On the Interoperability of Central Banks via DLT: Cross-Border Payments and Tokenized Assets

Cross-border payments remain slower, costlier, and less transparent than domestic transfers, largely because settlement must traverse chains of correspondent banks operating on different ledgers, in different currencies, and under different regulatory regimes. Central banks and international financial institutions have responded with extensive experimentation in which distributed ledger technology (DLT) and tokenization are applied to shorten transaction chains, enable atomic cross-currency settlement, and preserve central bank money as the anchor of cross-border value transfer. This paper surveys fourteen institutional DLT projects for cross-border payments and settlement. Its central contribution is a three-axis taxonomy that decomposes the design space along target segment (wholesale versus retail), architectural pattern (common platform, interlinking and synchronization, infrastructure bridge), and settlement-asset representation (native central bank digital currency token, proxy token backed by escrowed central bank money, off-chain settlement). Together the axes generate a structured space in which recurring patterns, maturity trajectories, and unresolved trade-offs become visible. Five findings emerge: production-track projects are architecturally composite; proxy tokens and off-chain settlement dominate mature designs; atomicity mechanisms trend from trustless constructions toward oracle-mediated coordination; wholesale and retail segments diverge structurally; and critical enablers—legal finality, cryptographic privacy, elastic on-chain liquidity, and multi-sovereign governance—remain unresolved. The Eurosystem’s trajectory, going from three independent exploratory solutions through the consolidated Pontes bridge to the longer-horizon Appia programme, provides the most developed empirical lens through which these patterns can be observed, demonstrating how interoperability is being operationalized through staged, composite architectures that extend an existing infrastructure rather than replacing it.