bank raised interest rate

by 11.5 percentage point in a single emergency move,

just to stop the freefall. But look at who was not on that list. Spur Bank, Russia's biggest bank. Gazprom Bank, the institution

and most of Russia's oils and gas payments to Europe,

both deliberately left connected because German factories

still needed Russian gas. Because European households

still needed heating. Some called that strategic restraint. Others call it hypocrisy. I'm not in a position to judge,

but either way, it tells you something important

about how these systems operate. The kill switch exists,

and the people holding it get to choose when to press it

and when to look the other way. That decision is based on the interest

cut off in 2022. Moscow didn't reconcile. It started building And in doing so,

it became the figurehead of something much bigger. A growing list of countries

that looked at Swift and decided the risk of depending on

it was no longer acceptable. If one network can be weaponized,

every country that could end up on the wrong side of that

decision has a reason to build its own. China didn't wait for a crisis. They launched CIPS, the cross-border

interbank payment system, in 2015. Today it connects over 1600 financial

institutions across 180 countries. Those numbers sound great,

but more than 80% of CIPS transactions still rely on Swift on messaging

infrastructure to get processed. China built an alternative payment system

that runs on the very network it's trying to replace. And the Yuan still accounts for roughly 3

to 4% of global payments. You can't dethrone the Swift

without first dethroning the dollar. And that's a generational project,

not a product launch. Russia's system was born out of fear,

not ambition as BFFs. When life after the 2014 Crimea crisis,

and by 2022, it was only nearly all domestic interbank

traffic. Domestically, it works internationally. It has about 177 foreign participants

across 24 countries, almost entirely nations

that are themselves under Western sanctions or expected to be

Iran's banks have joined. so have a handful of Central

Asian institutions, two economies locked out of the global system,

finding each other outside it. That's not a swift replacement. That's a coalition of the excluded. And Washington knows it. in late 2024,

the US Treasury issued a direct warning. Any foreign bank joining SPFS will face aggressive sanctions targeting. They’re not just defending the network. They're actively trying

to kill the competition before it grows. India took a completely different

approach. UPI was built for people, not geopolitics. India receives

129 billion USD in remittances every year. Workers in Singapore, the UAE, the UK

sending money home to their families. UPI is now live internationally

in several countries, processing those transfers instantly

and almost for free. It doesn't compete with Swift

for the big institutional flows. It was never designed to. It quietly handles the everyday money that moves between ordinary people

and small businesses. That's not the challenge

to Swift at the top. It's erosion at the base. Then there are the BRICs, a growing group

including Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE Over 40% of the world's

population. The group has been openly discussing

a shared payment infrastructure to reduce

dependance on Swift and the dollar. The ambition is real. The problem is that

ambition is the only thing they agree on. China wants the yuan at the center. India wants neutrality. Russia wants anything that works. Saudi Arabia wants to keep Washington

happy while hedging his bets. Building a new payment system is hard

enough. Building one where every architect wants a different

blueprint is close to impossible. And that's the pattern

across every alternative. The technology works.

The incentive doesn't. Why would a bank in Germany,

Japan or France abandon decades of swift integration

for something new? They aren’t sanctioned. Swift works perfectly fine for them. The only countries building alternatives

are the ones already locked out. Or afraid they will be. still. The world is slowly

moving from one system to several. The question is how fast. And whether any of them

can actually stand alone. Every alternative we've just talk about

as one thing in common. They're all controlled by a government. The BRICS want their own version,

but somebody will run that too. Bitcoin was supposed

to change the equation entirely. A currency on the public ledger,

verified by thousands of computers simultaneously owned by no government

controlled by no central bank. The perfect exit

from a weaponized payment system and sanction countries

noticed Iran started mining it. Converting cheap energy into funds that

existed completely outside the dollar. for countries running out of options

inside the traditional system. Bitcoin look like the one ring

nobody could control. Two problems though. First, that public ledger cuts both ways. Every transaction is permanently recorded. U.S. intelligence can follow money on the Bitcoin blockchain

just as easily as anywhere else. Privacy is not a feature. It's a myth. Second, commerce

doesn't run on volatility. Nobody invoices a container of stealing

the currency that moves 20% in a week. You can't price a shipment today

if you don't know what it's worth tomorrow. For now Bitcoin is a speculation vehicle. It's not money you can do business with. So sanction

economies turn to stablecoins instead. digital dollars. Same value as the real thing. But moving on blockchain rails

outside the traditional system. After the swift disconnection, Russian

entities move heavily into Tether's USDT. It worked. Money was flowing again, outside

the reach of Western institutions. until tether froze the wallets of Garantex

A sanctioned Russian exchange. At the request of the US

Department of Justice. $28 million seized in a single action. and the other major

stablecoin, USDC, issued by circle. holds its reserves almost entirely in U.S. Treasury securities. It is legally required to comply

with American sanctions. Washington tells it to freeze your funds. It freezes your funds. Both of the world's

dominant stablecoins are at their core. Dollar instruments

under U.S. jurisdiction. You move off Swift. You're still inside the dollar. The leash just got longer. It didn't disappear. the geopolitics are fascinating, But if you're an entrepreneur watching

this, there's a more immediate question. What does any of this have to do

with your business? The answer is simple. the same system that froze

Russia and strangled Iran is the system your payment

runs on every time you pay a supplier in Shenzhen,

or receive a wire from a client in London. And it was not designed for you. Swift was built for banks

to talk to other banks. When you send an international payment, your money doesn't travel in a straight

line. It bounces. your bank, sends it a corresponding bank,

which sends it to another corresponding bank, which

eventually gets it to the recipient banks. Each one takes a cut, each one adds a day. a transfer that should take hours,

take 3 to 5 days and the cost can be high sometimes We see this every day at Statrys

Entrepreneurs who have been doing business internationally for years

and never question why a payment to Hong Kong costs

this much or takes this long. They assume thats just how it works. It is how it works

is just not how it has to work. The best way to cut the chain. Don't use the cross-border system

for every cross-border payment. Pay locally. That's what modern fintech infrastructure

does. Let's say your company has his business account in Hong Kong,

but you need to pay a supplier in the UK. The traditional route is obvious. Send the money through Swift. Let it hop across a few corresponding

banks. wait a few days, pay a few fees and act surprised

when less arrives on the other side. Wonderful system. Now, if your payment is executed

locally in the destination country, The chain becomes much shorter. Instead of pushing that transfer through

multiple international intermediaries, the funds are settled

using local payment rails in that market. In simple terms. Your UK supplier gets paid via local

UK transfer. Not like a complicated international wire

pretending to be efficient. Fewer hops, fewer fees. Less waiting

That's what Statrys was built for. Not to replace Swift,

but to make the system work less badly for the people stuck using it. we're moving towards a world

with competing payment systems. That might sound like more freedom,

But every single one of those systems is controlled

by someone with an agenda. You don't get a neutral network. You get to pick whos rules you play by for governments,

that's a geopolitical chess game. for you. Running a business

that moves money across borders it’s something much more practical. How much are you paying for

every international transfer? How many days are you waiting? And have you ever actually looked at the FX rate

your bank gave you versus the real one? Most entrepreneurs haven't. It's worth checking. We built Statrys for exactly this. Entrepreneurs moving money internationally

who are tired of overpaying and waiting too long. I’ll leave a link in the description

if you want to take a look at what we do. Thanks for watching.