The Banque de France has completed the next stage of CBDC testing, which more than 500 major financial institutions attended.
The next stage of CBDC testing by the Banque de France has been completed. In 10 months, more than 500 transactions on the securities market were carried out. In particular, the digital currency was used in issuing new bonds, entering into repurchase agreements and redeeming deals, The Financial Times reported.
The trial was led by the Belgian financial company Euroclear with the help of IBM software. In addition, the test was conducted with the participation of the French public debt office and more than 500 major financial institutions, including BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole CIB, HSBC and Société Générale, among others.
CBDCs were used in a series of bond transactions and securities trading. Based on the experiment results, Isabelle Delorme, chief executive of Euroclear France, stated that CBDCs allow such transactions “safely and securely”. Soren Mortensen, global director of financial markets at IBM, emphasized that the CBDC has eliminated the need for coordination between market intermediaries. In his opinion, the introduction of CBDCs will lead to fundamental changes in the post-trade market infrastructure.
We recall that this is not the first CBDC experiment in France. The Banque de France launched an active study of digital currency in March 2020. Since then, several experiments have been implemented, including:
- The placement of tokenized shares worth more than €2 million. It was placed on an exchange fund on the blockchain of the British company SETL from December 2020 to January 2021.
- Using CBDCs in cross-border settlements with the Swiss National Bank and the BIS Innovation Hub in June 2021.
- Simulating the processing and distribution of listed securities in collaboration with SEBA, a Swiss cryptocurrency bank, in June 2021.
- The experiment simulated cross-border transactions for Singapore Dollars (SGD) and Euro (EUR) in the CBDC form in a shared network between the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Banque de France in July 2021.
