CBDC News

Wholesale CBDCs Used for Cross-Border Settlement

The Banque de France, the Swiss National Bank and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub have completed a cross-border wholesale CBDC experiment. Known as Project Jura, the experiment used tokenised assets on a distributed ledger (DLT) platform to settle cross-border transactions. The DLT platform used was operated not by the commercial banks who carried out direct fund transfers denominated in both euro and Swiss francs, but by a third party.

The experiment was conducted in near-real time, complying with current regulations. Payment versus payment and delivery versus payment mechanisms were used.

The project partners believe this use of multiple wholesale CBDC settlements between different commercial banks in different countries was a first. The use of a third-party platform to give non-resident financial institutions access to another country’s wholesale CBDC using separate sub-networks was also new.