Paolo Angelini: DLT and stablecoins - where do we stand?
Speech by Mr Paolo Angelini, Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Italy, at the International Economic Symposium "The global economy at an inflection point: technology, policy, and the future of growth", co-hosted by the Bank of Italy and National Association for Business Economics (NABE), Rome, 20 April 2026.
The publication of the Bitcoin protocol in October 2008 fueled the promise that blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) could do away with intermediation. Decentralized verification and, later, programmable execution were expected to make financial intermediaries redundant. Almost 20 years since, this promise has proved elusive at best. Fully automated financial services have not taken over the market; human governance and formal legal frameworks, compliance, risk management, are still necessary to foster trust.
However, DLT-based infrastructure may still come to occupy an important place in the financial sector, as adopters move beyond pilots and into production-grade projects. Indeed, so far, we have not seen disruption, but rather gradual adaptation to technical change.
The question I want to address today is: can DLT be adopted at scale in a way that satisfies adequate requirements of governance, compliance, and operational resilience? Are there substantial use cases for which it is an economically viable solution?
I asked the same questions three years ago, and concluded that the jury was still out.
Today, my answer is a tentative yes. Yet, I would put the emphasis on the "tentative" qualifier. We are witnessing a gradual building of momentum, rather than a "big bang".
DLT in finance spans a wide array of use cases, but many initiatives fall into four main broad categories: crypto assets, for which the technology was initially developed; asset tokenization; financial market infrastructure; payments and settlement, including via stablecoins.