Central Banks Conduct Joint Experiment to Enhance Retail Digital Currency Payments

The outcomes of a cooperative experiment carried out by central banks with the goal of increasing retail digital currency payments have recently been made public in a report. The experiment, which was run by the Bank for International Settlements’ (BIS) and Bank of England’s) London Innovation Hub, concentrated on creating application programming interface (API) functions to explore various use cases for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), including offline payments. The main conclusions and ramifications of this innovative project are examined in this essay.

The collaborative venture, known as “Project Rosalind,” looked at how an API layer would support retail CBDCs and make it possible to make payments securely and conveniently in a variety of situations. The importance of this API-based strategy to enable secure and effective digital currency transactions was stressed by Francesca Hopwood Road, Head of the BIS Innovation Hub London Center.

Bank of England’s Consultation on Digital Pound

In collaboration with Project Rosalind, the Bank of England is now doing public consultations on the implementation of a digital pound. As part of its framework proposal, the bank aims to host the central ledger and API for a hypothetical digital currency. Through this API, the ledger would be accessible to private sector companies, enabling them to provide services like automated payments.

Hopwood Road said, “One use case that Rosalind was employed for was a child-parent wallet, and looking at how payments could be made in that kind of scenario – responsible spending, how parents can allocate pocket money to children, how that money could then be spent in different locations and all those different things.” 

The trial covered a broad range of payment methods, including online, off-line, and in-store transactions made with smart cards, mobile phones, and QR codes. The research also investigated micropayments and even looked at a parent-child wallet situation to evaluate how money may be shared and used appropriately. The results demonstrated the API layer’s adaptability and agility in supporting various ledger systems and payment mechanisms.

Promising Results and Continued CBDC Exploration

The study showed that the API layer worked with several ledger systems, showing that it had the potential to be widely used. The BIS seeks to add significant knowledge to the ongoing global discussion surrounding CBDCs by building on the achievements of earlier initiatives like Project Meridian, which investigated distributed ledger technology for interbank transactions. The BIS understands the significance of looking into many aspects like cross-border functioning, offline capabilities, and security measures as more governments consider the issuing of CBDCs.

Hopwood Road said, “I think if you look across the range of experiments that we have done in the Innovation Hub, increasingly in the CBDC space, whether it’s wholesale or retail, we are experimenting and exploring different dimensions, [such as] cross border, offline, security.”