Today the Swiss National Bank (SNB) announced it is extending Project Helvetia III, its wholesale central bank digital currency (wholesale CBDC) pilot, for ‘at least’ two years. Since December 2023, six digital bond issuances totaling CHF 750 million ($842m) used the SNB’s digital Swiss Franc for settlement on the SIX Digital Exchange (SDX). The pilot was due to end later this month. “Project Helvetia III has been very successful to date,” the central bank said.
The SNB also made a groundbreaking announcement about executing a world-first in monetary policy operations. Earlier this month, it issued CHF 64 million in SNB Bills on the SDX DLT platform. These bills had a one-week maturity. This follows several other world firsts for SDX. They include the first regulated DLT exchange and central securities depository (CSD), the first integration between a DLT CSD and a conventional CSD (SIX SIS), and the first production wholesale CBDC transactions.
Around the same time, the World Bank issued a CHF 200 million bond. Additionally, UBS issued a second digital bond of CHF 150 million, following its first SDX digital bond of CHF 375m in 2022. With this month’s activity, the total issuances on the SDX platform have passed the CHF 1.3 billion ($1.5bn) mark.
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