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As part of the Eurosystem exploratory work, the first two trials with the Deutsche Bundesbank's Trigger Solution were successfully settled. The use case comprised the issuance and primary distribution of a commercial paper with the use case team Clearstream as a market distributed ledger technology (DLT) operator, and two market participants (DekaBank and DZ Bank). The exploration was conducted as a trial in the participants' production systems and ultimately resulted in real and final bookings in TARGET, the Eurosystem's payment system, by using the Trigger Solution. The Trigger Solution links DLT platforms operated by the market with the traditional Eurosystem payment system (TARGET), thus enabling the direct settlement of DLT-based wholesale transactions in central bank money on participants' existing RTGS accounts.

The European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan have conducted a joint research effort on how to balance confidentiality and auditability in a distributed ledger technology (DLT) environment. This collaboration marks the fourth phase of a joint project called Stella, which started in December 2016 and aims at exploring DLTs through conceptual studies and practical experimentation.

The Israel Securities Authority intends to draft a regulation for DLT-based digital asset exchange platforms. It is now calling on the private sector to pitch the regulator with proof-of-concept DLT trading systems.

The Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) of the European Parliament has published a draft report on on the proposal for a regulation on a pilot regime for market infrastructures based on distributed ledger technology (DLT). The proposed regulation is intended to provide a mechanism for allowing market infrastructures to experiment with certain restricted uses of DLT. The report indicates overall support for the proposed regulation, but presents a number of amendments aimed at ensuring the final proposal delivers the stated objectives of the pilot programme.

[In January 2019] the Bank of Thailand published the results of Project Inthanon Phase I which indicated that DLT can fulfil basic payment functionalities. In addition, the technology demonstrated capabilities to help enhance payment efficiency and to support interbank transfer and settlement during off-hours. However, despite its high capabilities, DLT would need more time to mature to the stage in which the technology can be fully adopted for the payment system infrastructure. More experiments would be needed to further affirm DLT's capabilities, and any challenges to comply with international payments standard such as scalability, security and system resiliency should be explored. https://www.bot.or.th/English/FinancialMarkets/ProjectInthanon/Documents/Inthanon_Phase1_Re port.pdf

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published a paper that provides an overview of policy measures taken in 19 jurisdictions to address the risks associated with activities that incorporate crypto-assets and distributed ledger technology (DLT) programmability capabilities in financial services. The paper classifies policy measures into three categories and identifies different types of initiatives across jurisdictions, including bans, restrictions, clarifications, bespoke requirements, and initiatives to facilitate innovation. It finds that, for centrally managed issuance activities, current regulatory initiatives focus mainly on issuers of security tokens and stablecoins. Initiatives related to centrally managed infrastructure activities mainly explore the benefits and risks from traditional financial intermediaries' use of DLTs and their programmability capabilities. Initiatives related to centrally managed service provision activities often extend the regulatory perimeter to new non-bank centralized intermediaries.

The European Central Bank (ECB) "new technologies for wholesale settlements contact group" held its first meeting on June 21, 2023, marking the start of the Eurosystem's exploratory work on how wholesale financial transactions recorded on distributed ledger technology (DLT) platforms could be settled in central bank money. Exploratory work is expected to begin in 2024 with trials or experiments to launch later in 2024. Initially, three types of interoperability solutions will be explored; the Deutsche Bundesbank's trigger, Banca d'Italia's TIPS Hash-Link, and the Banque de France's wholesale central bank digital currency (WCBDC) based full-DLT interoperability solutions.

And speaking of Banca d'Italia, according to ThePaypers, Associazione Bancaria Italiana (ABI) has brought together 18 commercial banks to collaborate with the central bank in a CBDC pilot. In this Project Leonidas the banks use a shared private ledger to streamline interbank payments using a pretend DLT-based wholesale CBDC. This sounds very similar to the ABI's Project Punta, a DLT-based platform now in production that  is used to settle small interbank transactions, with Project Leonidas being a scaled up version to handle large interbank transactions. However, it doesn't seem to actually be CBDC-based, even though it's been accepted into the Banca d'Italia's Milano Hub innovation facilitator. In other words, the "wholesale CBDC" used is not tokenized CeBM.

