The BIS Innovation Hub released a report on Project Promissa, a proof of concept that explored tokenizing promissory notes. The main participants in the project were the Swiss center of the BIS Innovation Hub, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) and the World Bank, with the IMF observing.
While promissory notes are an old and pretty broad type of IOU, the context of the experiment was promissory notes issued by government ministries of finance to multilateral development banks, such as the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank. In other words, a Ministry of Finance will issue a promissory note promising to fund the World Bank according to a schedule.
Today those promissory notes are paper-based, signed with wet signatures, couriered between countries and held in vaults at central banks. As funds are released, the ministry and development bank each hold their own records that have to be kept in sync by sending messages between them.
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