Swiss National Bank tested CBDC for transactions with five banks - Finance

The Swiss National Bank has successfully used a wholesale CBDC to handle transactions with five commercial banks, the currency authority said. The tests are part of an experiment that was carried out together with the bank for international payment compensation and the Swiss financial service provider Six.

The Swiss Central Bank tests the integration of the CBDC wholesale handling with private banks

A wide range of transactions with a digital currency of the wholesale central bank ( cbdc ) Project Helvetia processes, as the Swiss National Bank (SNB) announced in a press release published on Thursday.

The tests are carried out as part of a joint initiative of SNB, the Bank for International Payment Compensation (BIZ) and Six, the most important provider of financial infrastructure services in Switzerland. Five commercial banks also took part - Citi, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Hypothekarbank Lenzburg and UBS.

The experiment, which took place in the last quarter of 2021, examined the handling of interbank, monetary policy and border crossing transactions on the test systems of SIX Digital Exchange (SDX), the Swiss real-time gross processing system SIX Interbank Clearing (SIC) and nuclear banking systems, SNB in ​​detail.

The Swiss Central Bank and the other banks have integrated a CBDC for wholesale into their existing back office systems and processes. The SNB states that a growing number of financial investments will be token in the future, while financial infrastructures will run on Distributed-Ledger technology (DLT). The regulatory authorities may have to include markets for tokenized assets in their monetary policy, said the authority and stated:

International regulatory standards suggest that operators should fulfill system -relevant infrastructures in central bank money, whenever this is possible and possible. Although none of the existing DLT-based platforms are systemic, they could be in the future.

"In order to continue to meet your mandate to ensure currency and financial stability, the central banks have to keep up with the technological change. The Helvetia project ... has enabled the SNB to deepen its understanding of how the security of central bank money could be extended to token-stagrades," added Andréa M. Maechler, member of the Bank's Board of Directors.

The Swiss National Bank realizes that Helvetia is only a exploratory project, which indicates that it should not be seen as a plan for emission a wholesale CBDC. In December, SNB together with the Banque de France and the BIZ Use of CBDC in wholesale tests for cross -border payments. The Jura project used DLT and was also realized with the support of companies from the private sector.

Do you expect the Swiss National Bank to publish a wholesale CBDC at some point? Let us know in the comment area below.

lubomir Taskensev

lubomir Taskensev is a journalist from the technically experienced Eastern Europe, to the Hitchen's quote: "To be a writer is what I am and not what I do." In addition to crypto, blockchain and fintech, international politics and business are two other sources of inspiration.

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