The U.S. Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) will manage a distributed ledger technology (DLT) proof of concept (PoC) involving tokenized deposits, wholesale central bank money, U.S. Treasuries and other tokenized assets on a shared ledger. The goal is to test settlement on a common regulated venue under existing laws by simulating USD delivery versus payment transactions. This will build on a 2023 initiative involving several of the same institutions for the similarly named Regulated Liability Network (RLN).

The Royal Canadian Mint has implemented a distributed ledger technology (DLT) solution to trace the source of gold used in the Mint's refinery and log gold bar transactions.

BNY Mellon, Goldman Sachs and HSBC have successfully passed the €1 billion notional milestone in outstanding agency securities lending transactions using the HQLAX distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform. HQLAX creates digital collateral records (DCRs) to effect the simultaneous ownership exchange of loan identifiers (ISINS) and triparty collateral on a delivery vs delivery (DvD) basis. This eliminates intraday exposure and associated credit risk identified in most current collateral settlement practices.

The German Banking Industry Committee (GBIC) published the results of a proof of concept (POC) for its distributed ledger technology (DLT) based commercial bank money token (CBMT) project. CBMT is focused on serving large corporates, especially industrial companies, allowing them to hold tokens from multiple banks and to make P2P (B2B) transactions 24/7/365. Results confirmed that the CBMT is viable and offers considerable potential, enabling the realization of a variety of use cases across corporate functions. Results also showed that the CBMT works across a variety of DLT platforms, has the potential to scale and should present no barrier to integration into existing systems via application programming interfaces (APIs). https://die-dk.de/media/files/240716_DKBDI_position_CBMT_final.pdf

Banca d'Italia published a paper on the FROSTed Byzantine Fault Tolerance (FBFT) protocol, an approach to DLT proof of authority (PoA) validation meant to strengthen the security of the ledger, its tolerance to faults or attacks, and the confidentiality of validators. It combines the practical byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) algorithm with the flexible round-optimized Schnorr threshold (FROST) signature scheme. The resulting system is an alternative platform for a distributed, resilient transactional system. Operated by a set of trusted actors, distributed at geographic scale, it holds potential for mission-critical applications, such as wholesale and retail CBDC, and asset tokenization schemes.

So far, most central banks remain a long way from issuing CBDC of any kind. But given that technology has been progressing fast in the settlement and payment areas, as well as DLT, it is possible central banks may increase their interest in retail and wholesale CBDC proposals based on DLT and consider actual implementation seriously in the near future.

The Australian Securities Exchange's work on a DLT-based platform aimed at replacing its ageing CHESS settlement system is "on track" to likely 2021 completion. It will "will deliver upgraded security, resilience and performance" for equity post trade services. It will also offer new functionality over and above what is currently enabled by CHESS.

The government of Catalonia has announced it will develop a DLT-based identity platform aimed to give citizens control of their own data when interacting with online services. The Catalan government will act as the validator for the network, but it will not collect users' personal data.

A key question for adherents of DLT is why it offers benefits beyond traditional settlement mechanisms. Whelan suggested "smart contracts" could be one answer - contracts written in computer code that can be fulfilled automatically when certain conditions are met. He said such contracts had proven "extremely powerful" in trials.

DTCC has issued a white paper "Governing DLT Networks, Distributed Ledger Technology Governance for Private Permissioned Networks."

Distributed ledger technology could play a major role as financial institutions seek to gain a single, trusted viewpoint of their customer. Know-your-customer utilities based on DLT aim to provide this visibility.

The ECB and BoJ suggest that a single trusted source, either an existing DLT component or a credible third party, could provide the necessary information to the auditor. But the introduction of such a model would also increase risks to the network. "While reliance on … [a single] source of information has obvious benefits for auditing from all three perspectives, it may become a single point of failure in the auditing arrangement," the authors say. If there was a single entity storing all transaction information, the central banks conclude, a potential security breach could result in a leak of the transactional details of all participants.