The Bank of Spain announced the award of two projects towards trialling a wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC), reports Ledger Insights. Adhara, the technology partner of Fnality, won the contract to deliver a wholesale CBDC infrastructure. And a consortium involving Cecabank and Abanca will trial wholesale CBDC for securities settlement.
Additionally, Adhara will deliver a “digital interbank orchestration platform”, which Ledger Insights interpreted as a tokenized deposit solution. Adhara has already developed such an offering. The company’s CEO Julio Faura is Spanish and spent 11 years at Santander. Hence, Adhara has a Spanish subsidiary.
The Adhara project involves the issuance of two or more separate wholesale CBDCs for cross border purposes and the provision of wallets to participants. The projects specify English as a second language to enable sharing of the results.
For the Cecabank – Abanca consortium, the emphasis is on the use of a wholesale CBDC to settle tokenized securities on a blockchain platform. Hence a wholesale CBDC will be issued and distributed to participants of the blockchain platform. It aims to enable atomic settlement or delivery versus payment (DvP) for bond issuance as well as secondary market trading. Additionally, the wholesale CBDC will be used for coupon payments. It will also support cross border transactions.
Both projects are simulations.