The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has called a multi-jurisdictional central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot program “successful”.for its acronym in English) following a month-long test phase that facilitated $22 million worth of cross-border real-value transactions.
The central banks of Hong Kong, Thailand, China and the United Arab Emirates participated in the pilot program along with 20 commercial banks from those regions..
More than 12 million dollars were issued on the test platformwhich facilitated 164 cross-border foreign exchange transactions and payments between participating companies worth a total of more than $22 million, according to a BIS post published Tuesday on LinkedIn.
Daniel Eidan, consultant and solution architect at BIS, said that the pilot focused on CBDC wholesale cross-border payments and the role that central banks have in the platformadding that “we will probably consider more commercial aspects in future stages of our work.”
The platform, known as mBridge, short for Multiple CBDC (mCBDC) Bridge, is part of the Inthanon-LionRock Projecta CBDC cross-border payments project with distributed ledger technology (DLT) initially launched in September 2019 involving the central banks of Thailand and Hong Kong.
With the first pilot of the platform already completed, the project has moved into its third and final stage before a minimal version of the product with only the core functionality of the platform is released.
According to the BIS report of September 2021, a fully functional CBDC cross-payments platform will only be ready after reviews are donetaking into account the comments of the minimum version.
The BIS added that a detailed report on the progress of mBridge will be published in Octoberwhich will discuss the technical design and legal, policy and regulatory considerations, along with a future mBridge roadmap.
A June report from the BIS revealed that about 90% of central banks are investigating the adoption of CBDC. Currently, 11 CBDCs have been launched, 15 are in pilot phase and 26 are in development, according to the Atlantic Council think tank’s CBDC tracker.
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