The Euroclear Bankchain has successfully completed its first pilot, a service launched by financial blockchain solutions firm Paxos and the Euroclear Bankchain Market Advisory Group.

The Euroclear Bankchain is designed for the settlement of London’s bullion (gold) market, and is scheduled to go live for the first time in 2017.

According to Charles Cascarilla, CEO of Paxos, the pilot involved digitizing 400 bars of gold within the mock environment, and then trading those allocated bars in over 600 trades against the U.S. dollar. Cascarilla told Bank Innovation:

The settlement of those trades occurred with simultaneous delivery vs payment (DvP) which means that the gold and the cash moved together in the transaction. This is important because this type of settlement significantly reduces counterparty risk as gold is never delivered without the dollars and dollars are never delivered without the gold.

In addition to Paxos, some of the Market Advisory Group’s 17 members were included in the pilot, which settled 6,000 OTC test bullion trades—the participating members included Scotiabank, Société Générale, Citi, and INTL FCStone.

The Euroclear Bankchain is run on Paxos’s Bankchain, its flagship blockchain platform, and is designed to eliminate some of the risk and some of the pain points currently fought against by traders for the settlement of gold, which can be somewhat of an arduous process. The digital tokens used during the test pilot were native to the Bankchain.

Said Cascarilla:

Of the over US$20 billion of gold traded on average every month in London, the vast majority is unallocated gold. The absence of perfected ownership allows unallocated gold trading to move faster and more flexibly but with a higher level of residual risk…

At the core of Euroclear Bankchain is a tokenization process that converts physical gold bars – both allocated and unallocated – into digital allocated gold tokens. Once unallocated gold is digitized into an allocated gold token, it gains the certainty that comes with perfected ownership. However, it does not lose the benefits that make unallocated gold so popular: flexible settlement in non-standard bar sizes and low vaulting fees. Thus, Euroclear Bankchain addresses a key systemic risk while meeting the trading needs of market participants.

Paxos will run another market simulation of the blockchain service early next year in partnership with Euroclear, in order to prepare for the product’s live launch later in the year.

In other blockchain news, the Banque de France—the central bank of the country—has also begun testing out the technology for use within the Single Euro Payments Area, in partnership with the public French organization Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, Paris blockchain startup Labo Blockchain, and a few other partnered French banks.

Additionally, Overstock is in the midst of its first day of blockchain trading, and we’re beginning to see the collision of real estate and the blockchain.

Finally, this was an odd week for cryptocurrencies, with Ethereum Classic—i.e., the version of the blockchain that did not support the hard fork implemented to save the stolen DAO funds and chose instead to let the theft stand—spiking up to 37% in value. Bitcoin’s price wobbled around a high of around $780 this week, striking above that mark a few times in one day—the currency is now being traded at around $790, according to data by Coindesk.

Meanwhile, Zcash is continuing its free fall; while the cryptocurrency initially received ample support in the community due to the increased autonomy and security of the currency—which was partially achieved by actually burning physical computer hardware into black char with a blowtorch—it’s now trading at below $35.