The Final Block Episode 10 | Trade and settlement in one step: Ralf Wandmacher (21X) on Europe's DLT Pilot Regime and the race against T+0

Season two of The Final Block opens with a guest who sits on the other side of the trading rail: Ralf Wandmacher, COO and CFO of 21X, Europe's first licensed DLT Trading and Settlement System. Before 21X, Ralf built the retail derivatives platform at Deutsche Bank, ran a Euro stablecoin as CEO of StablR, and started his career at Dresdner Bank building some of Germany's earliest index-linked products. Georges Bock hosts the conversation, covering what the DLT Pilot Regime actually allows, why atomic settlement changes the risk equation, and why Europe risks losing its early lead to the US.

What is the EU's DLT Pilot Regime, and why does it matter?

The DLT Pilot Regime (often still called the "DLT sandbox," though the temporary framing is fading) is the EU rule that allows real, regulated securities — not crypto — to be traded and settled on-chain. 21X was the first company in Europe to be licensed under it as a combined trading and settlement venue.

The regime's core innovation: in traditional finance, trading and settlement are always kept separate. The DLT Pilot Regime allows both to happen in the same step, through smart contracts and atomic settlement.

What is atomic settlement, and why does it remove settlement risk?

Atomic settlement means a trade only completes if both sides of it complete together — an asset token and a matching payment token (typically a stablecoin) are exchanged simultaneously inside a smart contract. If either side is missing, the whole transaction reverses and both parties keep what they started with. There's no window where one party has delivered and the other hasn't, which is where settlement risk usually comes from.

This is a genuine structural change, not just a faster version of the old process: under the pilot regime, an entity can operate both the trading venue and the settlement layer together, which isn't normally permitted for traditional exchanges and central securities depositories.

What can actually be traded under the pilot regime today?

The regime currently allows tokenised versions of relatively simple instruments — funds, corporate and government bonds, and equities — subject to size and volume caps while the EU tests the framework before removing the limits. Political signals from the European Commission and member states suggest those caps are expected to loosen as adoption grows.

Why Europe's early lead is at risk

Europe currently has something the US doesn't yet: a live, regulated, fully tokenised trading venue. US infrastructure players — DTCC, Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange, alongside firms like BlackRock and JPMorgan — are targeting go-live for tokenised, always-on trading around October. The concern raised in the episode isn't regulatory — it's adoption speed: Europe built the rules first, but a more cautious, slower-moving market could hand the practical advantage to the US regardless.

Why real-time settlement matters more for the next generation of investors

A generation used to instant digital experiences — sending money, seeing a trade confirm, watching anything happen in real time — has a low tolerance for a T+1 or T+2 settlement cycle that leaves a trade "pending" for a day or more. The comparison drawn in the episode: paying for something and finding out two days later whether the payment actually went through would be unacceptable in almost any other context. Traditional finance's settlement lag becomes a UX problem as much as an operational one, particularly for investors who've never known anything but real-time.

Where funds specifically fit into this shift

Access matters as much as speed. Through 21X, corporates can already buy actively managed, tokenised funds directly — no intermediary required (retail onboarding is technically possible under the license but not yet activated, largely on cost grounds). That's a distribution shift as much as a technology one: managers gain a direct channel to corporate buyers that didn't previously exist in this form.

The gap still slowing things down in Europe

The practical bottleneck isn't technology — it's onboarding. Getting a single issuer live on a European platform can take 12-15 months, mostly spent convincing each stakeholder individually. The US approach (via DTCC's planned "Launchpad" model) would let anyone already connected to DTCC choose a tokenised path with far less friction, since the product connectivity already exists. That's the structural advantage the episode flags as the real race to watch — not who has the better rulebook, but who removes friction faster.