The working group for Germany’s Commercial Bank Money Tokens (CBMT) will unveil a tokenized deposit sandbox on Wednesday. Last year the German Banking Industry Committee acted as coordinators for proofs of concept involving five banks (DZ Bank, Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, Unicredit and Helaba) and five enterprises (Airplus, BASF, Evonik, Mercedes Benz and Siemens). This year’s sandbox involves the same banks and a few more enterprises, but the group is still tightknit in order to keep focus. The ultimate aim is to create a multi-issuer, multi-chain, multi-currency ecosystem.
The CBMT Sandbox is not another PoC iteration. It will involve pre-production trials. That’s subject to regulators agreeing to launch, with discussions in progress. Assuming it graduates to production, this could be the first consortium to go live in order to make deposits available on blockchain. There are plenty of live production tokenized deposit initiatives from individual banks, including consortium members such as Deutsche Bank. Beyond individual banks, Cambodia’s Bakong is a multi-bank tokenized deposit solution run by the central bank, rather than a CBDC solution. But no consortium has gone live so far.
“CBMT combines the positive characteristics of commercial bank money with the innovative potential of DLTs, while also being compatible with the emerging infrastructures we see here today” said Claus George, Head of Digitalization and Innovation TxB at DZ BANK AG.
For the sandbox phase, CBMT has assembled previously announced technical services providers who will help with onboarding, integration and interoperability: Giesecke+Devrient (G+D), GFT Technologies and the Universal Digital Payments Network (UDPN). A new member of the group is Oracle which will provide the blockchain ledger.
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