Polygon Labs has entered Phase 2 of the Bank of England’s Digital Pound Lab, collaborating with NOBO Finance and Dun & Bradstreet. The initiative focuses on examining near-instant cross-border settlement and portable credit identities for businesses, leveraging Polygon’s Open Money Stack technology.
The Digital Pound Lab serves as a controlled, simulated platform.
It allows the central bank and industry participants to explore potential applications for a digital pound alongside cross-border stablecoin transactions. Importantly, the environment involves no actual customers, real funds, or formal regulatory assessments.
Participation does not signal any endorsement by the Bank of England of Polygon Labs or its offerings, nor does it dictate the eventual design or adoption of a digital pound.
In this phase, the consortium is investigating whether a stablecoin and a digital pound can complete opposite sides of the same international payment within a unified process, eliminating delays for either party.
Under the tested scenario, an exporter receives payment via stablecoins while a UK importer settles using a digital pound.
Both components proceed through a coordinated orchestration.
Polygon Labs supplies the stablecoin settlement infrastructure and underlying smart contracts via its Open Money Stack, which operates on the Polygon network.
The digital pound portion clears on the Bank of England’s simulated systems.A parallel workstream, the SME Bankable Profile led by NOBO Finance, aims to create a reusable credit identity for small and medium-sized enterprises.
Dun & Bradstreet provides verified business identity and credit information to support each profile.
Polygon contributes the on-chain framework that enables this identity to accompany the payment seamlessly.
The broader motivation centers on addressing fragmentation in today’s financial systems.
Traditional bank money, stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and potential central bank digital currencies often operate on disconnected rails.
This separation can trap liquidity and reintroduce settlement risks when different forms of value cannot exchange efficiently at par and on demand.
Maintaining fungibility across these variants is essential for a cohesive monetary system.
The Open Money Stack was developed precisely so that settlement does not hinge on proximity to any single rail.
By conducting these trials in the Lab’s low-risk setting, the partners can evaluate interoperability between private stablecoins and simulated central bank money without exposing real capital or users.
Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs, emphasized the importance of such collaboration: different forms of digital money—public and private, central bank-issued and stablecoin-based—must function together for global trade to benefit fully.
Interoperability drives value transfer, and the Open Money Stack is designed to support it.
Central banks and regulators are posing critical questions, and Polygon welcomes contributing at the infrastructure level.
These experiments form part of a larger effort to understand practical mechanics before any real-world implementation.
Insights gained will be shared as Phase 2 concludes and may inform joint evaluations by the Bank of England and HM Treasury regarding future steps on digital currency.
The Lab itself runs as an experimental venue rather than a pathway to immediate policy decisions or product launches.
This participation underscores growing interest in hybrid models where blockchain-enabled stablecoins and central bank digital currencies could complement one another in trade finance and beyond, potentially streamlining processes for exporters, importers, and smaller businesses that currently face lengthy settlement times and limited access to credit.
