Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are one potential avenue to reduce the cost and delays of cross border payments. There have been several multi-CBDC initiatives, but all have focused on interbank or wholesale CBDC. Today Sveriges Riksbank, the Bank of Israel and Norges Bank launched Project Icebreaker, which aims to interlink the test retail CBDC platforms of each central bank.
“By interlinking our current e-krona platform, developed in a test environment, with the other countries we gain valuable lessons regarding cross-border payments using a CBDC,” said Mithra Sundberg, Head of the E-krona Division at Sweden’s Riskbank. “We also gain better understanding of important design and policy choices needed to secure cross-border functionalities if we decide to issue an e-krona.”
Project Icebreaker intends to enable instant retail CBDC international payments without using the correspondent banking system. Technology, architecture and design choices will be explored alongside policy issues. The experiments will run until the end of this year in association with the new Nordic BIS Innovation Hub.
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