Overview
- This week Lloyds Banking Group and Visa completed a seven‑day live pilot that settled $750,000 in real US dollar obligations using the Circle‑issued stablecoin USDC.
- Lloyds booked the transactions through its Corporate Markets arm in Jersey and bought USDC on UK‑regulated exchange Archax before transferring the tokens to Visa in the United States.
- The test linked Lloyds’ private, privacy‑configurable Canton node with Visa on a public blockchain and showed funds reached Visa in under an hour, including on weekends.
- The firms said the pilot focused on back‑office institution‑to‑institution settlement and did not change consumer payment flows, but it did not report total cost savings, reconciliation burdens, custody arrangements or bank conversion timing.
- Industry projects such as The Clearing House and the BIS’s Project Agorá are pursuing related tokenized‑money tests and wider operational questions will determine whether faster token settlement yields net economic or liquidity benefits for banks and businesses.