Unveiling the potential of wholesale CBDC: what insights and prospects?
Published on the 22nd of September 2023
New technologies such as distributed legders (DLT) and tokenization could bring significant benefits to the functioning of financial markets and cross-border payments, provided that they are used in a secure and regulated environment. In order to check the promises of these new technologies and support their development, the Banque de France has been committed since 2020 into an open innovation program, through twelve experimentations conducted in partnerships with private entities, international institutions and other central banks. More specifically, those experiments aimed at investigating how wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency (wholesale CBDC), based on distributed ledger technologies (DLT), could be used for the settlement of interbank transactions. Following the publication of an initial report in 2021, the Banque de France has released last July a second report of conclusions and lessons learned from these wide range of experiments.
This high-level conference is organized by the Banque de France with many of its partners, public as private, as speakers (Bank of International Settlements, European Bank of Investment, Monetary Authority of Singapore, Swiss National Bank, SWIFT, SG Forge, IZNES). This conference aims at making a progress report of the exploratory work conducted by these various institutions on wholesale CBDC, and at sharing insights and prospects on their development. This conference will be held early October, while the ECB is expected to disclose very soon its eligibility criteria for its experimentation program on new technologies for wholesale central bank money settlement, which will be an important milestone in the international considerations about the tokenization of finance and wholesale CBDCs.