Hong Kong’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) project with three other central banks and the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) has completed its pilot, an advisor from the BIS and a specialist from Thailand’s central bank said on Tuesday.
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Fast facts
- The mBridge pilot saw 20 commercial banks in four participating jurisdictions conduct over 160 cross-border real-value payments and transactions worth over US$22 million, BIS advisor Daniel Eidan said in a LinkedIn post.
- Tayo Tunyathon K., a senior specialist of Bank of Thailand who works on the country’s CBDC projects, also announced in a Tuesday social media post that the pilot had been completed.
- The mBridge, or mCBDC, is a collaborative CBDC project between the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) and the central banks of Thailand, China, the United Arab Emirates and the BIS to enhance multi-currency cross-border payments.
- The mBridge pilot project was designed to help different architecture components “scale to more participants and to a production volume of transaction,” the BIS said in the June report.
- The HKMA, Hong Kong’s de-facto central bank, said last week it would likely take at least two or three years to build the wholesale system for the city’s CBDC.
- The BIS will publish a detailed report on the project in October, according to Eidan.
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