The Bank of England’s Digital Pound Lab has published its Phase 2 update, and buried in the participant list is a consortium worth your attention: NOBO Finance, Dun & Bradstreet, and Polygon Labs. Their use case tests whether a stablecoin and a digital pound can settle the same cross-border payment in a single orchestration flow—an exporter pays in stablecoins, an importer settles in digital pounds, and neither leg waits on the other. Polygon’s Open Money Stack handles the stablecoin leg on public chain infrastructure; the digital pound leg settles on the Bank’s simulated rails.
After the conclusion of Phase 1, a major G7 central bank has now confirmed that stablecoins present a serious competitor to traditional bank settlement rails. BOE is now testing them as an interoperable settlement leg alongside its own prospective CBDC.
The broader Phase 2 lineup reinforces the theme: programmability everywhere. Locks, allowances, streaming micropayments, conditional B2B releases via smart contracts—the Bank is effectively rebuilding DeFi primitives inside a sandbox, with twelve participants ranging from Leeds City Council to offline-payments specialist Crunchfish.
The Stablecoin Strategist delivers enforcement-focused intelligence on stablecoin regulation for operators, counsel, and institutions navigating the GENIUS Act cycle. This is analysis, not legal advice; no attorney-client relationship is formed by reading it.