Brussels– SWIFT has successfully shown that Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and tokenised assets can move seamlessly on existing financial infrastructure – a major milestone towards enabling their smooth integration into the international financial ecosystem.
The findings, from two separate experiments, solve the significant challenge of interoperability in cross-border transactions by bridging between different distributed ledger technology (DLT) networks and existing payment systems, allowing digital currencies and assets to flow smoothly alongside, and interact with, their traditional counterparts. This important step forward builds on SWIFT’s core capabilities and means that as CBDCs and tokens develop, they can be rapidly deployed at scale to facilitate trade and investment between more than 200 countries and territories around the world.
Interlinking CBDCs for seamless cross-border payments
Globally, nine out of 10 central banks are actively exploring digital currencies — often using different technologies and with a primary focus on domestic use. For the potential of CBDCs to be fully realised across borders, these digital currencies need to overcome inherent differences to interact with each other, as well as with traditional fiat currencies.
SWIFT, in collaboration with Capgemini, achieved CBDC-to-CBDC transactions between different DLT networks based on popular Quorum and Corda technologies, as well as fiat-to-CBDC flows between these networks and a real-time gross settlement system. The success showed that the blockchain networks could be interlinked for cross-border payments through a single gateway, and that SWIFT’s new transaction management capabilities could orchestrate all inter-network communication.
14 central and commercial banks, including Banque de France, the Deutsche Bundesbank, HSBC, Intesa Sanpaolo, NatWest, SMBC, Standard Chartered, UBS and Wells Fargo, are now collaborating in a testing environment to accelerate the path to full scale deployment.
Source: swiftdotcom
