Between May and November 2024, the Eurosystem conducted exploratory work to test the settlement of distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based transactions in central bank money via three interoperability solutions provided by the Eurosystem.
This initiative brought together 64 participants, including central banks, financial market participants and DLT platform operators, and involved over 50 trials and experiments.
Trials involved real settlements in central bank money and experiments focused on mock transactions, providing valuable insights into the technical and operational feasibility of the proposed solutions as well as business, operational and legal insights on the use cases tested.
The exploratory work highlighted the strong interest from financial market participants in leveraging DLT and tokenisation for wholesale financial transactions, as an opportunity to enhance the efficiency and redesign processes and practices across the entire value chain. It also confirmed the market need for central bank money to be used as a means of safe settlement for DLT-based transactions.