The Bank of France and the Swiss National Bank are starting a joint cross-border central bank digital currency (CBDC) experiment dubbed “Project Jura.” It will focus on the bank-to-bank wholesale lending market, not public transactions.
- In an announcement Thursday, the Swiss National Bank said it will work with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub and a “private sector consortium” led by Accenture, to experiment with wholesale CBDCs for cross-border settlement.
- The private sector consortium of companies includes the Swiss investment bank Credit Suisse, Natixis, R3, SIX Digital Exchange, and UBS.
- The Swiss National Bank said it has already been investigating tokenized assets with wholesale CBDC.
- Project Jura will experiment with cross-border settlements of two wholesale CBDCs and a French digital financial instrument on a distributed ledger technology platform.
- The transaction will involve the exchange of the financial instrument against a euro wholesale CBDC through a delivery (rather than payment) settlement mechanism, and the exchange of a euro wholesale CBDC against a Swiss franc wholesale CBDC through a payment versus payment settlement mechanism, said the Swiss National Bank.
- The transactions will be settled between banks domiciled in France and in Switzerland.
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