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The participants believe that Project Jura’s approach, including subnetworks and dual-notary signing, may give central banks comfort to issue wCBDCs on third-party platforms and to provide regulated non-resident financial institutions with access to wCBDCs.
The Project Jura report, published by the BIS, concluded that
Moving to a production setting would require further work. This may include: (i) if, where
and how a central bank might delegate functions and activities to a platform operator;
(ii) how oversight arrangements could be formed internationally for multi‐currency and
multi‐jurisdiction systems; (iii) integration between DLT platforms and existing payment
and core banking systems to achieve straight through processing;14 and (iv) legal changes
related to the issuance of wCBDC to achieve settlement finality on the third‐party platform,
which would simplify PvP and DvP settlement considerably for a production setting.
On the same day, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank, Perpetual and ConsenSys, with input from King & Wood Mallesons, announced the conclusion of their wCBDC experiment, Project Atom.
The year-long project involved a PoC for the issuance of a tokenised form of CBDC that could be used by wholesale market participants for the funding, settlement and repayment of a tokenised syndicated loan on an Ethereum-based DLT platform. The Australian central bank said that the PoC demonstrated that the digitisation of syndicated loans on a DLT platform could provide efficiency gains and reduce operational risk by replacing manual and paper-based processes.
From The great wholesale digital currency race heats up – Editor’s Blog –.
The RBA’s report on the project said, essentially, that the Ethereum blockchain worked as advertised, but other than that… well, given that the project “did not focus on non-functional requirements (for example, the scalability of the system, or how it would address cyber risk)” and that the project “highlighted a range of additional
questions and issues that need to be explored to help address the question of whether there is a case for a wholesale CBDC”.
While both of these reports are very interesting, and contain useful lessons, it doesn’t seem to me that either Atom or Jura signal the imminent launch of wholesale CBDC in either jurisdiction.
Snippings 