The Bank of England isn’t just watching the tokenization wave from the sidelines. It’s actively rebuilding its plumbing to accommodate it.
Sasha Mills, the Bank’s Executive Director for Financial Market Infrastructure, has been laying out an increasingly detailed vision for how central bank money needs to evolve. The core argument: if wholesale financial markets are moving onchain, then the money used to settle those transactions needs to live there too.
The RTGS overhaul and DLT integration
At the heart of the Bank’s strategy is a major renewal of its Real Time Gross Settlement system, dubbed RT2. RT2 is a modernization effort designed to make that backbone compatible with distributed ledger technology. A key component is a new synchronisation interface that would allow DLT-enabled assets to settle against central bank money.
Mills first outlined this direction in a keynote on 2 July 2025, where she also announced the launch of a DLT Innovation Challenge in partnership with the BIS Innovation Hub. The challenge is focused on exploring how programmable ledgers could be used in wholesale central bank money settlement.
