On the 24th of November, the European Parliament and the Council of the EU reached a political agreement on a pilot regime based on distributed ledger technology (DLT). The DLT pilot regime is part of the European Commission’s Digital Finance Strategy aimed at ensuring that the European Union’s financial services legislation is fit for the digital age.
The project based on the DLT follows the ‘sandbox’ approach, allowing for temporary derogations from certain requirements under the EU’s financial services legislation. The experience gained with the pilot regime should help identify possible practical proposals for new rules on trading and settlement of transactions in financial instruments based on DLT.