Last week the European Central Bank (ECB) announced the first set of participants for its wholesale DLT settlement trials using real central bank money. Deutsche Börse-owned Clearstream will participate with multiple subsidiaries and its D7 digital securities platform. It’s part of the first wave of pilots that commence in May.
The ECB wholesale DLT trials involve three ways to use central bank money for settlement. Clearstream plans to use all of them to execute various delivery versus payment (DvP) use cases. The Banque de France will provide a wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC). Germany’s Bundesbank has its Trigger solution linked to the TARGET2 central bank payment system. And the Bank of Italy has its Tips Hashlink offering.
Clearstream is the only central securities depository (CSD) participating in the first wave of trials. That includes its German Clearstream Banking subsidiary, Luxembourg subsidiary LuxCSD, and Luxembourg-based international CSD, Clearstream Banking Luxembourg.
In 2022, Clearstream went live with its D7 digital securities post-trade platform, which will be used in the ECB trials. It is one of three infrastructures in the first wave, alongside DekaBank’s SWIAT and BNP Paribas’s AssetFoundry.
While D7 has blockchain at its core – based on Digital Asset’s DAML and Canton – it currently operates as a centralized platform. However, there will be a greater DLT focus for the EuroSystem trials. So far 25,000 digital securities were issued on D7, the vast majority of which are structured products from Vontobel Financial Products.
“Clearstream’s participation in the ECB trials is a significant milestone in our digitisation journey: we are expanding our D7 digital securities infrastructure with DLT components and fostering connections with the main digital payment solutions across the Eurosystem,” said Jens Hachmeister, Head of Issuer Services & New Digital Markets at Clearstream.
