A pilot project involving central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) is being jointly conducted by the Bank of England (BoE) and the Bank of International Settlements (BIS).
Project Rosalind aims to explore the implementation of a “universal and extensible API layer” that can connect central bank and private sector infrastructures, facilitating retail CBDC payments. The initiative also seeks to develop various retail CBDC use cases.
According to the BIS and BoE, the project has successfully demonstrated that a well-designed API layer can integrate with different private sector applications and central bank ledger designs. It also showed that a set of simple and standardized API functionalities can support a wide array of use cases.
Throughout the project, 33 API functionalities were developed, and 30 retail CBDC cases were examined, including peer-to-peer transfers, retail payments for goods and services, and small-value business transactions.
“Active collaboration with the public and private sectors to identify and explore these use cases has been at the heart of this,” stated Francesca Hopwood Road, Head of the BIS Innovation Hub London Centre. “We believe that Rosalind can make a significant contribution to how organizations across the globe are considering and engaging with the design of retail CBDC systems.”