Three central banks settle currency trades across tokenized and conventional ledgers in a trial

The Bank of England, the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Bank of Thailand published the results of a joint test on 13 November. It asked whether currency trades could settle safely across very different central bank systems. A single coordinating service made both halves of each trade complete together, or not at all. It is a trial, not a working service, and none of it used real money.

The three systems were deliberately unlike each other. One was a simulated version of the conventional account ledger that central banks run today. The Bank of Thailand supplied a prototype tokenized payment system. Singapore's was a shared ledger for a wholesale digital Singapore dollar, the kind of central bank money only banks would hold, run in a non-live setting.

The problem being tackled is old and large. When a bank swaps pounds for Singapore dollars, it often pays away one currency before it receives the other. If the other side fails in between, the money is lost. Citing a 2025 survey by the Bank for International Settlements, the Monetary Authority of Singapore says more than $1.4trn of currency settlement a day was still fully exposed to that risk in April 2025. That is a tenth of the total. The existing fix is CLS, a specialist system that records both halves on a ledger of its own. The trial asked whether a coordinator could get the same result while each currency settles in its own central bank's system.

Partior, a company that runs blockchain-based settlement infrastructure, built the prototype coordinator. It settled single trades, and it also handled batches among three systems in which trades are offset so that only the net amounts move, which means banks need to hold less cash. Tom Mutton, who runs payments and innovation at the Bank of England, called the project "practical evidence of how synchronised settlement could help reduce risk".

The technical report is franker about the cost of mixing designs. The Bank of England's test system let the coordinator put a hold on a bank's funds. Singapore's token ledger, built around wallets the banks control themselves, had no such feature. Instead the money was moved into a dedicated wallet that the coordinator managed on the bank's behalf. The report concedes that this gave the coordinator duties it would not normally carry, with legal and operational consequences. Central banks, it says, intend such coordinators never to hold the money.

Much remains unsettled. The experiment had no live participants, did not cover a trade's full life and did not run under real operating conditions. Only the Bank of England has committed to anything live: it plans a synchronisation service in 2028. Singapore's and Thailand's central banks say taking part implies no such commitment. How a coordinator should be regulated would depend on what it actually does, the reports say, and common international principles could help. Pucktada Treeratpituk of the Bank of Thailand said the work showed such coordination could make cross-border currency trades safer "while preserving trust in central bank money".