CBDC News

HKMA First to Work with the ECB on Wholesale CBDCs

Both the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) and the European Central Bank (ECB) are working on wholesale CBDC infrastructure.

The Banque de France (BdF) has a system called DL3S2 and HKMA its Ensemble Sandbox. Ensemble focuses on tokenised deposits issued by commercial banks and made available to the public. HKMA wants to research and test settlement of tokenised real world assets such as green bonds, carbon credits, aircraft, electronic bills of lading, treasury management etc.

The plan is that they will explore real-time cross-border and crosscurrency payments between financial market infrastructures.

HKMA and BdF will test different use cases for payment versus payment between the tokenised form of the Hong Kong dollar and the euro.