It is supported by a suite of world-class vendors, including EY, Linklaters, R3, Quant, Coadjute and DXC. On 16 April, UK Finance hosted a webinar to give a ‘101’ overview of the project. The UK has a thriving and vibrant innovator community, and this was an opportunity to give them an insight into the how to get involved later in the project by experimenting with the RLN platform through a dedicated sandbox.

Our RLN 101 webinar got great audience engagement and there were a lot of questions asked that we didn’t have time to answer fully. So, in this blog, we’ve provided a short summary of answers to the questions raised. We expect to publish further blogs focused on specific elements of the project to help to bring it to life for external stakeholders.

Why the RLN?

On the webinar the panellists gave an introduction to the RLN concept (and more information can be found on the UK Finance website here). The RLN is envisaged to provide new settlement functionality by building 14 core foundational capabilities. This new functionality will unlock a range of enhancements to payment and settlement journeys and some entirely new use cases as well. As well as this exciting innovation prospect, another hypothesis is that the RLN will result in increased resilience, confidence and fraud prevention. The RLN concept also delivers against the goal of functional equivalence of money. The RLN ledger is envisaged to be multi-asset, but it could also interoperate with assets on separate chains.

The RLN technology approach

For the purposes of this experimentation phase, we are using R3 and Quant to build the simulated shared ledger and orchestration layer infrastructure. User-facing apps provided by Coadjute and DXC will allow us to simulate the user engagement layer. A shared ledger rather than a fully distributed ledger is being considered. However, the final design of a RLN could change in the future and one of the purposes of this experimentation phase is to consider the relative merits.

Settlement

We discussed the importance of settlement finality on the webinar. The settlement asset in RLN is central bank money. There are different ways of achieving that, for example through a connection with the RTGS system, an omnibus account with a partition on the ledger, retail CBDC, or indeed in the future maybe a wholesale CBDC.

Forms of money

There were questions on the webinar about different forms of money. We clarified that as per the RLN whitepaper, the only forms of money currently in scope are regulated. However, in the future when e.g. stablecoins are regulated, they may be eligible for inclusion. We also talked about why the RLN is important to consider alongside CBDC. The RLN hypothesis is that a platform that contains both central bank money and commercial bank money will generate more innovation than CBDC alone. The goal is to enable a platform for innovation across all forms of money, ensure functional consistency of money, and therefore give consumers a greater experience.

Legal considerations

Finally, we touched on the important legal questions that the project will explore, of which there are many. One that we were asked on the webinar related to the nature of tokenised deposits in the RLN. The hypothesis is that a deposit recorded on a shared ledger as a token is legally equivalent to a deposit recorded on a traditional database. The records on the RLN could therefore have legal weight.

Next steps

On 16 May, we are hosting an Innovator Workshop for third parties that want to learn more about the experiment and how to get involved. The first part of the workshop is being streamed live, so if you want to watch it, please register here.