The Banque de France published a second report to share lessons learned from its wholesale CBDC experiments using distributed ledger technologies. The report covers the first and the second tranches of its wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC) experimentation programme,launched in March 2020 and comprising twelve experiments.
These findings contribute to the Eurosystem’s exploratory work announced in April 2023, which aims to investigate how wholesale financial transactions recorded on DLT platforms could be settled in central bank money. Through these experiments, the Banque de France shows the operational feasibility and practical implementation of the three models it has conceptualized for issuing wCBDC directly on DLT: the interoperability model, the distribution model and the integration model.
These three models have been tested with different types of DLTs across a large spectrum of use cases, covering two key strategic areas: the tokenization of finance and the improvement of cross-border transactions. The report includes key policy and technical takeaways.
“These twelve experiments, which were all carried out successfully with our partners, central banks and commercial banks, in a public-private partnership, have provided us with the assurance that central bank money can be provided in a tokenised form to settle tokenised assets and improve cross-border payments. We are happy to provide our DL3S DLT solution in the context of the exploratory work announced by the Eurosystem for settling tokenised transactions, using central bank money, including in the European Pilot Regime, and are also ready to explore other solutions to facilitate the interaction between TARGET Services and DLT platforms. We have demonstrated that our DLT solution is flexible and can be interoperated with TARGET solutions and other DLT solutions. We are also keen to keep abreast of developments in the field of cross-border payment and explore new concepts” said Emmanuelle Assouan, director general of Financial Stability and Operations at the Banque de France, in a statement.
