Twelve Participants, Six Demos, One Stablecoin Headline

The Bank of England's Digital Pound Lab reached the news in mid-August as a stablecoin story. The Bank's own page on the same programme, last updated seven weeks earlier, tells a different one.

That page lists twelve Phase 2 participants and six demonstrations the Bank built itself. None of the six involves a stablecoin, a public blockchain or a cross-border settlement flow.

The list was published in June, not August

On 11 August 2026, Polygon Labs published a blog post describing its participation in Phase 2 of the Lab, as part of a consortium with NOBO Finance and Dun & Bradstreet, testing a flow in which a stablecoin leg and a simulated digital pound leg settle within a single cross-border payment. Coverage followed over the next three days, framed variously as the Bank expanding its pilot, testing stablecoins, or tapping the three firms.

The Bank had already published the participant list. Its Phase 2 update page carries the line "This page was last updated 25 June 2026," and the entry "NOBO Finance Limited In collaboration with Dun & Bradstreet and Polygon" appears there among twelve participants. That is 48 days before the coverage.

The selection process had closed earlier still. The Bank's digital pound news page states that applications for Phase 2 closed at the end of March 2026. Participation is described in the Lab's own terms as voluntary and unremunerated, with organisations applying to take part.

None of that makes the August reporting wrong about the substance of what the consortium is testing. It does mean the event being reported was the publication of a company blog post, not a decision by the Bank.

The six demonstrations the Bank built itself

The more useful part of the Bank's page is the part that received almost no coverage. Alongside participant work, the Bank built its own demonstrations with Accenture, the Lab's delivery partner, to show what the underlying capabilities can do. There are six, and together they are a reasonable sketch of what a retail digital pound might actually change at the payment layer.

One-time aliases let a payer transact using a single-use random string rather than persistent account details, so the recipient does not see the payer's full payment information. The Bank notes the alias still works for refunds, and that a configuration in which the recipient sees only the alias and not the payer's name would also be possible.

Confirmation of Payee, already a live service in UK payments today, is demonstrated with an exact match and a close match, where the name entered differs slightly from the name on the alias record.

A group-chat "kitty" demonstration uses locks — a programmability feature that sets money aside until a condition is met, such as a target amount or a number of contributors. If the lock expires unmet, the money returns to the payers.

External Service Interface Provider connections show a third-party application, in this case the chat app, being granted its own separate alias linked to the user's wallet, so that a compromise of the third party does not expose the wallet itself. The user can authorise spending up to a limit inside the app, or keep per-payment approval.

Allowances, extended in Phase 2 to e-commerce, let a user permit another person, application or merchant to spend up to a set amount within a set period. The Bank draws an explicit distinction: an allowance grants permission to spend but does not set funds aside, so the primary user can still spend the money themselves.

Streaming micropayments use two-party locks with multiple drawdowns so that a user pays incrementally for content actually consumed — the Bank's example is paying per minute of an audiobook.

Aliases, payee confirmation, delegated third-party authority, conditional holds and pay-per-use drawdowns are payment-infrastructure primitives. They are also the closest thing the Lab has produced to a public statement about what a digital pound would be for.

Two participant demonstrations are published, and neither is the stablecoin one

The Bank says demonstration videos from other participants "will be included in the final Phase 2 update, which will be published following the completion of Phase 2." As of the page's current state, two participant demonstrations are published.

Crunchfish built an offline payments proof of concept using a reserve, pay and settle lifecycle layered on digital pound infrastructure, including point-of-sale payments, online reconciliation and controls against double spending. TECHT Labs built a conditional business-to-business payment using its own smart contract platform, with payments locked and released automatically once agreed conditions are met.

The NOBO Finance, Dun & Bradstreet and Polygon demonstration is not among the published ones. Its description comes from Polygon's own blog rather than from the Bank.

The Bank says inclusion is not endorsement

The Phase 2 page carries two disclaimers that sit directly against the framing the story acquired. The Bank states that policy choices in the demonstrations "were determined by the participants for the purpose of the experiment and should not be taken as an indication of future Bank policy," and that inclusion of participants' videos "does not imply Bank approval or endorsement of the firms, their products or their services."

Polygon's own post carries the same caveat, saying participation does not imply Bank of England endorsement and that the tests do not indicate future Bank policy or digital pound design.

The Lab's boundaries are set out plainly elsewhere on the Bank's site. It is a simulated environment. It is "not a regulatory sandbox and no real customers or real money payments will be involved."

The programme was scheduled to end in July

The Bank states that "the Lab is expected to run from August 2025 to July 2026," in two phases, with participants developing use cases within three months of joining.

The Phase 2 update page, in its opening line, describes Phase 2 as one "which will conclude in July." That page was last updated on 25 June. The final Phase 2 update, which the Bank says will contain the remaining participant demonstrations, has not appeared. Neither has the Phase 2 webinar the page says the Bank expects to host.

So the story arrived in the second week of August about a phase that, on the Bank's own published schedule, had been due to finish the previous month, and whose concluding publication is still outstanding.

No decision has been taken

The most consequential sentence sits on the Bank's digital pound news page, and it is the one least likely to survive a headline. The Bank says it will announce its decision on whether to proceed with a digital pound in 2026, alongside publication of the digital pound blueprint and a joint assessment by the Bank and HM Treasury.

The Lab's stated purpose is to feed that assessment: co-creating use cases "that will contribute to the assessment of whether to build a digital pound," understanding potential business models for payment interface providers and external service interface providers, and informing the Bank's thinking on digital currency technology generally.

A programme designed to help decide whether to build something is not evidence that it is being built.

What is established and what is not

Established: the Bank published a twelve-name Phase 2 participant list, including the Polygon consortium, by 25 June 2026. It built and published six demonstrations of its own, none involving stablecoins. Two participant demonstrations are published, from Crunchfish and TECHT Labs. The Bank states that inclusion is not endorsement and that participants' policy choices are not Bank policy. The Lab is simulated, involves no real money, and was scheduled to run to July 2026. A decision on whether to proceed with a digital pound is due in 2026.

Not established: what the NOBO, Dun & Bradstreet and Polygon demonstration produced, since only the participant has described it; whether Phase 2 concluded on schedule; when the final Phase 2 update and webinar will appear; what the other nine participants built; and what any of it implies for the decision, which the Bank has not made.

The narrow reading is that a central bank published a list of twelve experiments in June, one of which involves a stablecoin, and that in August the payments press reported the one.