The Bank for International Settlements, or BIS, has reported it has concluded a project exploring international retail and remittance payments use cases for central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, with the central banks of Israel, Norway and Sweden.
In a March 6 report, the BIS said it had finished Project Icebreaker, an initiative involving the bank’s Innovation Hub Nordic Centre testing key functions and the technological feasibility of interlinking domestic CBDC systems through the Central Bank of Norway, the Bank of Israel, and Sveriges Riksbank. According to the report, the BIS concluded that a ‘hub-and-spoke’ model between domestic systems could “reduce settlement and counterparty risk by using coordinated payments in central bank money and complete cross-border transactions within seconds”.