SEBA Bank, Banque Internationale à Luxembourg, and LuxCSD announced that they have successfully completed their CBDC (central bank digitial currency) experiment with Banque de France. SEBA is an institutional grade digital asset banking platform with a Swiss FINMA banking and securities dealer license.
The alliance, led by SEBA Bank, performed the DvP of a listed security with TARGET2-Securities as delivery platform in test environment and CBDC tokens issued by the Banque de France. The confidentiality of transactions was achieved through a protocol that makes use of zero-knowledge proofs in order to encrypt and obscure the values of the CBDC transactions over a public blockchain.
As a result, the participants successfully demonstrated the ability of distributed ledger technologies to communicate with the Eurosystem’s settlement platform TARGET2-Securities for the settlement of listed securities. The success of this experiment will be an important element of contribution to the Eurosystem’s global reflection on the benefits of CBDC and blockchain technologies to improve payment and settlement of transactions.
Matthew Alexander, head Digital Corporate Finance at SEBA Bank, said in a statement that the experiment is an “important development and contribution towards the possibility of a digital European currency”.
In a separate statement, Marco Caligaris, CEO at LuxCSD, said: “Connecting new technology, such as DLT, with existing infrastructure is crucial to offer optimal services for the market. By joining forces, the industry can develop sustainable solutions that not only work today but lay a strong foundation for the future. Being a trusted central securities depository at the heart…of one of Europe’s financial centres, LuxCSD is perfectly positioned to support the industry on its way towards a true digital finance ecosystem.”