BIS G20 TechSprint 2022 Shortlist Winners
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub and Bank Indonesia have apparently chosen the projects that will be invited to showcase prototypes in a July workshop for the central bank digital currency (CBDC) focused G20 Techsprint. During the workshop, the project managers will receive feedback from national authorities and invited experts, after which an independent panel of experts will choose the winning solutions, to be announced in October. The three categories are focused on (i) CBDC distribution and transfer, (ii) financial inclusion and (iii) interoperability. Above I say “apparently” because there’s no announcement from the source, just from vendors themselves, four so far that I know of; BitMint (quantum-safe offline-capable peer-to-peer digital currency (DC) platform), Dragonfly Fintech (blockchain-based DC platform), Fluency (blockchain-based offline-capable DC platform), and Giesecke+Devrient (multiple-media offline-capable DC platform).
The BIS Innovation Hub London Centre invites companies and organizations to submit expressions of interest to join the Project Rosalind to develop application programming interface (API) prototypes for distributing CBDCs. The group will be structured into two tiers – API users and technical advisors, with different roles and responsibilities for each. The project, run jointly with the Bank of England, aims to address some of the questions around developing a retail CBDC system, including: how to improve public-private sector collaboration? How to maximize interoperability, encourage competition and enable adoption? How might retail CBDC meet current and future consumer needs in a fast-changing payments landscape? The objective is to explore how this interface could best enable a central bank ledger to interact with private sector service providers to safely provision retail payments. [Read more]
Bank of Ghana rolls out mobile wallet
The Bank of Ghana has launched GhanaPay, a common mobile wallet open to banks, savings and loans companies and rural and community lenders, enabling the industry to pool resources and reduce the cost of developing and testing new technologies. With GhanaPay, merchants do not need to maintain banking relationships with several banks to receive bill payments from other bank customers. In addition, customers only need to maintain an account with a bank to make bill payments to the entire network of customers and merchants registered with GhanaPay. [Read more]
Upcoming events I’m affiliated with:
The second session of the CBDC Think Tank CBDC Papers Lecture Series will be held on June 24 starting at 7am EST and run for 4 hours. [View list of papers and register here]
The CBDC Think Tank, in partnership with the International Monetary Fund and George Washington University, is hosting a full-day in-person CBDC Masterclass on October 12 in Washington DC. The sessions are designed as instructional deep dives with full presentations and Q&A components. [Register here]
