Innovation Tagline: open-source wholesale cross-border CBDC platform
Project Keywords: #CBDC #Wholesale CBDC, #OpenSource
Project Members
1. Adam Retkes - CBDC Advisor
2. Daniel Szego - DLT Architect
3. Balázs Héder - Blockchain specialist and researcher
4. Mate Brezovszki - Digital currency and neobank expert
Prototype Outcomes
Pitch Deck pdf slides (in case of the ppt presentation glitches):
Pitch Deck ppt (containing demonstration video):
Technical and use-case demonstration video:
Project repository:
https://github.com/Daniel-Szego/Project-Juno-Moneta
Documentation of use-cases (version - first draft):
Project Juno Moneta - documentation of use-cases.pdf
Solution
Description
Our team is deeply committed to improving the financial infrastructure of countries, private and public organizations. Taking into consideration the opportunities of digital currencies, we firmly believe that cross-border wholesale central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) could provide the safest and most effective remedy to the existing pain points of international transactions. Typical use-cases like payment versus payment, or payment versus delivery provide solutions to cross-border and cross-national value exchange. Our initiative from the private sector could greatly contribute to the huge effort of central banks, the G20, and the Financial Stability Board in improving cross-border payments in an effective and safe manner, created in an open-source fashion having DLT as core technology.
The scope of the challenge is to have a first working prototype up and running. We would like to implement a typical wholesale cross-border CBDC use case, like payment versus payment with the help of Hyperledger Besu and solidity smart contracts. During the development phase, we focus on the functionalities of Besu, like transactional speed and privacy features without scaling much beyond its capabilities.
Our focus is on CBDCs but our solution is intended to provide an interoperable digital currency design that might be interchangeable with tokenized commercial bank money.
Competitive edge
Currently, an international wire transfer has to go through a chain of correspondent banks to reach the beneficiary. This correspondent banking system has not changed much in the last 50 years since the SWIFT system was introduced, it is obsolete, slow, expensive, and not transparent. Innovative cryptoassets can serve as international means of exchange, an alternative solution to the correspondent banking system's pain points, but they are not legal tender, therefore Project Juno Moneta focuses on cross-border wholesale CBDCs.
We believe that DLT is actually one of the fastest developed transactional technology on the planet. With Hyperledger Besu both the Ethereum and Hyperledger communities are combined in one direction. Besides, other initiatives also exist for open-source CBDC systems, like the recently published OpenCBDC platform from M.I.T. Since the project is open-source, the solution will be adjustable to all monetary authority's jurisdictional needs, which is unique in its nature.
Environmental and social impact
One of our use cases is having a sustainability aspect taken into consideration in which carbon and methane accounting is a functionality on the token level. We call it Green token and it incorporates a tracking mechanism for environmentally harmful operations, where currency tokens are held.
Project Juno Moneta - Community interactions
We already have shown our prototype solution to the Hyperlegder Community during the Cross-border CBDC, tokenization and DLT Hyperledger Meetup. Our team is dedicated to sharing its knowledge on financial market infrastructures and CBDCs, as it is our field of expertise. We have gained a lot of positive feedback from the audience. The online recording is available here:
Project Plan
05/2022 Prototype Phase (Hyperledger Challenge 2022)
- First working prototype
08/2022 Launch Phase (Hyperledger Challenge 2022)
- Prototype version for further use-cases, like Payment versus Payment, digitized commercial bank money
- Registering Hyperledger Lab
- Getting community traction
Q3/2022 Evaluation Phase
- Privacy evaluation
- Possible privacy extensions with private groups and cross-chain or in-chain swaps
- Performance evaluation and measurements
- Evaluation of use-case extensions
- Finding bank partner for launch
- Getting further community traction
- (further project plan might change based on the results of the evaluation phase)
Q4/2022 - Q1/2023 Extension phase
- Cross-border payment with embedded FX function
- Cross-chain Payment vs Delivery
- Green token issuance
- UI for further use cases
Q2/2023 Integration Phase
- System integration to live banking systems
- ISO20022 compatibility analysis and questions
Project potential and challenges
By sharing Project Juno Moneta on professional platforms and in articles, we would like to engage the open source community to contribute to the project. We find it important to share the potential of CBDCs in the next 10 years, as 90% of the central banks are engaging in the work of CBDCs in some form. There will be a huge demand for base solutions and skilled professionals to implement these systems.
In order to maintain and develop the project, commercial bank and central bank partnerships are needed, to gain valuable feedback on the system requirements and pilot the solution in a sandbox environment. IT security, regulatory, and governance consultation will be necessary to develop a viable system in a live environment. This domain knowledge must be improved within the team in the long run.