Hedera is proud to participate in the DLT Innovation Challenge, an initiative launched by the Bank of England in collaboration with the Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub (BISIH) London Centre. This challenge explores how wholesale central bank money could be transacted and settled on external programmable ledgers not operated by the Bank.

The Challenge, which runs through the autumn of 2025, is an invitation to firms to demonstrate how to securely transact and settle central bank money on an external ledger that is not controlled by the Bank of England. Hedera participated in the Challenge and joined the showcase event hosted by the Bank of England and BISIH in October 2025.

Exploring trust and innovation in wholesale settlement

The DLT Innovation Challenge explores environments where trust is not inherent—where participants must rely on mechanisms other than central bank control of the ledger to ensure security, finality, and integrity.

Through this initiative, the Bank and BISIH seek to test how trust can be established in decentralised or externally governed infrastructures, and to draw insights that may inform the Bank of England’s wider wholesale experimentation programme. The Challenge does not reflect any intended policy by the Bank or BISIH.

Learning outcomes from the Challenge are expected to shed light on:

• Settlement finality and security, ensuring irreversible, tamper-proof transactions;

• Scalability, handling high transaction volumes efficiently;

• Network and asset control, balancing decentralisation with regulatory requirements; and

• Interoperability, enabling seamless interaction between financial systems and ledgers.

The Bank of England and BIS Innovation Hub’s DLT Innovation Challenge is part of a broader effort to explore how distributed ledger technology can support the future of money and payments.

Hedera: the proven platform for trust and performance

As the only public network governed by leading global institutions, Hedera combines enterprise-grade security with transparent, decentralized governance, a model uniquely suited to regulated environments such as banking and financial services.

Operated by a Council of 31 organizations across six continents and 11 industries, Hedera’s governance structure ensures diversity, accountability, and resilience. Council members run network nodes and participate in decision-making, maintaining stability and trustworthiness at the infrastructure layer.

At the technical core of the network is the Hashgraph consensus algorithm; a next-generation DLT mechanism that achieves asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (aBFT), the highest level of security in distributed systems. Transactions on Hedera achieve finality in 2.5–3.5 seconds, are immutable, and incur predictable, low-cost fees fixed in USD, an important feature for wholesale settlement and central bank digital currency (CBDC) exploration.

Building for the future of financial infrastructure

Hedera brings proven expertise in secure, high-performance consensus and transparent governance, demonstrating how public, open-source DLT can meet the regulatory and operational needs of critical financial infrastructure. With its hashgraph consensus and EVM-compatible architecture, Hedera enables tamper-proof settlement, interoperability, and auditability; all foundations for the next generation of trusted, decentralized financial systems.

Hedera is proud to contribute to this global dialogue, helping shape how distributed technologies can underpin the future of trusted financial infrastructure.

For more information on the Bank of England and BIS Innovation Hub’s DLT Innovation Challenge, visit the Bank of England’s official announcement.