A Growing Circle of Trust: Welcoming Our 10th Central Bank Member

Last month, while speaking at the Bank of England’s DLT Innovation Showcase on a panel about interconnecting financial networks, I was reminded how far our community has come. Just a few years ago, the idea of central banks collaborating directly with open source developers to shape the future of money felt like an experiment. Today, it’s a movement. And it’s gaining real momentum.

This week, we’re thrilled to welcome our 10th central bank member, The Bank of Korea, to the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust (LFDT) member community. Their participation underscores how open source collaboration has become a cornerstone of digital-currency and payments modernization worldwide.

Why Central Banks Are Joining Our Open Source Community

Across continents, central banks are exploring digital currencies, tokenized deposits, and cross-border settlement platforms. But these systems can’t — and shouldn’t — be built in isolation. Interoperability, transparency, and resilience depend on shared, neutral infrastructure.

By joining LFDT, central banks gain:

• A seat at the table to shape open standards and interoperable protocols.
• Access to a global network of technologists, financial institutions, and developers building production-grade systems together.
• The ability to collaborate safely under the Linux Foundation’s open-governance model,  ensuring IP clarity, secure code provenance, and vendor neutrality.

From Banque de France to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, Bundesbank, Banco Central do Brasil, Central Bank of England and now the Bank of Korea, each institution brings unique insights from their pilots and research. Together, they’re turning experimentation into shared progress.

From Experiments to Shared Reference Architectures

Our members aren’t just discussing the future. They are working together to build it.

One of the most recent developments is a new LFDT lab that will host the outcomes from CBWeb3, a sandbox network where a group of Latin American central banks are collaborating to develop a reference architecture for a CBDC built on open-source principles. It convenes technologists and policymakers to define practical, reusable components for secure, interoperable, and privacy-preserving digital-currency systems.

CBWeb3’s goal is to advance a model of public infrastructure built on public code by producing a living, adaptable architecture that other monetary authorities can leverage, extend, and localize. Its public repository is live at in our Labs, here: https://github.com/LF-Decentralized-Trust-labs/cbweb3

We’re also seeing open collaboration expand across regions. Norges Bank has open sourced portions of its experimental CBDC code, setting a precedent for transparency and peer learning among central banks.

And in the EU, Deutsche Bundesbank recently joined LF Decentralized Trust following its work on the Trigger Solution, a proof-of-concept built on Hyperledger Fabric that synchronizes tokenized securities with central-bank money. Alongside Banque de France’s DL3S solution, these efforts are now advancing into the next phase of the digital-euro exploration through Project Appia and Project Pontes. These are concrete steps toward interoperable settlement infrastructures built on open technologies.

Together, these initiatives among many others illustrate how open collaboration accelerates progress while maintaining the rigor and accountability required in regulated environments.

What Makes This Collaboration Different

Our community builds the core codebases — ledgers, interoperability frameworks, identity systems, and cryptographic tools — that underpin real-world pilots including:

• Swift Sandbox with 38 participating central and commercial banks
• The Bank of England’s Project Rosalind
• The Reserve Bank of India’s Digital Rupee
• Papua New Guinea’s Digital Kina project
• Solomon Islands’ Bokolo Cash
• BIS’ Project Icebreaker, Mariana, Meridian FX, and others
• Indonesia’s Garuda project

Each example reinforces a simple truth: open source isn’t just about sharing code — it’s about sharing trust. (See more examples in our CBDC ebook)

Why a Direct Relationship Matters

For central banks, a direct relationship with our open source community means co-creation, not just consultation. It enables them to test emerging architectures, influence design decisions early, and ensure that public-sector requirements are reflected in the code itself.

For us, their engagement brings perspective, rigor, and validation. It helps ensure that the decentralized technologies being developed under LF Decentralized Trust — from Besu to Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Cacti, and others — are designed to meet the demands of mission-critical, regulated environments. At the same time, our Certified Service Providers and other vendors building and maintaining these solutions gain direct visibility into evolving requirements and can play an active role in shaping the standards and tools they rely on to deliver enterprise-ready systems.

This tight-knit collaboration helps close the loop between those building the tools and those deploying them, strengthening the ecosystem and accelerating paths to trusted, production-grade adoption.

The Road Ahead

Decentralized technologies are reshaping how value moves across borders, industries, and systems. As more central banks join our community, our collective capacity to develop open, secure, and sustainable code to power this transformation grows stronger.

At LF Decentralized Trust, we believe that public investment should support public code. And that the best way to build trust is to build together.

I couldn’t be more inspired to see how far we’ve come. I am even more excited about where we’re going next and the role our community will play in modernizing financial infrastructure.