CBDC Round-Up

BIS Project Addresses Trade-Offs for Resiliency, Scalability and Privacy

The Swiss Innovation Hub of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has started project Tourbillon, which will explore how to improve cyber resiliency, scalability and privacy. A prototype should be finished by mid-2023 and the solution will be useful for both wholesale and retail CBDCs.

The project is following approaches suggested by David Chaum and Thomas Moser put forward in their eCash 2.0 study ‘Inalienably Private and Quantum- Resistant to Counterfeiting.’ The work will look at quantum-resistant cryptography, an underlying architecture that works with distributed ledger technology while not being based on it, by separating transactions so that the systems resources can scale linearly and by providing privacy for the payment sender rather than the recipient.