Last June we issued a Communication on DLT and crypto–assets proposing principles and benchmarks for supervised intermediaries and entities falling within the scope of payment system oversight.6 Coming to DLTs use for financial market infrastructure, two main types of claims have been made.
According to early-hour proponents of DLTs, the technology has the potential to do away with financial intermediaries and their trust-building role: the very key features of the technology – the distributed nature of the ledger, the “impossibility” for any single user to tamper with the records once validated – pave the way to a world with a greatly diminished role for intermediaries.