The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub and Bank Indonesia under the Indonesian G20 Presidency announced the winners of their jointly organized G20 TechSprint competition last week during a live award ceremony in Jakarta. This third edition of the TechSprint aims to catalyze the development of central bank digital currency (CBDC). Twenty-one finalists from more than 100 applicants worldwide developed and submitted innovative best-in-class CBDC solutions.
Dragonfly Fintech Pte. Ltd. from Singapore won the coveted “Effective and robust means to issue, distribute and transfer CBDCs” category ahead of about 100 participants globally, including some Fortune 500 companies. The other finalists for this category included BitMint, FIS, Mastercard Asia Pacific, R3, Ripple, Roxe CBDC, S.e.A.(Stellar, eCurrency and ANZ).
Other competition categories were “Enabling Financial Inclusion and “Improving Interoperability.” Eleven global expert judges conducted rigorous evaluation and scoring to decide the winners.
With the announcement of this year’s winners, Cecilia Skingsley, Head of the BIS Innovation Hub, said:
“This TechSprint has allowed us to improve our practical work on CBDCs. These technological solutions add to the central banks’ toolbox and provide a springboard for the further development of CBDCs. Our heartiest congratulations to the winning teams.”
Dragonfly’s winning production-ready solution showcased an effective and robust means for the issuance, distribution, and transfer of CBDC for wholesale and retail usage. The submitted solution included the following:
- nCore: Dragonfly’s proprietary blockchain infrastructure, designed for digital banking, enabling regulatory compliance, privacy and control, direct correspondent banking, and interoperability with legacy systems.
- Central Bank Solution: Integrated with an independent central bank-controlled network, a central bank can securely issue and distribute CBDC, execute monetary policy, and have complete oversight over CBDC in circulation. Onboarded financial institutions (FIs) can leverage the network to settle multi-currency transfers.
- mWallet: Integrated with an independently controlled FI network, Dragonfly’s mobile banking solution comes with a modularized backend operating management system that can quickly scale into a full-fledged digital bank.
Dragonfly followed key design principles to make CBDC SIMPLE, with its solution being:
- Scalable: The distributed multi-network design can quickly scale to serve a national CBDC rollout and facilitate cross-border payments.
- Interoperable: Operators can integrate with existing core banking ledgers and external payment and settlement rails.
- Modular: New digital banking modules can easily be plugged in using APIs and SDKs available in multiple common coding languages.
- Programmable: High programmability facilitates the design of innovative services, giving operators a competitive edge.
- Layered: The solution is a ready-to-use stack of future-proof layer one and two technologies.
- Extensible: A multi-touchpoint experience with dual offline capabilities that can serve the unbanked.
