This is a summary of work published elsewhere. The findings and any errors in them belong to the authors cited below, not to this publication.
Executive summary
Wholesale settlement on distributed ledgers has been tested for eight years, and the record now separates cleanly. One system carries volume in the trillions: J.P. Morgan's Kinexys, which the bank's own milestones page reports at more than $3trn of cumulative transactions and more than $5bn of average daily volume. One platform has issued at scale inside conventional securities law: HSBC Orion, at more than US$3.5bn of digitally native bonds, selected on 12 February 2026 as the platform for the UK's Digital Gilt Instrument pilot. SIX has folded its digital exchange into its licensed central securities depository. Fnality's sterling payment system has been operating since 14 December 2023, but under limits set by the Bank of England.
Against that, the multi-jurisdiction efforts have not become systems. The BIS handed Project mBridge to its central bank partners in October 2024, after the platform reached minimum viable product stage. Project Agorá, with eight central banks and more than 40 private institutions, published findings on 27 May 2026 and stated an intention to move to real-value transactions with some currencies and participants. Project Meridian, whose first report appeared in April 2023, has become a Bank of England commitment to a service the Bank hopes to make operational in 2027.
What separated the two groups is not the technology, which was broadly the same. It is whether the cash leg was already an existing liability of an existing licensed entity, whether a statutory designation was in place before launch, and how many supervisors had to agree. On all three tests the systems that scaled were the narrow ones.
Key findings
- Designation preceded operation by sixteen months at the one designated system. HM Treasury's order designating the Sterling Fnality Payment System as a regulated payment system under section 43(1) of the Financial Services (Banking Reform) Act 2013 was made on 26 August 2022 and came into force on 31 August 2022. Sterling payment operations commenced on 14 December 2023, with Lloyds Banking Group, Banco Santander and UBS, against an omnibus account held at the Bank of England's RTGS service. No multi-jurisdiction platform has an equivalent instrument.
- The largest volumes come from the narrowest design. Kinexys, a single bank's permissioned network settling its own deposit liabilities, reports more than $3trn cumulative and more than $5bn average daily volume on J.P. Morgan's own disclosure. No BIS project has published a comparable production figure, because none of them is a system that anyone operates.
- Coordination cost, not legal impossibility, is the binding constraint. Project Agorá's findings of 27 May 2026 were that atomic settlement "is achievable securely across currencies and jurisdictions", that privacy could be preserved at balance and transaction level, and that legal analysis supported settlement finality in all seven jurisdictions examined. The residual was operational and technical alignment, and after roughly two years with eight central banks the next step announced was testing rather than launch.
- "Production" often means a shadow of the real thing. DTCC announced on 22 August 2022 that Project Ion was operating in a parallel production environment averaging more than 100,000 bilateral equity transactions a day and almost 160,000 on peak days, with DTC's classic settlement systems remaining the authoritative record. A platform that processes 100,000 transactions a day without holding the golden record is a test at scale.
- Central banks are explicit that operating is not committing. The SNB's announcement of 30 June 2025, extending Project Helvetia and adding a production-environment link between the Swiss Interbank Clearing system and tokenised asset platforms, stated that the extension "does not constitute a commitment on the part of the SNB to introduce wholesale CBDC on a permanent basis". Helvetia III has issued real Swiss franc wholesale central bank money on SIX Digital Exchange since December 2023 and remains, by its owner's description, a pilot.
Analysis
The projects that crossed over share a property that is easy to miss: the cash leg was somebody's existing liability, and the ledger only changed how that liability moved. A Kinexys deposit token is a deposit on J.P. Morgan's balance sheet, inside the banking perimeter, requiring no new instrument and no new licence. A sterling Fnality balance is a claim on funds held in an omnibus account at the Bank of England, which is why HM Treasury could designate the arrangement under an existing statute rather than legislate for a new one. HSBC Orion issues bonds that are bonds: the Hong Kong government's US$1.3bn-equivalent multi-currency green bond of 2025 and the European Investment Bank's first digital sterling bond of 2023 were sold under the securities law that already existed. SIX runs its digital issuance inside a licensed central securities depository.
The projects that did not cross over were trying to create the settlement asset itself, in more than one jurisdiction at once. mBridge needed several central banks to issue and hold each other's money on a shared platform; the BIS's own project page records that it "announced in October 2024 that it was handing the project over to the partners" after the minimum viable product stage in mid-2024. Agorá needed seven legal systems to agree on finality, and got the legal analysis it wanted while discovering that agreement is the cheap part. Each additional supervisor adds a veto, and the number of bilateral alignments grows faster than the number of participants.
