Bank of England opens Synchronisation Lab to prototype tokenized-asset settlement with central bank money

The Bank of England has moved from design-stage research to hands-on experimentation by convening a cross‑sector cohort to probe how tokenized assets could settle alongside central bank money. Over a six‑month sandbox starting in spring 2026, 18 selected firms will attempt linked delivery-versus-payment and payment-versus-payment workflows that connect the bank’s planned RT2 ledger to external distributed-ledger systems without using actual funds. Participants include a mix of market utilities, banks, fintechs and decentralized-technology teams; use cases span tokenized government debt, collateral optimisation, FX settlement and programmable issuance of digital money. Several Web3 vendors will explore decentralized coordination mechanisms to orchestrate conditional handoffs between on‑ledger assets and central bank balances, while other firms will prototype margin and redemption flows that must interact cleanly with RTGS finality. The lab’s technical objective is to confirm whether atomic cross‑platform settlement can be achieved deterministically and to surface practical interoperability barriers such as messaging standards, timing constraints and failure-recovery logic. Outcomes are intended to feed directly back into the RTGS synchronization design and guide decisions about supporting a production synchronization feature. This effort sits alongside similar work at other central banks and international bodies that are testing programmable money, tokenization toolkits and settlement extensions to legacy infrastructure. If the experiments show reliable patterns, market infrastructure will face new integration and governance demands—standards for conditional transfers, operational playbooks for multi‑system failures, and legal clarity on settlement finality across platforms. Conversely, technical fragilities or unresolved risk allocation could delay any move to live synchronized settlement or require narrower, use-case-limited deployments. The Bank of England has structured the lab to reveal both the engineering and the policy trade‑offs, asking participants to report concrete findings at the program’s close. That reporting, combined with broader international pilots, will inform whether central banks can realistically extend real‑time gross settlement systems into a tokenized landscape without compromising monetary and financial stability. The initiative therefore represents a pivotal test: proving the technical plumbing is only the start; industry coordination, regulatory alignment and resilient operations will determine whether tokenized settlement becomes an incremental improvement or an operational headache for core payment rails.