DL3S: Distributed Ledger for Banque de France
We've helped Banque de France scope a potential and compliant blockchain solution for cash transactions as well as Delivery-versus-Payments, that could be used for the entire Eurosystem. This solution was called DL3S and was experimented & trialed in 2023.
Trials: real tokenized money, real tokenized assets. Experiments: only on testnet, not involving RWA nor real cash tokens.
Our involvment was mainly on the Business Analysis & Product Features, as well as an involvment within the "Team Group" with Banca d'Italia & Deutsche Bundesbank, reporting to the European Central Bank. Specific workstreams we've handled directly: the scalability of the solution, upgrades of its performances, and its resilience.
End 2023: the solution could deliver 5 transactions per seconds with end-to-end latencies as low as 7 seconds, for full DVPs in interoperability using a secured HTLC protocol. Latency is calculated from the moment the DVP is initialized from the trading plateform (Market DLT), and until both the cash & the assets have changed hands.
The HTLC protocol was enhanced to further limit the residual principal risk, thanks to the implementation of additional features: a 'Reaction Time' check, several retry mechanisms, mTLS secured communications between several DL3S nodes with several Market DLT nodes, direct access to the unlock function of the MarketDLT HTLC SmartContract, and a legal framework enforcing DFOP in the very unlikely event all counter-measures would fail at once.
Privacy was very strictly implemented, in a totally decentralized manner, using IDEMIX on HyperLedger Fabric. Research on EVM equivalent technologies proved that Tessera could not achieve the same level of privacy, and was nowhere near as scalable. Paladin seems to be more promising, but must still demonstrate its capability to scale.
No node-crash was observed, even maintaining a throughput of 15 DVPs per second in HTLC during over 30 minutes of tests.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7270392804906778624/
https://www.banque-france.fr/en/financial-stability/financial-stability-mandate/supporting-digital-transformation-financial-sector/wholesale-mnbc?utm_source=chatgpt.com
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/distributed/exploratory/html/index.en.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com
https://www.directeur-innovation.com/aiovg_videos/banque-de-france-plateforme-dl3s/