Sweden’s central bank tests CBDC for retail and international remittance payments
Riksbank, the central bank of Sweden, along with the central banks of Israel and Norway, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), are exploring the use of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) for instant retail and cross-border remittance payments. according to For release on September 28th.
The central bank-BIS cooperation is titled ‘Project Icebreaker’, where participating banks will connect their domestic proof-of-concept CBDC systems to Sweden’s e-krona platform.
The e-krona platform is a blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform developed in a test environment. In February 2022, e-krona completed the second phase of technical testing. This demonstrated the potential for banks and other payment service providers to integrate into his e-krona platform and how e-krona can act as an offline CBDC.
The project has entered Phase 3 and is focused on formulating possible e-krona requirements, based on technical testing and analysis, should a decision be made to issue.
Meanwhile, Project Icebreaker will explore the technical feasibility of participating central banks to interconnect different national CBDC systems to facilitate instant retail CBDC payments at significantly lower costs than current methods. doing. Current payment systems require payments to be sent to multiple central banks before reaching the final recipient.
Project Icebreaker is BIS’s fourth cross-border CBDC project, the others being Project Dunbar, Project Jura, and mBridge. After the project, BIS announced the success of mBridge on September 28th. It involved the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), the central banks of China, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, and the BIS facilitated his more than $22 million. Real value cross-border payments.
Project Icebreaker will run until the end of 2022 and a final report concluding the findings will be available in the first quarter of 2023. according to to Riksbank.
