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Banks and other financial institutions are already showing signs of readiness for blockchain adoption, but they almost certainly won't use Ethereum. More likely is that they'll adopt customized solutions. An omni-chain platform that can interact with a wide variety of enterprise networks is, therefore, a must-have in preparing for the point when there's a demand for trading traditional financial instruments with decentralized digital assets.

The Singapore Centre of the BIS Innovation Hub (BISIH) announced that it will start a proof-of-concept of its Project Nexus cross-border payments platform with the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the Bank of Italy and the Central Bank of Malaysia, as well as with BCS in Singapore and PayNet in Malaysia. Project Nexus aims to enable and speed up the process of linking fast payment systems by standardizing the way that these systems connect to each other. Rather than a payment system operator building custom connections for every new country that it connects to, the operator can make one connection to the Nexus platform. This single connection allows a fast payments system to reach all other countries in the network. This provides a more scalable way to build up instant cross-border payment networks.

According to a report published by New York Federal Reserve (NY Fed) and Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) systems operating on different types of networks can be used for cross-border and cross-currency payments. The study, which used simulated CBDCs and hypothetical payments, found that cross-border transactions could be conducted across different distributed ledger (DLT) and hashed timelock contract (HTLC) technology stacks, with near real-time settlement finality. https://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/nyic/project-cedar

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) launched Project Aperta (Latin for "open") to explore how to reduce frictions and costs in global finance by enabling seamless cross-border data portability. The project aims to connect the domestic open finance infrastructures of different jurisdictions. The initial use case to be explored is in trade finance for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), with many more applications to follow. Project Aperta collaborators include the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, the Banco Central do Brasil, the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority , the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, and the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation.

The Deutsche Bundesbank (BuBa) maintains a continuously updated list of its trigger solution experiments and trials. 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 on participants' existing RTGS accounts in central bank money.