Barclays awards Lloyds Bank first place in CBDC Hackathon
finextra.comNumerous private sector consortiums, central banks, and governments around the globe are debating the need and the potential that central bank digital currencies (CBDC) may bring to their society. The European Central Bank (ECB) and Bank of England (BoE) have dedicated working groups exploring the opportunities and risks at play, with several design choices drafted and published. Specifically, the Hackathon sought to address the potential risk of fragmentation in payments markets and retail deposits, unless interoperability between existing and new forms of money can be solved with this retail CBDC design. The Hackathon required participants to connect to Barclays’ simulation of a central bank, Payment Interface Providers (PIPs), commercial banks, and other ecosystem services. This simulation was based on the Bank of England’s (BoE) platform model for retail UK CBDC provision. The teams represented a range of players, including IBM, Lloyds Banking Group, Mastercard, Industria, REGnosys, Rethink Ledgers, UST, SDK.finance, and Barclays (Barclays was not eligible for a place).
Working with a variety of technologies to bring their solution to life, such as Corda, Ethereum, Java, Digital Asset Modelling Language (DAML) and others, the teams were asked to complete the following challenges:
Challenge 1: Deposit physical cash into a CBDC account Challenge 2: Transfer value between two CBDC accounts Challenge 3: Transfer value from a CBDC account to a commercial bank account Challenge 4: Pay at merchant website using CBDC Challenge 5: Crowdfunding via multiple debits and a single creditThe sixth ‘stretch challenge’ encouraged participants to demonstrate more novel or creative functionality within their solution. Lloyds Banking
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