“The emergence of various forms of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) poses much more profound challenges because it enables verification of payments to be decentralised, removing the need for a trusted third party,” she said. “It may reshape the mechanisms for making secured payments: instead of settlement occurring across the books of a single central authority (such as a central bank, clearing house or custodian), strong cryptographic and verification algorithms allow everyone in a DLT network to have a copy of the ledger, and give distributed authority for managing and updating that ledger to a much wider group of agents. The Bank is undertaking work to understand the implications of new digital or e-monies and new methods of payments and financial intermediation as part of the One Bank Research initiative.”

http://www.bankingtech.com/428402/bank-of-england-considering-digital-ledger-for-rtgs-in-2017/