UK Central Bank taps firms to test elements of distributed-ledger settlement infrastructure

The six-month central bank pilot brings together market infrastructure providers, banks and Web3 companies to assess how core UK markets could move onchain.

The Bank of England has launched a new industry experimentation initiative to explore how tokenized assets could be settled using synchronized, atomic settlement in British pounds sterling as part of efforts to modernize the UK’s real-time gross settlement (RTGS) infrastructure.

The Synchronisation Lab initiative will allow 18 selected companies to test delivery-versus-payment and payment-versus-payment settlement between the BoE’s next-generation RTGS core ledger, known as RT2, and external distributed-ledger platforms, in a non-live environment without using real money, according to a bank statement.

The six-month pilot, scheduled to start in spring 2026, is intended to validate the central bank’s design choices for synchronized settlement, assess interoperability between central bank money and tokenized assets, and inform the development of a potential future live RTGS synchronization capability.

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