The Bank of England has finished selecting 18 firms for its six-month Synchronisation Lab, an experimental pilot intended to trial distributed-ledger settlement concepts alongside the Bank’s next-generation RTGS platform (RT2). The work is scheduled to start in Spring 2026 and will run in a non-live environment with no real funds in use.
The stated objective is to test whether tokenized assets can settle in a synchronized, atomic way against central bank money in pounds sterling, while stress-testing interoperability and operational controls. In practical terms, the Bank is using the Lab to evaluate design choices that could shape a future RTGS “synchronisation” capability without introducing live-balance risk.
What the Synchronisation Lab is testing
The Lab is structured as a controlled sandbox for coordinated settlement workflows, where the emphasis is on orchestration, resilience, and settlement finality rather than production throughput. The Bank’s focus is on proving that synchronized settlement can be executed reliably with RT2 integration points, including the mechanics of data sharing and coordination across ledgers.
The participant set spans multiple wholesale-market use cases, with different firms exploring different “legs” of an end-to-end settlement stack. Chainlink and UAC Labs are described as working on decentralized coordination models for synchronized settlement between central bank money and ledger-recorded assets, while Ctrl Alt and Monee are positioned around delivery-versus-payment workflows for tokenized gilts and other securities. In parallel, Tokenovate and Atumly are associated with tokenized settlement for derivatives and collateral workflows, including conditional margin payment concepts and digital-money issuance and redemption flows coordinated with RTGS.
Why it matters for market infrastructure
The Lab also reaches into core market-infrastructure rails where interoperability is often the binding constraint. SWIFT and LSEG are referenced in connection with market infrastructure use cases such as foreign-exchange settlement and tokenized bond settlement, while Partior is linked to synchronized cross-border and collateral transaction workflows aimed at broader wholesale applicability.
Across these threads, the Bank will assess whether synchronized RTGS payments can support more automated settlement and reduce operational friction when linking cash-like central bank claims to tokenized securities. The underlying question is whether atomic coordination can be achieved with robust controls, especially where workflows touch multi-money interactions and finality expectations.
The outcomes from the Spring 2026 pilot are expected to inform the Bank’s view on RT2 design options and the feasibility of delivering a synchronization capability at scale. If the prototypes demonstrate dependable atomic settlement with controlled interoperability, the findings could influence liquidity management approaches, settlement finality rules, and integration patterns for tokenized instruments—while the non-live constraint keeps systemic safety front and center during evaluation.
