Last week the Swiss National Bank (SNB) outlined its Swiss payments vision. The central bank has already conducted various wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) tests. Now it plans to issue a real wholesale CBDC on the SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) for a limited time. It is also exploring a private token backed by central bank reserves as a potential solution for settling financial transactions. While this sounds similar to a stablecoin, the central bank did not use that term.
The planned wholesale CBDC pilot is the latest iteration of Project Helvetia. This involves SDX, the Swiss regulated DLT-based exchange and central securities depository (CSD), and in the second iteration, five banks participated: Citi, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Hypothekarbank Lenzburg and UBS.
For settlement, Helvetia initially explored integration with the main Swiss real time gross settlement (RTGS) system SIC, which also happens to be operated by the SIX group. But the trials were then expanded to include a wholesale CBDC on the test version of SDX as the settlement asset for tokenized securities transactions.
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