Permissioned Blockchain

On a public, permissionless blockchain such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, anyone can run a node, read every transaction and take part in consensus. A permissioned blockchain splits these rights and grants them by identity: one member may only read, another may submit transactions, a third may also validate blocks. The study Transactional Properties of Permissioned Blockchains describes such networks as run by known entities that do not need to trust each other, with access controlled through a registry of identities.

Because the validators are known, a permissioned network needs neither proof of work nor proof of stake to agree on the order of transactions. Voting protocols of the Byzantine fault tolerance family, or crash-tolerant ones such as Raft, are common, as MoonPay's comparison of the two models notes. Inside the closed group, a transaction is final within seconds. The price is control: the operator or the consortium behind the network becomes a single point of decision and of failure, and members find it hard to leave once their processes depend on one platform.

One use of permissioned ledgers in banking that is already live is the cross-border payment between banks. Partior, backed by DBS, J.P. Morgan, Standard Chartered and Temasek, is a blockchain network for 24/7 atomic settlement, with a unified ledger for cross-border payments and FX payment versus payment in US dollars, Singapore dollars and euros. In an FX trade on such a ledger, both currency legs settle together or not at all.

Deutsche Bank invested in Partior in November 2024 and signed a platform agreement in May 2025 to join as a euro and US dollar settlement bank. In September 2025 it completed a pilot euro transaction on the network, with DBS as the receiving bank. The same pattern, banks on a shared ledger with bank money or central bank money as the cash leg, is behind tokenized deposits and the Eurosystem's Pontes service.

Deutsche Börse Group sees a continuous rise of tokenized securities issued on public permissionless blockchains, as it wrote in its response to a Basel Committee consultation. It compared the setup to the internet: TCP/IP is open at the base layer and partly permissioned in the applications built on it. In practice, a bank on a public chain adds the permissions itself, for example with token contracts that accept transfers only between verified wallets. Networks such as Canton Network take a middle path and share only the parts of a transaction both counterparties need to see.

For a bank the choice has a capital side. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision concluded that the risks of crypto-assets on permissionless blockchains cannot be mitigated enough for the lighter Group 1 treatment; Deutsche Börse disagreed in the same response and pointed to KYC duties as one countermeasure. In February 2026 the Committee expedited a review of targeted elements of its cryptoasset standard.

A permissioned network reaches only the customers of its members, so the first question is who else is on it and which money settles the cash leg. The second is how the network connects to TARGET, to other ledgers and to public chains: separate permissioned networks do not talk to each other by default, and the page on cross-chain messaging covers the bridge designs and their trust models. The third is operations, from who runs the nodes to what happens to the data if the consortium closes; the page on node infrastructure compares running a node with buying one.

Payments in DLT-based markets and the forms of money that settle them were the topic of a panel at the Frankfurt Forum on Digital Assets & Applications, with speakers from Deutsche Bundesbank, Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, DZ Bank and AllUnity. Finance Loop is a strategic partner of the Digital Euro Association, whose Digital Euro Conference covers wholesale CBDC and programmable money, and has a strategic cooperation with 21X, a DLT trading venue in Frankfurt.

A shared ledger where an operator or a consortium decides who may read it, submit transactions and validate them. The participants are identified, so the network can use voting-based consensus and reach final settlement within seconds.

On a permissionless blockchain such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, anyone can read, transact and validate. On a permissioned one, each of these rights needs approval. The permissioned model gives up openness for control over who sees which data and who is responsible for running the ledger.

Mostly. A private blockchain is run by one organization or a closed group, and joining it needs permission. Some networks are public to read but permissioned to validate, so the two words describe different rights: who can see the ledger and who can write to it.

Yes. Ethereum client software can run as a private network with a fixed set of validators, and banks have built permissioned networks this way. Tokens on public Ethereum can also carry permission rules in their smart contracts, such as a list of verified wallets.