The Swiss National Bank (SNB) has completed testing of wholesale CBDC (wCBDC). Board member Thomas Moser told CoinDesk in an interview CoinDesk that a technical rollout could take place in January 2022, provided there is a policy decision.
If approved, the regulator would deploy SIX Digital Exchange (SDX).
“Technically, we will be ready. We have accounted for all details. We set up end-to-end connectivity and understood how this would be reflected on the balance sheet and how to conduct operations. The question is only whether we can operate with wCBDC legally,” said the official.
The experiment under the Helvetia project, with the support of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), started in 2019.
In December 2020, its participants reported success in testing CBDC for settlement of tokenised assets. The legal and technical feasibility of transferring them was studied.
To date, Phase II of the Helvetia project has been completed. It involved integrating wCBDC into the infrastructures of five banks. The publication noted that earlier participants included Citibank, JPMorgan, and Credit Suisse.
The missing link in the scheme were the necessary FINMA licenses to operate SDX. In September, the platform obtained them. The first real transactions will be conducted in November. A report on the results of the second phase will be published in January.
The combination of digital cash and distributed ledger (SDX uses Corda from R3) enables Atomic swaps.
“Everyone complains about slow T+1 and T+2, but they give banks time. Atomic swaps will complicate liquidity management, forcing financial institutions to seek answers to questions about costs and benefits,” commented Moser.
The official noted that the regulator prefers CBDCs to stablecoins.
“In stablecoins you always have counterparty risk to the issuer. If SDX becomes a systemically important organisation, the question will arise as to whether to deploy wCBDC instead of a private version of money,” he explained.
Earlier, SNB chief economist Carlos Lenz in June doubted the need for a digital franc.
Previously the Swiss government found no advantages from issuing a retail CBDC, but recognised some benefits from its wholesale variant. The SNB shared this stance.
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