China’s rapid-fire progress with its digital yuan CBDC, spurred rival nations into action. However, it turns out that some of them – like Banque de France – have been carrying out research projects or even CBDC pilots for months. Now, the latest to join this group was Australia.
Aussie CBDC under the microscope
Australia’s CBDC research project, named Project Atom, claimed a “successful conclusion” in a report by The Reserve Bank of Australia, Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank, Perpetual, ConsenSys, and King & Wood Mallesons.
According to the report, Project Atom is a CBDC using distributed ledger technology [DLT] and is based on Ethereum. Furthermore, spanning between 2020 and 2021, the project studied funding, settlement, and tokenized syndicated loan repayment use cases.
Coming to a range of eligible CBDC users, the report noted,
“The POC [proof-of-concept] explored a two-tier model for the issuance and distribution of the wholesale CBDC whereby the RBA would issue CBDC to commercial banks, and then banks could make the CBDC available to eligible wholesale market participants that they sponsor onto the platform.”
The report further revealed that past CBDC experiments took place in 2018. This was also on Ethereum.
It’s also important to remember that Australia is a member of the Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub’s Project Dunbar, which is working on prototypes for international payments using multiple CBDCs.
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