First Central Bank Digital Currency experiment to settle French government bonds🍀

First Central Bank Digital Currency experiment to settle French government bonds🍀
A consortium of institutions led by Euroclear have successfully experimented central bank digital currency (CBDC) for settling French treasury bonds on a test blockchain. The experiment, commissioned by the Banque de France included Agence France Trésor, BNP Paribas CIB, Crédit Agricole CIB, HSBC, Societe Generale. IBM provided Euroclear with design expertise and all platform features, including advanced privacy-preserving tokens and hybrid cloud capabilities.

The objective of the experiment was to assess if a wide range of operations and functionalities can be run on a blockchain platform and identify, from a user point of view, the added value of blockchain technology. The full scope of the experiment covered a large range of core securities settlement operations including securities issuance, primary market and secondary market trades, liquidity optimisation mechanisms like repo and interest payments. The experiment also demonstrated that a blockchain platform can coexist and interoperate with existing market infrastructure.