The Bank for International Settlements and the central banks of Hong Kong and Israel released the results of Project Sela on Sept. 12. The project was a public-private partnership that used private intermediaries to create a retail central bank digital currency (rCBDC) combining the desirable characteristics of cash and the advantages of digitalization.
The project leveraged the central banks’ diverse experience to incorporate a number of predefined policy, security, technology and legal features. The private participants were fintechs FIS and M10 Networks, which provided core products, Clifford Chance for legal analysis and Check Point Software Technologies (NASDAQ:CHKP) for cyber security. The project was a proof-of-concept.