Polygon joins Bank of England’s Digital Pound Lab to explore onchain use cases

Polygon Labs has been tapped to help the Bank of England figure out what a digital pound might actually look like in practice. The blockchain infrastructure firm is joining Phase 2 of the central bank’s Digital Pound Lab, where it will work alongside NOBO Finance Limited and Dun & Bradstreet to test onchain use cases focused on trade finance for small and medium enterprises. The appointment, announced on August 12, represents one of the clearest signals yet that central banks aren’t just studying crypto infrastructure from a distance. They’re inviting it into the building. What the Digital Pound Lab is actually testing Phase 2 of the Lab, which runs approximately from November 2025 to July 2026, is designed to examine how private stablecoins and a central bank digital currency might interact in real-world payment scenarios. The key word there is “simulated.” No actual customers are involved, no real funds change hands. This is a sandbox exercise, not a product launch. The consortium is tackling two distinct workstreams. The first focuses on building reusable credit profiles for SMEs, essentially creating portable financial identities that could follow a small business across di...