The second discriminator is whether a scarce and priced resource was on the table. Kinexys sells out-of-hours and programmable movement of corporate cash across currencies, which corporate treasurers pay for because the alternative is a value date. Fnality sells intraday certainty in central bank funds. Orion sells issuance and asset servicing for bonds whose issuers wanted a first. The experiments that ended were selling efficiency in the abstract, and efficiency without a counterparty willing to pay for it does not produce an operator.
The third discriminator is the direction of travel from experiment to institution. This is where the picture is more encouraging than the survival rate suggests, because several of the concluded experiments produced official commitments rather than nothing. Project Meridian's April 2023 prototype for synchronised settlement became Project Meridian Securities, reported on 28 November 2025, which tested atomic delivery against central bank money, programmable repo triggers and settlement across several tokenised securities platforms. The Bank of England is running a Synchronisation Lab during 2026 and intends to "fold the insights from this Lab into a live synchronisation service that we hope to make operational in 2027". The Eurosystem took the same route: 64 participants ran more than 50 trials and experiments between May and November 2024, and on 1 July 2025 the ECB announced Pontes, a bridge from DLT platforms to TARGET Services with a pilot targeted for the end of the third quarter of 2026, alongside longer-term work under the name Appia. Hong Kong's Project Ensemble moved on 13 November 2025 into EnsembleTX, described by the HKMA's chief executive as "upgrading from proof-of-concept to a real-value setting", running through 2026 and settling initially through the Hong Kong dollar RTGS system with tokenised central bank money to follow.
That pattern is the useful finding. The experiments that ended as experiments were the ones asking central banks to become platform operators. The experiments that led somewhere were the ones that ended by asking a central bank to add a feature to the system it already runs: a synchronisation interface on RT2, a bridge from TARGET Services, an RTGS link from Swiss Interbank Clearing. Tokenisation is being absorbed into existing settlement infrastructure rather than replacing it, and the private platforms that scaled are the ones that assumed this from the start.
Methodology and data
This piece summarises published material from the operators and authorities involved, read on 25 July 2026, and makes no independent measurement. Volume and issuance figures are self-reported by the operating institution: Kinexys figures are from J.P. Morgan's milestones page; Orion's cumulative issuance is from HSBC's release of 12 February 2026; Project Ion's transaction counts are from DTCC's release of 22 August 2022. Dates for legal designation are from the text of HM Treasury's designation order. Project status is taken from each authority's own current description rather than from press coverage: the BIS project page for mBridge, the BIS press release of 27 May 2026 for Agorá, the Bank of England's Meridian Securities and synchronisation pages, the ECB's release of 1 July 2025, the SNB's release of 30 June 2025, and the Hong Kong government's release of 13 November 2025.
The classification into production, supervised operation and concluded experiment is this publication's judgement, applied consistently: a system is treated as in production where an operator settles third-party value on its own account outside a stated pilot; as supervised operation where it settles real value under explicit supervisory limits or an owner's declared pilot status; and as concluded where no operator carries value today.
Limitations
Self-reported volumes are the weakest link. Kinexys's cumulative and daily figures are not independently verified, are not audited, and aggregate several products; no regulator publishes a tokenised deposit or DLT settlement volume series against which they could be checked. HSBC's US$3.5bn is cumulative issuance since inception, not outstanding, and cumulative issuance is not a measure of a platform's current use.
Failure is under-reported by construction. Projects that ended quietly do not publish closure notices, so a survey built from official pages is biased toward the projects still described in the present tense. The BIS's handover of mBridge is visible because the BIS said so; an unknown number of bank and market infrastructure pilots between 2019 and 2024 simply stopped, and their absence from this piece is a gap in the record rather than evidence that they succeeded.
The causal claim is not tested. Legal designation, an existing cash liability and a single supervisor are properties shared by the systems that scaled, but they are also properties of systems built by well-resourced incumbents inside receptive jurisdictions, and this piece cannot separate the design factor from the sponsor factor. A counterfactual multi-jurisdiction platform with a designation has not been attempted.
Two dates could not be settled. The SNB's page on Project Helvetia, accessed 25 July 2026, states that the pilot runs until at least June 2028, later than the mid-2027 horizon in the release of 30 June 2025; no intervening press release confirming the further extension was located, so the earlier dated commitment is the one relied on here. And the Bank of England's stated hope of an operational synchronisation service in 2027 is an intention rather than a delivery date, as the Bank's own wording makes clear.