The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the Bank of France (BoF) and the Swiss National Bank (SNB) have concluded the combined study testing the wholesale use of central bank digital currency (CBDC) in international settlements between financial institutions.
Announced on Wednesday, the banks explored settling foreign exchange (FX) transactions in euro and Swiss franc wholesale CBDCs under Project Jura. The French and Swiss central banks issued, transferred and redeemed a tokenized euro-denominated French commercial paper.
Benoît Cœuré, Head of the BIS Innovation Hub, said: “Project Jura confirms that a well-designed wholesale CBDC can play a critical role as a safe and neutral settlement asset for international financial transactions.”
Many private companies, including Accenture, Credit Suisse, Natixis, R3, SIX Digital Exchange and UBS, also participated in the wholesale CBDC testing. The private banks in France and Switzerland explored direct transfers of euro and Swiss franc wholesale CBDCs on a third-party operated single distributed ledger technology platform.
The European participants settled the real-value CBDC transactions on a near-real setting and maintained regulatory requirements.
