The new participants in the European Central Bank’s DLT tests include major financial institutions.
The European Central Bank (ECB) is expanding the distributed ledger technology (DLT) test it initiated in April. This second phase of testing will examine new use cases with an influx of private financial institutions and three more central banks.
Forty-eight financial institutions will participate in the new phase. These include divisions of many of the world’s biggest banks, such as ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas, Bank of New York Mellon, HSBC, J.P. Morgan and Société Générale. Participants in both sets of tests were recruited through a call for applicants issued in December.
The new cadre will engage in tests of wholesale domestic payments within the euro area, a variety of securities-related use cases and foreign exchange payment-versus-payment transactions among central banks. The second two tests will involve live settlements using central bank money, rather than commercial bank money.
