At the Point Zero Forum 2025 in Zürich, IBM made a bold play for the future of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Demonstrating a live wholesale-CBDC platform developed in partnership with the Banque de France, IBM revealed its DL3S system—capable of executing over 100,000 transactions per second while delivering atomic settlement across tokenised deposits, tokenised securities, and central bank money. The showcase sent a clear message: IBM is not just building a blockchain platform—it’s designing a national infrastructure stack, built to endure regulatory scrutiny and quantum-era threats.
Next-Gen Infrastructure for Regulated Assets
DL3S, which stands for Digital Ledger for Sovereign Settlements, is powered by a custom enterprise-grade build of Hyperledger Fabric tailored specifically for high-throughput environments. In contrast to permissionless chains, Fabric’s permissioned design offers tighter control over identities, consensus, and data visibility—requirements for any serious wholesale settlement system.
The IBM-led implementation enhances baseline Fabric with enterprise extensions: multi-cloud deployment, dynamic membership management, and real-time key rotation. These features aren’t just bells and whistles—they’re critical for scaling the platform to production-grade use by monetary authorities, large banks, and securities depositories.
Quantum-Safe by Design
What makes IBM’s architecture truly future-proof is its integration of quantum-safe cryptography. The DL3S platform includes modules from IBM Research’s post-quantum toolkit, including lattice-based encryption and hash-based signatures that are resistant to Shor’s and Grover’s algorithm attacks—two major threats posed by quantum computing to classical RSA and ECC cryptography.
In parallel, IBM leverages its HyperProtect Crypto Services to ensure that private keys used in the system are hardware-secured, tamper-proof, and segregated from application-layer code. This creates a hardware root of trust compliant with FIPS 140-2 Level 4, the highest commercial-grade certification currently available.
By baking quantum-safe algorithms into the very core of its ledger and key-management stack, IBM is ensuring that any CBDC or regulated token issued today will not become vulnerable tomorrow.
Interoperability with Tokenised Finance
One of DL3S’s most impressive capabilities is atomic settlement between three different classes of tokenised assets: deposits, securities, and central bank money. Using smart contracts, the platform can execute real-time delivery-versus-payment (DvP) and payment-versus-payment (PvP) transactions with finality in under 2 seconds.
The system is designed to integrate with other digital-asset networks via APIs and standard protocols such as ISO 20022 and Digital Token Identifier (DTI). This positions DL3S as a neutral interoperability layer between banks, custodians, exchanges, and regulators.
Moreover, the infrastructure supports privacy-preserving technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), allowing participants to perform computations on encrypted data without ever exposing sensitive inputs. This is especially important for regulated markets where compliance, confidentiality, and transparency must co-exist.
Identity and Compliance in the CBDC Era
Unlike retail crypto networks, DL3S is designed from the ground up with compliance in mind. The platform embeds self-sovereign identity (SSI) standards, enabling participants to authenticate, sign, and transact without leaking personally identifiable information (PII) onto the blockchain.
Every transaction on DL3S can be traced and audited by permissioned regulators, but end users retain control over what data they disclose. This architecture aligns with emerging digital-identity frameworks in Europe and Asia and ensures compatibility with GDPR and other data-protection regimes.
As such, institutions can deploy the system with full confidence in its ability to enforce anti-money laundering (AML), know-your-customer (KYC), and transaction-monitoring rules—without compromising speed or scalability.
The Role of the Crypto Wallet
Though DL3S is a wholesale platform, IBM has not neglected the interface layer. The system is designed to work seamlessly with digital custodians and banks offering institutional-grade crypto wallet solutions.
These wallets—secured through HSMs or multiparty computation (MPC)—can interface with DL3S’s APIs to submit signed transactions, retrieve settlement receipts, and monitor collateral positions. In future iterations, IBM envisions embedded wallet modules within financial-institution core systems, further blurring the line between traditional banking and blockchain infrastructure.
Beyond CBDCs: A Broader Vision
While CBDCs may be the initial use case, IBM’s blueprint hints at a much broader vision for tokenised finance. The DL3S stack could just as easily support tokenised bonds, real estate, carbon credits, and even programmable insurance contracts.
IBM’s recent work with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the Banque de France, and the European Investment Bank shows that sovereign-grade blockchain solutions are no longer theoretical. With throughput, compliance, and post-quantum security now proven, IBM is well positioned to become a critical supplier of the world’s future financial plumbing.
A Quiet Leader in Digital Sovereignty
In an ecosystem often dominated by crypto-native upstarts, IBM’s measured, standards-driven approach may not generate daily headlines—but it’s winning quiet confidence in the corridors of monetary power. With DL3S, IBM is not merely following the CBDC trend—it is shaping the future rules of engagement for a tokenised global economy.
As central banks and financial regulators move from exploration to deployment, platforms like DL3S will form the foundation of trusted, sovereign-grade digital money—secure not just for today’s internet, but for the quantum internet to come.