Polygon Tapped to Join Bank of England's Digital Pound Lab

The Bank of England has invited Polygon Labs to join its Digital Pound Lab to explore onchain use cases for a digital pound. This collaboration marks one of the clearest signals yet that central banks are actively engaging with crypto infrastructure.

Phase 2 of the lab, which runs from November 2025 to July 2026, aims to examine how private stablecoins and a central bank digital currency interact in real-world payment scenarios. The focus is on simulating interactions between a digital pound and stablecoins in trade finance for small and medium enterprises.

Polygon Labs will contribute its Open Money Stack, which handles stablecoin settlement, embedded wallets, and smart contract deployment. Dun & Bradstreet brings commercial credit data to the table, while NOBO Finance handles trade finance modeling.

The collaboration emphasizes participant-defined applications, with companies like Polygon proposing scenarios for stress-testing within the Bank's framework. Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs, framed the collaboration as a matter of interoperability between public and private forms of currency.