The central bank of France is on the verge of conducting a series of sweeping experiments whose lessons could be used to change the way money works. Cryptocurrency won’t be included. In a statement from the Banque de France, the nation’s central bank, which works together with the European Central Bank to determine the monetary policy of the continent, the institution today released the names of eight participants in the experiments and the scope of the work. Participants are consulting giant Accenture ACN +0.1%, settlement giant Euroclear, the HSBC bank, French firm, Iznes, Ethereum platform LiquidShare, little-known startup, ProsperUS, crypto bank Seba, and Forge, Societe Generale’s digital capital markets spinoff. The broad parameters of the experiments include everything from testing regulation using digital currency to improve cross-border payments, an analysis of how a central bank digital currency should be made available, and importantly, “to explore new methods of exchanging financial instruments (excluding crypto-assets) for central bank money.” The statement from one of the word’s leading central banks shows how the vaunted institutions are scrambling to learn the best that cryptocurrency and its underlying blockchain technology have to offer, but only within limits. Neither blockchain—the shared ledger that lets bitcoin exist—nor the more sanitized word to describe the larger group of technologies—distributed ledger technology— were mentioned by name in the statement. As such, the work also helps define the limits of what any actual adoption of the technology might look like.