Central Bank of France successfully run CBDC trial on a private blockchain
Central Bank of France announced the results of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) transaction conducted on Dec 17, 2020. It involved the use of smart contracts to enable issuance, circulation control, and redemption of fund units on IZNES’ private blockchain.
As part of the experimental program, ten transactions totally more than €2 million of central bank digital currency (CBDC) were carried out on a blockchain-based platform from IZNES.
IZNES is the French fund administration platform developed by UK based blockchain startup, SETL.
CBDC trial consortium:
The pilot, conducted in collaboration with SETL, Citi, CACEIS, Groupama AM, OFI AM, and DXC, marks the first settlement of fund units using CBDC.
For this project, SETL provided the DLT technology as well as the technology behind the issuance and redemption of CBDC tokens. DXC supervised the security issues.
Citi and CACEIS acted as commercial banks to use CBDC tokens created by the Central Bank of France. CACEIS also acted as custodian of the “Groupama Entreprises” fund. Groupama AM participated as the fund manager, while OFI AM and SETL acted as proprietary investors.
Wholesale CBDC trails
One of the tests’ objectives is to see whether central bank money should be accessible to organizations that don’t currently have direct access.
Last March 2020, the central bank announced it would run a series of wholesale CBDC trials. Given the experimental nature, the primary use cases are for capital markets or trading transactions.
More experiments are expected to be run to assess the Wholesale CBDC application. The final report on the trials will be ready by the middle of 2021. It is one of several national central banks that plans to give feedback to the European Central Bank’s CBDC exploration.
