The rise of DLT Financial Infrastructures marks a turning point for Europe’s financial system. After a decade of blockchain pilots and proof-of-concepts, the conversation is shifting from experimentation to execution. That’s the perspective of Ivica Aračić, CTO of Swiat and former IT architect at DekaBank, who argues that distributed ledger technology is finally maturing into real-world infrastructure. Speaking on the “Bitcoin, Fiat & Rock ’n’ Roll” podcast, Aračić describes how regulated institutions are moving from early trials to scalable systems capable of supporting genuine market adoption—turning DLT from a buzzword into the backbone of modern finance.
The Case for an Architecture Lens
What holds the transition back, in Aračić’s telling, isn’t cryptography or compute; it’s architecture—the shared blueprint that lets regulated firms build once and interoperate everywhere. Without a common vocabulary, each project becomes an island. With one, standards harden, costs fall and network effects show up.
The show adopts the ASAP model—Access, Service, Asset, Platform—as a pragmatic map. Think of it as the TCP/IP of digital assets: the low-level plumbing (platform), the assets it carries (tokens and registries), the services acting on them (settlement, collateral, FX) and the access points (wallets, APIs, custody portals).
Platform: Reliable Enough, If Properly Governed
At the base layer, European finance has quietly learned to operate permissioned Ethereum and other ledgers with confidence. The issue is less performance than governance: who runs what, who is liable, how upgrades happen, and whether the operator is a neutral utility or a toll booth. Swiat’s answer is a “Regulated Layer 1”—a permissioned network with contractual roles and cooperative governance designed for banks’ risk frameworks. Infrastructure, Aračić argues, shouldn’t be the locus of competition; it should be the meeting place.
Asset: Tokenization Works—Standards Don’t (Yet)
On the asset layer, issuance and ownership are no longer the bottleneck. Bonds, fund shares and money-like instruments can be modeled, issued and transferred under evolving European law. But standardization remains thin. ERC-20 has won mindshare for the investor interface—balances and transfers—but richer, instrument-specific schemas are fragmented. Every new “standard” risks being one more dialect. Until asset descriptions converge, portability and composability will lag.
Service: The Hard Part Is Synchronizing Value
If tokenization is the noun, services are the verbs—and where the market is most unfinished. True delivery-versus-payment and delivery-versus-delivery across ledgers require synchronized moves between DLT and central systems such as RTGS. Here, Aračić sees real movement: eurosystem experiments linking DLT asset legs to central-bank money; work toward production rails (often referenced under “Pontus Track”); and integrations for tokenized deposits and stablecoins. The next mile is scale—and liquid secondary markets under the EU Pilot Regime—so newly issued assets don’t sit stranded on chain.
Access: Hide the Chain, Elevate the Experience
Most institutions don’t want to run full stacks on day one. They want clean APIs, custody-grade wallets and service bundles that can later migrate on-prem. The broader point is cultural: mainstream users shouldn’t need to know they’re on a blockchain. Success looks like familiar dashboards backed by auditable, programmable rails.
Why Consolidation Is Suddenly Plausible
After a decade of divergence, the guest sees convergence: banks forming consortia, neutral networks gaining traction, and global utilities exploring ledger connections. Consolidation can’t be total—multiple platforms will exist—but assembling more participants in fewer places dramatically raises the odds of de facto standards emerging at higher layers.
The Missing Pieces—and a Timetable
Aračić’s checklist for liftoff is concrete: (1) a payment leg that spans central-bank money, commercial bank money, tokenized deposits and stablecoins; (2) secondary markets with real depth; and (3) eligibility—so tokenized instruments become first-class collateral at central banks. None are moonshots. All are policy-and-plumbing problems.
The Long View: When the Technology Disappears
The episode ends with a modest thesis: the transformation succeeds when nobody talks about DLT. Like HTML in the browser, the rails fade and only the market remains—faster settlement, programmable assets, lower friction, better transparency. In that world, Europe’s financial architecture won’t look “crypto.” It will look normal—and work better. That, Aračić suggests, is the point.
ASAP: A Conceptual Model for Digital Asset Platforms
SWIAT Research
Ivica Aračić’s Newsletter
Ivica Aračić at LinkedIn
Bitcoin, Fiat & Rock’n’Roll Website
Bitcoin, Fiat & Rock’n’Roll Telegram Channel
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