LF Decentralised Trust underpins blockchain at G7 central banks and top global CSDs
Key points
- Hyperledger Fabric and Besu both ranked in the top three by institutional market share, with LFDT technologies powering 29.4% of disclosed deployments.
- Project Agorá, involving all G7 economies, and the Eurosystem's Project Pontes both run on LFDT technology, alongside platforms at Clearstream, DTCC and Euroclear.
- BNP Paribas, Citi and HSBC, three of the top five global systemically important banks, are among institutions using LFDT-based platforms.
- Over a quarter of surveyed projects did not disclose their technology stack, and a further share of EVM-compatible and proprietary deployments likely derive from LFDT foundations, meaning the 29.4% figure understates real penetration.
- Ethereum mainnet placed fifth in the institutional rankings overall, though public-chain adoption remains concentrated in fund tokenisation rather than core settlement infrastructure.
A new report commissioned by LF Decentralised Trust (LFDT) finds that nearly 30% of institutional blockchain platforms run on Hyperledger Fabric or Besu, placing both technologies in the top three by market share. The projects in question are not marginal experiments: Project Agorá, which involves all G7 economies, and the Eurosystem’s Project Pontes both operate on LFDT technology, as do platforms at Clearstream, DTCC and Euroclear, the world’s three largest central securities depositories, and at three of the top five global systemically important banks, BNP Paribas, Citi and HSBC.
The 29.4% figure is almost certainly understated. More than a quarter of projects surveyed declined to disclose their technology stack at all, so they are excluded from the count. Additionally, a meaningful share of projects categorised as running “EVM compatible” technology almost certainly use Besu, according to the report’s own sourcing, but were excluded without explicit confirmation. Some organisations listed as running proprietary systems, including Citi and India’s National Payments Corporation of India, have acknowledged adapting LFDT technologies. The report’s authors consider it likely that very few proprietary deployments genuinely start from a clean sheet.
The governance argument running through the report is worth considering on its own terms. LFDT’s neutral foundation model, the report argues, offers a counterweight to commercial blockchain ecosystems where vendor incentives can shape infrastructure decisions in ways that may not align with the institutions building on top of them. Clearstream is cited as highlighting how shared open-source foundations lower the barrier to common standards. A separate observation flags that three public-chain platforms made the institutional top ten, with Ethereum mainnet in fifth place overall, though public-chain adoption remains concentrated in fund tokenisation rather than core settlement infrastructure.
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