The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) called a multi-jurisdictional central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot “successful” after a month-long test phase that allowed real-value cross-border transactions worth $22 million.
Twenty commercial banks from Hong Kong, Thailand, China, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as their central banks, took part in the pilot project.
According to a post on LinkedIn from the BIS on Tuesday, more than $12 million worth of value was put on the test platform. This made it possible for 164 foreign exchange transactions and cross-border payments between the participating firms, which added up to more than $22 million worth of value.
Related: A think tank has started a “technical sandbox” to study CBDCs in the United States.
The BIS made a movie about the CBDC pilot. From LinkedIn.
Daniel Eidan, a BIS adviser and solution architect, said that the pilot focused on wholesale CBDC cross-border payments and the role that central banks play on the platform. He also said, “We will likely look at more commercial aspects in the next stages of our work.”
The platform is called mBridge, which stands for Multiple CBDC (mCBDC) Bridge. It is part of Project Inthanon-LionRock, which is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) CBDC cross-border payment project that the Thai and Hong Kong central banks will start in September 2019.
Now that the first pilot of the platform is done, the project is in its third and final stage before a version of the product is released that only has the platform’s core features.
A September 2021 BIS report says that a fully functional CBDC cross-payments platform won’t be ready until changes are made based on what people said about the minimum version.
The BIS also said that a detailed report on Mbridge’s progress will be released in October. This report will talk about mBridge’s future as well as its technical design, legal, policy, and regulatory issues.
Related: The deputy governor of India’s RBI told the IMF that CBDCs can “destroy” private cryptography.
In a report from June, the BIS said that about 90% of central banks are looking into whether or not to use CBDCs. The Atlantic Council’s CBDC tracker shows that 11 CBDCs are already up and running, 15 are in the pilot stage, and 26 are still being made.
