Bank of England Launches Pilot for Tokenized Asset Settlement

The Bank of England has launched a pilot program to test how tokenized assets could be settled in sterling, as it looks to modernize the UK’s core payments infrastructure.

The initiative, known as the ‘Synchronisation Lab’, will bring together 18 firms to test how payments in central bank money could be synchronized with transactions on distributed-ledger platforms.

The goal is to see whether so-called atomic settlement, where payments and asset transfers happen at the same time, could work safely and efficiently within the UK’s real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system.

Running for around six months from spring 2026, the lab will operate in a non-live environment and will not involve real money. Instead, participants will test different settlement scenarios between the bank’s next-generation RTGS core ledger, known as RT2, and external digital asset platforms. This will include both delivery-versus-payment and payment-versus-payment models.

The 18 selected organizations span banks, market infrastructure providers, fintechs, and decentralized technology firms.

Use cases being explored range from the settlement of tokenised gilts and other securities to collateral management, foreign exchange, and digital-money issuance.

Firms such as Chainlink and UAC Labs will test decentralized coordination models, while others will focus on more traditional securities settlement and margin workflows. Swift and the London Stock Exchange Group are also among the participants.

The bank says the lab will help validate its design choices for a future RTGS synchronization capability, assess how well central bank money can interact with tokenized assets, and gauge how ready the wider ecosystem is for such changes. Findings from the program will be shared once the pilot concludes.

The project builds on earlier experiments under Project Meridian, which showed that synchronized settlement is technically feasible. While the lab is not a regulatory sandbox and will not process live payments, it reflects growing interest in using tokenization to improve the speed, safety, and efficiency of financial markets and reinforces the UK’s ambition to remain a hub for financial innovation.