On 17 June the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) wrote on twitter:

Coming soon: the BIS Annual Economic Report 2023 will explore combining money, assets and information on a common programmable platform – a #UnifiedLedger. Special chapter pre-released on 20 June at 13:00 CEST #BISAnnualEconReport https://t.co/8VYVLZthqD pic.twitter.com/HN5yHoQ2fU

— Bank for International Settlements (@BIS_org) June 17, 2023

What does “combining money, assets and information on a common programmable platform” mean? I will have to wait untill tomorrow (pre-release) to find out more. It however looks like it is about open finance and central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Apparently – according to the video in the twitter post – smart contracts are playing a role, ‘benefiting consumers’, the alibi always used for financial surveillance proposals.

On this page BiS’ Annual Economic Report 2023 is announced, including a special chapter on CBDC:

The Annual Economic Report 2023, to be released on 25 June, will discuss the challenges facing central banks and the risks to financial stability during the final and most difficult phase of the fight against inflation. The Report discusses the role of fiscal and macroprudential policies and calls for monetary and fiscal policy to work in a coherent way to ensure stability in the long run.

A special chapter, to be released on 20 June, lays out a blueprint for the future monetary system underpinned by central bank digital currency, thus opening up a new era in the joint development of the monetary system and the economy.

It shows what the international financial world is heading for.

More information:

BIS is working on digital finance and CBDC, through a lot of projects. One of the main activities called BIS Innovation Hub, with a lot of projects that mostly are about CBDC, e.g.:

• Project Rosalind: developing prototypes for an application programming interface to distribute retail CBDC.
• Project Leap: Quantum-proofing the financial system.
• Project Polaris: secure and resilient CBDC systems, offline and online.
• Project Meridian: innovating transactions with synchronisation.
• Project Mariana: CBDCs in automated market-makers.
• Project Atlas: Mapping the world of decentralised finance.
• Project Nexus: enabling instant cross-border payments.
• Project Icebreaker concludes experiment for a new architecture for cross-border retail CBDCs.
• Project Sela to test a cyber-secure retail CBDC architecture that reduces the financial exposure of intermediaries.
• Project Tourbillon explores cyber resiliency, scalability and privacy in a prototype CBDC.
• Project mBridge: Connecting economies through CBDC
• Project Dunbar: international settlements using multi-CBDCs.

Other BIS-projects:

• Aurum: “Aurum is a retail CBDC technology prototype, comprised of a wholesale interbank system and a retail e-wallet system, setting up two different types of tokens: intermediated CBDC and stablecoins backed by CBDC in the interbank system. While intermediated CBDC is a direct liability of the central bank, CBDC-backed stablecoins are liabilities of the issuing bank, with its backing assets held by the central bank. The prototype is designed under the principles of safety, flexibility and privacy“
• Ellipse: “Ellipse is a prototype of an integrated regulatory data and analytics platform that combines both structured and unstructured sources of data that are relevant in real time and to current events. Advanced analytics are applied to those integrated data sources to provide supervisors with early warning indicators, analytics and prudential metrics. It is powered using the Data and Knowledge Platform (DKP), which is being developed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore“.
• SDMX/FMR: “The FMR enables organisations to ‘get a grip of their metadata’, by externalising their statistical structural metadata with the benefits of maintainability, re-use, standardisation, harmonisation and improved metadata and data governance“.

Addition 21 June 2023
Yesterday the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) announced a blueprint for the future monetary and financial system, that will include programmable central bank money. Read the press release on the special chapter of BIS’ Annual Economic Report 2023.