Of course, the exchange is now scrambling to find another bank to handle the transactions.

My limited research on this topic led me to conclude that it was all complete and utter irrational alarmism.

Signature Bank accounts for 0.01% of Binance's business.

I might have to look into it more because you are saying the SWIFT system is unilaterally applying this rule to all banks, which was not my takeaway. However, if this is the case then it actually hugely financially incentivizes banks to become Bitcoin custodians directly, because then they can buy $100k worth of Bitcoin at a time and use that free-floating value to continue engaging with the system without the need for SWIFT. That would actually improve decentralization and take more power away from the few centralized exchanges we have access to.

More likely what would happen is that banks could create accounts at the exchanges and deposit $100k USD instead of BTC. As customers transfer money to the exchange the bank can transfer the USD in their exchange account to the client until they run out of money. Of course they can do withdrawals in the same way to refill the account without having to throw down $100k all at once. there are a lot of workarounds for this seemingly miniscule problem, but I'm sure American exchanges are pissed if they are all affected.

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