Rival banks just built a blockchain together — meet RL1

Ten European banks and financial institutions did something competitors usually avoid — they built a shared blockchain network instead of each going it alone. On July 29, the Regulated Layer One (RL1) cooperative formally started operating as an independent European Cooperative Society registered in Luxembourg, Cointelegraph reports.

• Founding members: ABN AMRO, Cecabank, Chartered Investment, Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale, DekaBank, DZ BANK, LBBW, Natixis CIB, SC Ventures, and Seturion
• German development bank KfW has backed the initiative since 2025 without being a founding cooperative member
• Britain's NatWest is in talks to join the network
• Every member holds equal governance and development rights

The network's technology comes from German fintech SWIAT (Secure Worldwide Interbank Asset Transfer), which has now fully transferred ownership of the infrastructure to the cooperative. Over more than two years of live operation, SWIAT processed more than 40 transactions worth over €600 million, KfW notes.

“RL1 has the potential to elevate the European DLT infrastructure to a new technological level.”

— Stefan Wintels, CEO of KfW

Quote source: KfW.

The network is meant to handle digital-money settlement, bond tokenization, and collateral — exactly the infrastructure where Europe's regulated financial institutions have so far been stuck with fragmented, mutually incompatible ledgers.

South Korea's largest bank, KB Kookmin, recently took a similar but fundamentally different route — it joined JPMorgan's ready-made Kinexys network instead of building its own. RL1 is a bet on the opposite model: not becoming a customer of someone else's infrastructure, but co-owning your own.

Each model has its own cost: plugging into a ready-made network is faster but means depending on a single operator; building shared infrastructure takes longer and is harder to govern, but keeps the decision-making with the banks themselves. Which model wins out in Europe will be decided over the next few years, not by a single network's launch.

This piece is informational, not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any asset.