Current Affairs Security

Ten European Banks Just Launched Their Own Blockchain Cooperative—And It Actually Works

2026-07-29

On July 28, 2026, ten serious European financial institutions—ABN AMRO, Cecabank, Chartered Investment, Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale, DekaBank, DZ BANK, LBBW, Natixis CIB, SC Ventures and Seturion—launched Regulated Layer One (RL1), a member-owned, permissioned blockchain cooperative registered as a European Cooperative Society in Luxembourg. This is not a tech startup playing at finance. These are heavyweight regulated institutions pooling resources into shared infrastructure.

What makes this different? Equal governance. Each founding member holds identical decision-making rights over the network's governance and technology roadmap. No single entity controls the system. That's a meaningful departure from how traditional finance usually works—and from how most blockchains are structured, frankly.

The network is built on infrastructure originally developed by German fintech SWIAT. The key detail: SWIAT handed over ownership of a live, operating network to the cooperative after three years of real production use. Over that period, the platform processed more than 50 transactions worth over €700 million (about $808 million). So this isn't theoretical. The thing ran at scale and worked.

RL1 is designed to handle institutional use cases—digital money, tokenized bonds, collateral, blockchain-based settlement. The whole settlement stack, basically. European banks have spent years trying to tokenize assets, but they've mostly done it in silos. One bank builds its own system. Another builds a different one. Nobody talks to anyone. Interoperability nightmares. Duplicated costs. Fragmentation hell.

Pooling into a shared network solves that problem on paper. In theory, it dismantles the isolation and creates actual liquidity between institutions. A single standard infrastructure instead of twenty incompatible ones.

Former SWIAT managing director Henning Vollbehr now leads RL1. KfW and L-Bank are continuing their support. The cooperative is already in talks with additional institutions about joining—NatWest is specifically mentioned. That suggests momentum. Other major players want in.

What's striking here is the structural shift itself. Banks aren't funding another centralised blockchain vendor. They're not betting on some startup to own the rails they all depend on. Instead, they've built a cooperative where they all own the infrastructure equally. No winner-takes-all vendor control. No single point of failure in terms of governance.

This is what institutional blockchain adoption actually looks like when it matures past the hype phase. Not flashy. Not revolutionary in rhetoric. Just ten regulated financial institutions agreeing on shared technical standards and pooling capital to make settlement cheaper and faster across European capital markets.

The question now is whether others join, and whether the governance structure actually holds up under pressure. Cooperatives are notoriously difficult to maintain when stakes rise. But for now, RL1 represents the most significant cross-border attempt by traditional banks to collectively govern a shared distributed ledger system in Europe.

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