Ten major European financial institutions have established a joint blockchain cooperative in Luxembourg aimed at unifying the fragmented landscape of institutional distributed ledger technology.<\/p>\n
Operating as a European Cooperative Society, the entity\u2014named Regulated Layer One (RL1)\u2014has begun operations with equal governance rights distributed across its founding members. The initial consortium comprises ABN AMRO, Cecabank, Chartered Investment, Cr\u00e9dit Mutuel Alliance F\u00e9d\u00e9rale, DekaBank, DZ BANK, LBBW, Natixis CIB, SC Ventures, and Seturion.<\/p>\n
The move addresses a recurring challenge in wholesale capital markets: the proliferation of isolated, bank-specific private blockchains that hinder liquidity and cross-border settlement. By uniting behind a shared permissioned infrastructure, RL1 aims to provide a common layer for tokenized bonds, commercial money, collateral management, and automated clearing across European capital markets, aligning with broader regional initiatives under the European Union’s regulatory framework for distributed ledger technology<\/a>.<\/p>\n Rather than building a core architecture from scratch, RL1 inherits its technological foundation from SWIAT (Secure Worldwide Interbank Asset Transfer), a German fintech firm. Ownership of SWIAT’s underlying platform has been formally transferred to the cooperative. Over a three-year production phase, the SWIAT architecture processed more than 50 transactions with a combined volume exceeding \u20ac700 million ($808 million).<\/p>\n Governance of the entity is structured to ensure parity among participants, preventing any single institution from dominating network standards or protocols. Former SWIAT Managing Director Henning Vollbehr has been appointed to lead the cooperative.<\/p>\n The cooperative structure also integrates public sector development institutions, with German state-backed lenders KfW and L-Bank continuing to support the ecosystem. RL1 is currently holding discussions to onboard additional international banks, including UK-headquartered NatWest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ten major European financial institutions have established a joint blockchain cooperative in Luxembourg aimed at unifying the fragmented landscape of institutional distributed ledger technology. Operating as a European Cooperative Society, the entity\u2014named Regulated Layer One (RL1)\u2014has begun operations with equal governance rights distributed across its founding members. The initial consortium comprises ABN AMRO, Cecabank, Chartered …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10545,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sitemap_exclude":false,"_sitemap_priority":"","_sitemap_frequency":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[13301,13305,13303,13300,13307,13311,13304,13308,13302,13312,13298,13299,13310,13306,13309],"class_list":["post-10543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-crypto","tag-abn-amro","tag-dekabank","tag-dz-bank","tag-european-cooperative-society","tag-henning-vollbehr","tag-kfw","tag-lbbw","tag-luxembourg","tag-natixis-cib","tag-natwest","tag-regulated-layer-one","tag-rl1","tag-sc-ventures","tag-swiat","tag-tokenized-bonds"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nile1.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nile1.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nile1.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nile1.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nile1.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10543"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/nile1.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10547,"href":"https:\/\/nile1.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10543\/revisions\/10547"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nile1.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nile1.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nile1.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nile1.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}