More than a year has passed since the Bank of Spain called for bids for the Wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency (Wholesale CBDC) pilot. On Wednesday, the company announced the award of two projects. Fnality’s technology partner Adhara has been awarded a contract to provide wholesale CBDC infrastructure. And a consortium involving Cecabank and Abanca plans to pilot a wholesale CBDC for securities settlement.
Additionally, Adhara offers a “digital interbank orchestration platform” which is interpreted as a tokenized deposit solution. Adhara is already developing such a service. The company’s CEO, Julio Faura, is Spanish and worked for Santander for 11 years. Adhara therefore has a subsidiary in Spain.
The Adhara project involves the issuance of two or more separate wholesale CBDCs and provision of wallets to participants for cross-border purposes. The project has designated English as a second language to enable sharing of results.
Cecabank – The Abanca consortium focuses on using wholesale CBDCs to settle tokenized securities on blockchain platforms. Therefore, a large-scale CBDC will be issued and distributed to participants of the blockchain platform. It is intended to enable atomic settlement or delivery-versus-payment (DvP) in bond issuance and secondary market transactions. Additionally, wholesale CBDC will be used to pay for coupons. It also plans to support cross-border transactions.
Both projects are simulations.
Apart from the digital euro trial
When the tenders were published in December 2022, the central bank emphasized that these were Spanish tests separate from the digital euro initiative. At that stage, the European Central Bank (ECB) was very focused on a retail digital euro. Banque de France had already conducted several large-scale CBDC trials.
However, since then, the ECB has launched a project to explore “new technologies for wholesale payments”. This primarily concerns the use of central bank funds to settle DLT securities transactions. This includes trials of three solutions, including a wholesale CBDC in France, a trigger solution in Germany, and an escrow service in Italy. Experiments using real money will begin next month.
Spain is considering aspects of DLT securities, but also appears to be considering tokenized deposits. Germany is the most advanced in this field in Europe.
This month, Ledger Insights will release a report on tokenized deposits that includes a map of projects. Sign up to receive release notifications.