Three Central Banks Finish an FX Trial Linking RTGS and DLT Rails

Three central banks have finished testing a way to settle currency trades across systems that share no common technology. The Bank of England, the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Bank of Thailand published findings on Friday from Project Meridian FX APAC, which ran payment-versus-payment settlement and multilateral net foreign exchange across their three test environments. Both rails were in scope: real-time gross settlement systems, the plumbing central banks already run, and distributed-ledger ones. Partior, the project's delivery partner, built and tested the prototype that coordinated the movements. The Reserve Bank of Australia and Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas sat in as observers.

What the prototype actually did

Payment-versus-payment means one currency moves if and only if the other one moves, which closes the gap where a bank can pay out and receive nothing back. The risk is not hypothetical. The release calls the prototype a Synchronisation Operator, defining it as a coordination layer that makes linked transfers settle together or not at all. The trial also tested multilateral netting, where banks offset payments against each other so less cash has to be parked to settle the same volume. By The Block's reading of the technical material on Friday, the prototype matched settlement instructions, reserved funds, monitored payment readiness and started settlement. The release itself does not break the sequence down that far.

The exposure this is aimed at

A footnote carries the scale. More than $1.4 trillion of average daily foreign exchange settlement in April 2025, about 10% of the total, was fully exposed to settlement risk, per the 2025 BIS Triennial Central Bank Survey the central banks cite. That is the hole payment-versus-payment is meant to cover. The work sits alongside the slower shift of settlement itself onto ledgers, from tokenized equities at DTCC to the ledger NYSE picked for its tokenized stock venue.

Tom Mutton, the Bank of England's executive director for payments, innovation and fintech, put the result as evidence and not as a product.

"Project Meridian FX APAC provides practical evidence of how synchronised settlement could help reduce risk and improve efficiency in cross-border FX transactions," Mutton said in the joint release.

The hard part left is legal

The policy report is one of three documents published with the release. It is where the unfinished business sits. The Block, which read it on Friday, says the report raises operational resilience, settlement finality, governance, liability and cross-border data sharing. It also warns that giving a synchronization operator more to do, such as holding funds or calculating net positions, could change what that operator is regulated as. The media release covers the same ground in one line, saying the project examined the legal, regulatory and oversight considerations. Kenneth Gay at MAS and Pucktada Treeratpituk at the Bank of Thailand describe the outcome in the terms the Bank of England used. Synchronization works across different systems, and what remains is operating models and rules.

Nothing goes live before 2028

The Bank of England has said it intends to launch a live synchronization interface in 2028. It set that date out with the Financial Conduct Authority in a joint call for input on tokenization. Meridian FX APAC was announced a year ago, in November 2025. It builds on an earlier Meridian FX run by the BIS Innovation Hub in London with the Bank of England, the Bank of France, the Deutsche Bundesbank, the Bank of Italy and the European Central Bank. The three banks say future work could extend the approach to more jurisdictions, more currencies and industry participants. No date is attached to that. The trial was not a live launch, and nothing in the release commits any of the three to running one.

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