Third phase of Stella project completed

4 June 2019

The European Central Bank has published the third report from the Stella project (link) – a collaborative project with the Bank of Japan that focuses on the possible use of distributed ledger technology (DLT) for financial market infrastructures.

The third phase of the Stella project examines how cross-border payments could potentially be improved by new technologies, especially in terms of safety. The report considers the credit risk if one of the parties to the payment fails before the cross-border transfer is complete. After experimenting with several types of payment method, the report concludes that only payment methods with an enforcement mechanism, either through the ledger itself or through a third party, can ensure the safety of the principal amount of money being transferred. Read the leaflet or the full report for more details.

The two previous Stella phases focused on large-value payments processing using DLT (September 2017) and securities delivery-versus-payment in a DLT environment (March 2018).