Chain-Level Dependency
Definition
A reliance, by a settlement system, on the continued availability, behavior, governance, or rule-set of a particular distributed ledger or set of ledgers. Chain-Level Dependencies are properties of the infrastructure that uses the chain, not of the chain itself, and must be assessed as such.
Notes
A token issued on a chain depends on that chain. The dependency is not abstract: it includes the chain's continued operation, the stability of its consensus rules, the absence of contentious forks, the behavior of its governance process, and the availability of its bridges, oracles, and middleware. None of these properties are guaranteed by the issuer; all of them condition the issuer's ability to honor the claim represented by the token.
The question for an Operational Readiness Assessment is not whether a settlement infrastructure has chain-level dependencies — every tokenized system does — but whether those dependencies have been identified, scoped, and bounded. A dependency that has been mapped is manageable. A dependency that is unrecognized is the source of the system's most acute risks.
See also
Validator Concentration Risk · Cross-Chain Settlement · Black-Box Infrastructure · Infrastructure Trust Boundary
References
- ↩ Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub, Project Mariana: Cross-Border Exchange of Wholesale CBDCs Using Automated Market-Makers (September 28, 2023). bis.org
- ↩ Financial Stability Board, Thematic Peer Review on the FSB Global Regulatory Framework for Crypto-asset Activities (October 16, 2025). fsb.org