The Italian Banking Association (ABI) has 18 members participating in a wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) trial with the Bank of Italy, Project Leonidas. It is one of 14 projects that the central bank selected for DLT experiments. The CBDC trial comes as the ECB has announced plans to experiment with new technologies for wholesale payments without mentioning wholesale CBDC.
There is some uncertainty about whether the ECB exploration will use a DLT-based CBDC as favored by the ABI, or link a DLT to conventional central bank payments (trigger solution), or both.
The ABI has an exceptional track record when it comes to DLT. It has a blockchain project, Spunta, that has been in production for three years and includes around a hundred banks. Using a shared ledger for interbank payment reconciliations radically reduces the number of interbank queries and allows the process to happen nightly instead of monthly.
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