Bank of England partners with Chainlink to test atomic settlements

The Bank of England partnered with blockchain oracle Chainlink on Tuesday to test atomic settlements with tokenized assets. The BoE’s initiative, Project Meridian, aims to integrate traditional finance with decentralized systems.

The Bank of England’s Synchronisation Lab allows operators to demonstrate how they would interact with the bank’s RT2 synchronization capability. The Lab also aims to demonstrate what services operators could offer to synchronization users, including RTGS account holders, asset ledger operators, and customers in asset markets.

BoE’s Lab runs for 6 months from spring 2026

The Lab will build on Meridian and provide synchronization operators with a venue to experiment with various use cases. Britain’s central bank introduced the Synchronisation Lab in October 2025 to demonstrate use cases and understand synchronization business models.

The BoE announced that 18 organizations have already been selected to participate in the initiative. The entities will test a flurry of diverse synchronization use cases. 

The financial institution expects the Lab to run from spring 2026 for around six months. The period is meant to enable participating synchronization operators to test use cases and demonstrate how they would interact with RT2 and users.

The BoE stated that its Synchronisation Lab aims to help the bank better evaluate its design options for the exchange of information between RT2 and operators. The bank’s Lab also seeks to demonstrate synchronization’s flexibility by allowing participants to showcase use cases and the benefits they could offer users.

The UK’s central bank believes that synchronization may interest firms in the BoE’s Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS), which enables innovation in the issuance, trading, and settlement of securities in the country. The BoE revealed that the Lab provides a pathway for DSS firms to test the settlement of digital security transactions in sterling central bank money. The Lab will also not support real-money payments.

The BoE set the application deadline on November 28, and successful applicants will receive more detailed specifications at a later date. The bank will give the applicants another two months to build or develop their prototypes, with the bank looking to iterate with them on their design and build before the Lab launches.

Lab Participants are expected to use the bank’s capabilities to test their use cases. They will be invited to present their use cases and findings at an industry showcase once the Lab closes.

The BoE said it will publish a report about the key learnings for the live functionality. The bank also plans to use the Lab’s findings to support ongoing design and other development work.

The central bank’s Lab will enable its participants to simulate the basic interactions required for synchronization settlement. The bank also designed the Lab to function as a platform and expects Lab Participants to build the additional elements required to integrate with it.

The Lab will simulate the RT2’s settlement engine, which is required to settle and manage a transaction. The Lab will mimic RT2’s user interface to provide participants with visibility into transactions they orchestrate. It will also emulate an Application Programming Interface (API) layer, allowing participants to oversee and control the entire lifecycle of settling a transaction.

BoE’s Lab explores two different synchronization models

The BoE’s Synchronization Lab will explore two models to help the bank, RTGS account holders, and operators evaluate different options. The first model will enable synchronization operators to send the earmarking instruction to RT2 and instruct the final settlement.

The second proposed model will allow RTGS account holders to send the earmarking instruction directed by a synchronization operator. Operators are responsible for issuing the final settlement, while the Lab Participant will simulate the earmarking instruction.

The BoE will also consider two more models based on the feedback from the initial experimentation. The bank expects the models to test additional controls that RTGS account holders could apply.

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