Today the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) announced winners of the 2023 G20 Techsprint are Secretarium, Millicent Labs and Knox Networks.
Secretarium won the award for AML, CFT and sanctions solutions. The UK company uses confidential computing combined with DLT to conduct screening while maintaining some level of privacy.
Other finalists for this use case included:
- Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLIEF)
- Global Screening Services (GSS)
- Mastercard Technology Private
- Monetago
- PayGlocal
- United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF)
The second problem statement – where Millicent was the winner – aimed to provide FX and liquidity technology solutions to enable settlement in emerging market and developing economy (EMDE) currencies.
UK-based Millicent provided a hybrid decentralised exchange for CBDC. It combined automated market makers (AMM) and traditional order books. Typically, public blockchain automated market makers don’t use order books. Instead, they use liquidity pools and (crude) algorithms. The main rationale for not using order books on public blockchains is the high cost of gas fees.
The other finalists for this category were:
- Ajna
- Baton Systems
- Dian Nofitri
- Groww
- Partior
- Uniswap Labs
Knox Networks was the winner for the technology solution for multilateral cross-border CBDC platforms. It has a concept of File-Based Digital Assets (FBDA) where you can imagine a ten dollar coin being a file.
It does not use blockchain. In fact, it sort of turns blockchain on its head. Rather than duplicating blocks containing transactions across the entire network, every file or coin contains the blocks of transactions for that particular coin. This addresses the scalability issues that can be a challenge with DLT. But unlike a DLT it explicitly relies on trusted entities to validate that coins have not been double spent.
The other finalists for this use case were:
- Currency Network
- FortisNet
- Kevin Zhang
- Parfin
- Giesecke+Devrient
- Zerone Microsystems
