Hurdles to blockchain adoption in capital markets are falling away. The US’ abandonment of Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 was a key step and the Eurosystem’s advancing work on cash settlement solutions are welcome. However, there are still major stumbling blocks to be addressed. The Eurosystem announced in February 2025 that it is expanding its work to create a solution for the cash leg settlement of distributed ledger technology transactions in central bank money. This approach has two prongs: first, a rapid delivery of an interoperability link for the Target settlement system, to be followed by a ‘more integrated, ... (full story)