Latest findings on the Project Meridian Securities by the BoE.
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* Project Meridian Securities explored how synchronisation can act as a bridge between existing real-time gross settlement infrastructures and emerging tokenised securities settlement solutions.
The Project aimed to address two critical challenges:
- Accelerating the mobilisation of collateral and central bank money to improve liquidity management and reduce settlement risk.
- Achieving interoperability between conventional systems and emerging digital infrastructures based on DLT.
To explore these questions, the experiments tested three capabilities:
- Orchestrating atomic transactions between central bank money and tokenised securities.
- Supporting automated liquidity management through programmable triggers for repurchase agreements (repos) and unwind logic.
- Enabling cross-platform settlement across multiple tokenised securities platforms to reduce fragmentation risk.
The experiments highlight three transformative capabilities:
- Extending programmability to traditional infrastructures: By building on the strong foundations of existing infrastructure, synchronisation offers a practical and incremental path to innovation – one that does not require building new cash settlement systems but instead provides an effective bridge between existing settlement infrastructure and tokenised asset platforms.
- Improved liquidity management: By embedding the terms of repos and liquidity preferences into smart contracts, a synchronisation operator can enable real-time validation and settlement, reducing operational friction and improving responsiveness to intraday liquidity needs.
- Cross-platform interoperability: Synchronisation offers a practical solution for bridging diverse systems, enabling atomic settlement and liquidity co-ordination across multiple platforms.
Project Meridian Securities demonstrates that synchronisation can deliver significant improvements in securities settlement and liquidity management. Importantly, these experiments highlight important policy questions, including:
- how best to achieve atomic settlement and interoperability across multiple tokenised securities platforms;
- how to balance operational efficiency with flexibility in liquidity management; and
- what architecture and governance model best support synchronisation operators and market scalability.
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Todor Kostov
Director
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