The Bank for International Settlements, the international coalition of centralized banks for fostering cross-border financial and monetary cooperation, has proclaimed a month-long CBDC test pilot project as successful. The project comprised both central and commercial banks from 4 nations- the UAE, Hong Kong, China, and Thailand. The multi-jurisdictional project consisted of a 1-month testing phase and the active participation of 20 commercial banks from the aforementioned regions.
CBDC: Global Scenario
As per BIS’s June report, an estimated 90% of the world’s leading central banks are already conducting their own research for the integration and implementation of CBDC into their existing infrastructure. The current scenario indicates 11 successful CBDC launches, 15 in the pilot stage. An additional 26 are in development as per the CBDC info tracker provided by Atlantic Council.
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The mBridge Project
The multiple CBDC platform, acronymized to mBridge, falls under the Inthanon-LionRock project. The latter is an international CBDC payment project powered by Distributed Ledger Technology(DLT). It was launched way back in 2019 in cooperation with the central banks of Hong Kong and Thailand.
CBDC: Pilot Project Test
An allocation of over $12 million was issued to the test platform. The aim was to make a proper assessment of the Central Bank Digital Currency project. The platform successfully enabled 164 cross-border exchange transactions and payments between the enterprises participating, which amounted to a total exceeding $22 million. The report was presented this week by BIS on its LinkedIn post.
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Future Development
The BIS accreditation of mBridge’s first pilot will accelerate product development to the final stage, where a core-functional version of the cross-border CBDC platform will be introduced to the market, keeping only the minimum version. Depending upon the incoming feedback, a fully-functional variant of the platform will be released to the mainstream, after making the required revisions.
Wrapping Up
The BIS has announced that a comprehensive report on the mBridge project’s progress will be made available in October 2022. The report will comprise technical designs, legal regulatory, and policy considerations, in addition to a detailed future roadmap of the mBridge CBDC project.
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