Reserve Bank of Australia announced it is working on a collaborative project to explore the potential use and implications of a wholesale form of central bank digital currency (CBDC) using distributed ledger technology. The project will be delivered in the coming months in collaboration with Commonwealth Bank of Australia, National Australia Bank, Australia-based financial services firm Perpetual, and ConsenSys.
The Reserve Bank of Australia issued the following statement regarding the project:
The project will involve the development of a proof-of-concept (POC) for the issuance of a tokenised form of CBDC that can be used by wholesale market participants for the funding, settlement, and repayment of a tokenised syndicated loan on an Ethereum-based DLT platform. The POC will be used to explore the implications of ‘atomic’ delivery-versus-payment settlement on a DLT platform as well as other potential programmability and automation features of tokenised CBDC and financial assets.
Assistant Governor (Financial System) Michele Bullock said, “With this project, we are aiming to explore the implications of a CBDC for efficiency, risk management, and innovation in wholesale financial market transactions. While the case for the use of a CBDC in these markets remains an open question, we are pleased to be collaborating with industry partners to explore if there is a future role for a wholesale CBDC in the Australian payments system”.
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The project is expected to be completed around the end of 2020 and the parties intend to publish a report on the project and its main findings during the first half of 2021.
ConsenSys will lead the implementation of this transformational industry project by leveraging its technical expertise and its digital assets product stack, comprising ConsenSys Quorum, Codefi Assets, and Codefi Orchestrate. Claudio Lisco, Director of ConsenSys Australia stated: “We believe that the interoperation of digital assets and CBDCs will be a fundamental building block of the next generation of financial market infrastructure. We are looking forward to collaborating with the RBA, CBA, NAB and Perpetual to experiment with these transformational capabilities and unlocking learnings for the wider industry”.
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