Banque de France, France’s central bank, has announced that it has successfully completed a central bank digital currency experiment involving the settlement of listed securities with Switzerland’s SEBA Bank, an institutional grade digital asset banking platform.
Fast facts:
- Banque de France and SEBA Bank, Banque Internationale à Luxembourg and central securities depository service LuxCSD conducted delivery vs. payment of a listed security with the Eurosystem’s settlement platform, TARGET2-Securities, in a test environment, with CBDC tokens issued by Banque de France. “The confidentiality of transactions was achieved through a protocol that makes use of zero-knowledge proofs in order to encrypt and obscure the values of the CBDC transactions over a public blockchain,” SEBA Bank said in a statement.
- The experiment in clearing and settlement of tokenized financial assets was conducted as part of Banque de France’s broader exploration of potential uses of CBDCs.
- “This experiment made it possible to demonstrate the possibilities of interaction between conventional and distributed infrastructures,” said Nathalie Aufauvre, general director of financial stability and operations at Banque de France. “It also paves the way for other alliances in order to benefit from the opportunities offered by financial assets in a blockchain environment.”
- Banque de France is also working on Project Jura, a wholesale CBDC for cross-border settlements in collaboration with Swiss National Bank and the Bank for International Settlements, together with a private sector consortium led by Accenture.