Project Jura represents a collaborative effort involving multiple stakeholders, including Banque de France, the BIS Innovation Hub Swiss Centre, Swiss National Bank, and a private sector consortium.
The project focused on exploring cross-border settlement using wCBDCs denominated in euros and Swiss francs, along with a tokenized French financial instrument hosted on a third-party DLT-based platform. The primary objective was to facilitate payment-versus-payment (PvP) and delivery-versus-payment (DvP) settlements between French and Swiss banks while investigating ways to extend the safety and security of central bank-backed money across international borders.
This experiment introduced a novel architecture that may instill confidence in central banks to issue wCBDCs on foreign third-party platforms and grant non-resident financial institutions access to wCBDCs. By enabling various wCBDCs to coexist on a single platform, it allows for direct cross-border payments between financial institutions. Furthermore, the inclusion of other tokenized assets creates fresh opportunities for cross-border settlement involving FX, securities, and other financial instruments.
Importantly, this experiment was conducted in a near-real environment, involving real-value transactions and strict adherence to prevailing regulatory requirements.
Corda, developed by R3, was selected as the underlying permissioned DLT technical platform for the SDX (SIX Digital Exchange, a licensed exchange and CSD for tokenized assets) platform and the DAR (Digital Asset Registry, a new DLT-based registry for tokenized commercial papers issued under French law). Corda operates on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computer nodes and follows a need-to-know principle, with data shared exclusively among transaction counterparties.
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