Together with five central banks, 16 private companies—10 market players and 6 market DLT operators—were first brought on board to carry out live trials that involve real settlement in central bank currency and experimentation with mock settlement in test environments.

In the first experiment, government bonds were tokenized and mimicked delivery-versus-payment (DvP) settlement in a secondary market transaction against central bank currency, conducted by Oesterreichische Nationalbank.

A range of use cases, including as DvP transactions in primary and secondary markets, securities lifecycle management, automated wholesale payments, and payment-versus-payment transactions, are being prepared for more trials and experiments. These are now in the planning stages.

The experiments will go on for another six months, giving the Eurosystem more information about the "potential merits of using new technologies in wholesale financial markets" as well as possible interactions between the Target settlement system and distributed ledger technology (DLT) platforms.