Citigroup Inc., HSBC, BNY Mellon and other global financial giants have been experimenting with what they call a “regulated liability network” for conducting round-the-clock, wholesale payments using shared ledgers, and a paper released Thursday suggests the system has potential.

Fitting somewhere in the middle of the debate between central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and private stablecoins, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s New York Innovation Center (NYIC), which has collaborated on the project since last year, concluded that “the network has the potential to deliver improvements in the processing of  wholesale payments due to its ability to synchronize U.S. dollar-denominated payments and facilitate settlement on a near-real time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week basis.”

“From a central banking perspective, the proof of concept was conducive to exploring tokenized  regulated deposits and understanding the potential functional benefits of central bank and commercial bank digital money operating together on a shared ledger,” said Per von Zelowitz, director of the NYIC, in a statement.