A group of 11 banks – including the UK's Barclays, HSBC and Royal Bank of Scotland – have traded assets as part of a test of new blockchain technology. It marks one of the first known examples of banks successfully using a distributed ledger to trade with each other.

For the experiment, the banks, which are among those backing the blockchain startup R3, connected to a private distributed ledger developed by R3 to execute trades in digital assets, according to a statement on January 20.