Bank for International Settlements & Swiss National Bank Completes Crypto Proofs-of-Concept

The Bank for International Settlements and the Swiss National Bank and are considering the advantages of employing a central bank digital currency using blockchain technology.

As per a recent announcement, the BIS Innovation Hub Swiss Centre, has positively accomplished 2 proofs-of-concept linking prevailing payment systems to a distributed ledger and settling tokenized assets with a wholesale central bank digital currency.

The new initiative is a joint venture from the Bank for International Settlements and the Swiss National Bank, and Switzerland’s topmost stock exchange, Six Group. The project is dubbed “Helvetia”.

The exchange mentioned that Project Helvetia investigated the technological and permissible viability of moving cryptocurrencies through issuing a wholesale central bank digital currency onto Six’s proprietary distributed virtual currency platform, Six Digital Exchange. The new platform is anticipated to be unveiled in the imminent future, offering settlement, issuance, trading, management and custody of tokenized assets.

The financial establishments mentioned that the experiment should not be understood as a sign that Switzerland’s central bank is planning to launch a wholesale CBDC.

A member of the Singapore National Bank’s governing board, Andréa Maechler highlighted that the Swiss central bank does not want to miss prospects to improve the financial system with evolving technologies.

Even though Project Helvetia seems to demonstrate that DLT has the potential to be a valuable tool in the future of the financial system and central bank digital currencies, there is still no clear consensus over whether the technology is essential for beginning a central bank digital currency.