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The Swiss National Bank successfully trials wholesale digital currency.

Swiss bank Bordier & Cie said it had joined forces with B2B digital assets banking platform Sygnum to enable its customers to
Swiss bank Bordier & Cie said it had joined forces with B2B digital assets banking platform Sygnum to enable its customers to own cryptocurrencies.

According to the Reuters report, the Swiss National Bank has successfully tested using digital money to settle large scale transactions between financial institutions, the bank revealed on Thursday. But it has not decided whether to issue its own digital currency. The experiment, known as Project Helvetia, was run by the Swiss National Bank (SNB) with Swiss bourse operator SIX and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). The central bank looked at using CBDCs for wholesale transactions between financial institutions to make trading assets on a planned SIX exchange that will specialize in digital versions of conventional assets more efficiently.

The Swiss Central Bank has been skeptical about digital currencies.

The Swiss National Bank has been skeptical about digital currencies like Facebook’s Diem project, formerly known as Libra, saying they could undermine its ability to conduct monetary policy and achieve its goal of price stability. The central bank’s governing board member Andrea Maechler said the project showed wholesale CBDCs were feasible from a technical and legal viewpoint. However, the outcome did not mean the central bank was committed to issuing one.

Central banks across the world have been ramping up research on CBDCs.

Central banks worldwide have been ramping up research into their own digital currencies after Facebook last year unveiled plans for Diem, then known as Libra. Most of the work has been into retail digital currencies, which individuals could use to buy products and send money, an area not covered in the Swiss project. The Swiss central bank was among seven central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, to lay out in October how a digital currency could look. Central banks across countries are actively working on CDBCs. The People’s Bank of China is all set to roll out the national digital currency soon.

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