Austria’s central bank, Oesterreichische Nationalbank (OeNB) is starting to work on the second phase of its wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) Project Delphi. The first phase focused on simulating delivery versus payment for an Austrian Treasury Bond issued on a blockchain and settled by commercial banks on the same platform using CBDC. The second phase will explore more advanced functionality, business models as well as non-fungible tokens and DeFi.
Johannes Duong from the OeNB was keen to emphasize that the project is purely a national simulation for research, with no plans to launch a wholesale CBDC and independent of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) retail digital Euro initiative. He was talking during a video conference from the Digital Euro Association, a German private sector think tank.
In the first phase of Project Delphi, the participants included the Austrian Treasury (OeBFA), the national central security depository OeKB CSD, Raiffeisen Bank, and Erste Group Bank. The project commenced in October 2020 and ran through to June this year. It’s now starting to work on the second phase planned for 2022.
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