The European Central Bank has assembled a number of participants for exploratory work on the use of distributed ledger technology to settle wholesale transactions in central bank money.
The first wave of trials will involve ten market participants, six market DLT operators and five central banks. Tests with actual settlement in central bank money and experiments with fictitious settlement are carried out in a test environment.
The use cases mainly examine the securities settlement cycle, such as: B. Delivery versus payment, secondary market transactions and securities lifecycle management. Other options being considered are related to cross-border payments, such as pay-for-pay.
Deutsche Börse’s post-trading business Clearstream is involved in the operation via its digital post-trading platform D7, which has been expanded to include DLT functions.
Jens Hachmeister, head of issuer services and new digital markets at Clearstream, says: “Clearstream’s participation in the ECB tests is an important milestone on our path to digitalization: we are expanding our D7 infrastructure for digital securities to include DLT components and foster connections with the most important digital markets.” Payment solutions across the Eurosystem.
“We look forward to continuing to shape the future of a connected digital European settlement landscape together with the ECB and our broad participant base.”