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Swiss National Bank successfully tests wholesale CBDC settlement

Thursday 13 January 2022 14:43 CET | News

The Swiss National Bank (SNB), BIS and SIX have successfully tested the integration of wholesale CBDC settlement with commercial banks.

Tests covered a wide-range of transactions in Swiss francs – interbank, monetary policy and cross-border. The second phase of Project Helvetia is a joint experiment by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the Swiss National Bank (SNB) and SIX (a Switzerland-based provider of financial infrastructure services), which also included five commercial banks: Citi, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Hypothekarbank Lenzburg, and UBS.

Project Helvetia looks toward a future in which more financial assets are tokenised and financial infrastructures run on DLT. International regulatory standards suggest that operators of systemically important infrastructures should settle obligations in central bank money whenever practical and available. While none of the existing DLT-based platforms are systemic yet, they may become so in the future. Moreover, central banks may need to extend monetary policy implementation to tokenised asset markets.

Integrating a wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) into existing core banking systems is complex and a key prerequisite for issuance. Phase II of Project Helvetia demonstrates that such integration is operationally possible. Issuing a wholesale CBDC on a distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform operated and owned by a private sector company is feasible under Swiss law.

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Keywords: CBDC, central bank, digital currency, Citi, DLT
Categories: DeFi & Crypto & Web3
Companies: BIS, SIX Group, Swiss National Bank
Countries: Switzerland
This article is part of category

DeFi & Crypto & Web3

BIS

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SIX Group

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Swiss National Bank

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