The Banque de France intends to speed up its wholesale CBDC program as it looks to be ready to introduce central bank money as a settlement asset as early as next year.
According to Finextra, the French central bank has worked with the private sector over the past year to carry out nine experiments that have helped show how a CBDC can be used for wholesale payments, including cross-border and cross-currency payments and securities settlement.
The bank has already built its own DLT technology alongside an automated market maker platform, which could potentially serve as the basis of a multi-CBDC platform where different central banks come together to enable fast, automated and transparent asettlement across currencies.
Banque de France governor François Villeroy de Galhau said, “We want to get closer to a viable prototype, testing it in practice with more private actors and more foreign central banks in the second half of 2022 and in 2023.
“This work ensures that we stand ready to bring central bank money as a settlement asset as early as 2023, with the implementation of the European pilot regime. This pilot regime will offer a regulatory framework to support the financial asset tokenisation trend.”
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