BIS Announces Successful Completion of CBDC Testing Phase

• The BIS announced the successful completion of its CBDC pilot stage.
• The testing program took about a month to complete and facilitated over $22m in cross-border transactions.
• Advisor and Solution Architect at the BIS, Daniel Eidan, stated that further details would be revealed in October.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) announced the successful completion of its central bank digital currency (CBDC) testing program in a LinkedIn post after a month-long testing phase that facilitated over $22 million worth of international transactions.

The project is a collaboration between the Bank of Thailand, the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong’s Monetary Authority (HKMA), the People’s Bank of China, and BIS. Along with this, 20 commercial banks from those regions participated.

According to the post, more than $12 million worth of value was issued into the platform, facilitating over 160 international and foreign exchange transactions totaling more than $22 million.

Advisor and Solution Architect at the BIS, Daniel Eidan, reshared the post with the caption:

“Big news on the successful completion of the first CBDC pilot involving four jurisdictions and real-value transactions with over $12M in value issued onto the platform facilitating over 160 cross-border payments and FX transactions more than $22M in value between 20 participating commercial banks.”

Eidan expressed his gratitude to the teams from BIS, HKMA, Bank of Thailand, People’s Bank of China, and the Central Bank of the UAE for this achievement.

Lastly, Eidan stated that a detailed report would be released in October.

The platform mBridge is a part of the Inthanon-LionRock distributed ledger cross-border payment project that initially launched back in September 2019 with Thailand and Hong Kong central banks.

According to the brochure released by the BIS, the project has moved onto its third and final stage of the testing process before the full release.