BIS Projects
Industry Initiatives
Project Mariana (2023)
Initiative Name
Project Mariana
Organization
The BIS Innovation Hub
Type
Lab
Description
Project Mariana looks to a future world where central banks have issued wholesale central bank digital currencies (wCBDCs) and explores novel options for tokenised FX trading and settlement. It aim at improving the effectiveness, safety and transparency of FX trading and settlement. The project contributes to two key dimensions: first, it combines FX trading and settlement in cross-border transactions into a single instantaneous step using wCBDCs, as one possible mechanism for eliminating credit and settlement risk. Second, given the diversity of technological solutions used in emerging domestic CBDC arrangements, it tests cross-border interoperability through wCBDC mobility beyond domestic boundaries and with a uniform technical wCBDC standard.
Ecosystem
Agnostic
Public Participants
Banque de France
Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS)
Swiss National Bank
Link
Project Icebreaker (2023)
Initiative Name
Project Icebreaker
Organization
The BIS Innovation Hub
Type
Lab
Description
Project Icebreaker explores the potential benefits and challenges of using retail
CBDC in cross-border payments. It tested the technical feasibility of conducting
cross-border/cross-currency transactions between different DLT-based CBDC proofs
of concept. The aim was to gain a deeper understanding of the technologies used,
and to identify the key technical and policy choices and trade-offs that central banks
would need to consider in designing CBDC implementations that facilitate cross-
border payments.
Ecosystem
Agnostic
Public Participants
Bank of Israel,
Norges Bank,
Sveriges Riksbank.
BIS Innovation Hub.
Link
Project mBridge (2022)
Initiative Name
Project mBridge
Organization
The BIS Innovation Hub
Type
Tooling
Description
Multi-CBDC platform for international payments. Interoperable platform for international exchange of Blockchain-based CBDCs. Gearing up for Minimum Viable Product by 2024. Consortium expansion: 25 observing members, including the IMF and the World Bank.
Ecosystem
Ethereum
Public Participants
BIS, Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), Central Bank of The UAE, Digital Currency Institute of The People's Bank of China, Bank of Thailand and over 25 observing members.
Link
Project Helvetica(2022)
Central bank money settlement with more tokenized financial assets over DLT.
•Multi-phase collaboration between BIS, Swiss National Bank (SNB) and SIX.
Project Dunbar
Shared platform for international settlements using digital currencies issued by multiple central banks.
Lead by the BIS, in collaboration with a number of central banks.
Project Jura
Wholesale CBDCs transfer between French and Swiss commercial banks on a single DLT platform.
Collaboration between Banque de France, BIS, Swiss National Bank and a private sector consortium.
"The only other similar research project I am aware of is a pilot project by the Reserve Bank of Australia (2023) which was announced in March 2023 and looks at a CBDC on a rollup to analyze tokenized FX settlement. Overall, the literature on CBDC design is growing, with several central banks conducting pilot projects or research on CBDCs. The BIS Innovation Hubs, in collaboration with many central banks, are conducting various CBDC design projects. For instance Mariana (2023), Dunbar (2022), Helvetia (2022), Jura (2021) or mBridge (2022) fall into the category of wholesale CBDC projects, some of which use distributed ledger technology. Furthermore, there are retail CBDC projects such as Rosalind (2023), Sela (2023) or Icebreaker (2023). Moreover, some countries have CBDC projects that are either in a pilot state, such as China’s e-CNY (2021) or India’s e-Rupee (2023), or already in operation, like the Bahama’s Sand Dollar (2019) or the Nigeria’s eNaira (2021). Norges Bank and Nahmii work on a sandbox project that also includes layer-2 solutions (Jacobo, 2022)."
Source: A Proposal for a Layer-2 CBDC on a Rollup - Remo Nyffenegger
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