Phase 1
Year:
March — June 2016
Focus Area:
Explore the use of DLT for the settlement of high-value interbank payments.
Overview:
In 2016, Bank of Canada in collaboration with the Payments Canada, the financial innovation firm R3 Lab and Research Centre, CIBC, TD, Scotiabank, Bank of Montreal, RBC, National Bank and HSBC came together to explore DLT which concluded with four phases, and included cross-border testing. The project was named Jasper.
Project Jasper is a proof of concept of a DLT-based wholesale payment system. The experiment provided significant insights into the relative strengths and weaknesses of using DLT for financial market infrastructures.
The Phase 1 system is built on the Ethereum platform, which uses a PoW consensus protocol. Jasper used a version that shared the ledger among R3 members only.
The project team conducted an assessment of the new platform, comparing it to internationally recognized standards for systemically important payments infrastructure. While the platform demonstrated compliance with several standards, there were identified gaps in certain areas. These included concerns regarding the finality of asset ownership, specifically pertaining to the legal certainty that assets belong to a financial institution without the possibility of reversal. Additionally, there were areas of concern regarding operational risk, as well as access and participation requirements.
The conclusion was that the DLT platforms that employ a “proof-of-work” consensus protocol do not deliver the necessary settlement finality and low operational risk expected of core settlement systems.
Source:
https://payments.ca/insights/research/project-jasper-primer
Phase 2
Year:
December 2016 — April 2017
Focus Area:
Explore alternate DLT for the settlement of high-value interbank payments.
Overview:
Phase 2 involved rebuilding the platform using an alternative form of DLT ( consensus on the basis of a “notary node”) to further test the efficiency of this technology for the clearing and settlement of high-value interbank payments. In addition to atomic settlement, the platform included a liquidity-saving mechanism (LSM) that supported netting of payments.
The phase 2 of Project Jasper was built on R3 Corda platform.
Source:
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/research/digital-currencies-and-fintech/projects/#project-jasper
Phase 3
Year:
2018
Focus Area:
Explore the potential benefits from integrating the “cash on ledger” with other assets, such as foreign exchange and securities.
Overview:
Jasper 3 was commissioned by Payments Canada, TMX Group, and the Bank of Canada in collaboration with delivery partners Accenture and R3. It focused on a POC for a DLT-based integrated securities infrastructure providing delivery vs. payment (DVP) settlement to help re-imagine the payment exchange process of CDSX — Canada’s clearing and settlement system for securities.
It was hypothesized that this implementation would improve technical, operational, cash and collateral efficiencies. The Jasper Phase 3 POC solution was built on a corda peer-to-peer DLT network using open source Corda V2.0.
Source:
https://payments.ca/sites/default/files/2022-09/jasper_phase_iii_whitepaper_EN.pdf
Phase 4
Year:
2016
Focus Area:
Enabling Cross-Border High Value Transfer Using Distributed Ledger Technologies
Overview:
In collaboration with Payments Canada, the Bank of Canada joined forces with the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Bank of England to develop a cross-border, cross-currency settlement system. This partnership merges the efforts of Project Jasper and Singapore’s Project Ubin, with the aim of utilizing distributed ledger technology (DLT) to enhance the speed and cost-effectiveness of cross-border payments.
The team successfully demonstrated a cross-border, cross-currency, cross platform atomic transaction without the need for a third party that is trusted by both jurisdictions.
Source: