The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has announced the winners of the Global Central Bank Digital Currency Challenge (Global CBDC Challenge) at the Fintech Awards Ceremony of the Singapore Fintech Festival (SFF).
Selected from 15 finalists, the three top winners each received a cash prize of S$50,000.
The challenge was held in partnership with the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, United Nations Capital Development Fund, United Nations High Commission for Refugees, United Nations Development Programme, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
The challenge concludes the first phase of MAS’ study to explore possible retail CBDC solutions and will be followed by Project Orchid.
The project is the next phase which will build on the findings from this challenge, aiming to establish the technology infrastructure and capabilities needed to build a retail CBDC system.
Through Project Orchid, MAS will partner financial institutions to study how a retail CBDC can be implemented in Singapore and this can help lay the foundation for future decisions on retail CBDC issuance.
Sopnendu Mohanty
Sopnendu Mohanty, Chief Fintech Officer, MAS, said,
“We congratulate the winners of the Global CBDC Challenge and all finalists who have demonstrated the potential of retail CBDC solutions to unlock new use cases with programmable money and create pathways to broader financial access.
We would also like to thank the judges and partners of this global challenge for the joint collaboration to discover and develop innovative retail CBDC solutions.”
Winners of the Global CBDC Challenge:
ConsenSys
Other Participating Organisation: Visa
Solution Name: CBDCgo – digital currency, seamless acceptance
Solution Description:
ConsenSys and Visa are partnering to build a Visa Retail CBDC Payment module supported by the ConsenSys Blockchain Infrastructure to demonstrate the concept of how a retail CBDC solution can cater for widespread and frictionless use.
Criteo
Other Participating Organisations: Secretarium and Intel Corporation
Solution Name: The Atomic CBDC Solution
Solution Description:
Using Secretarium’s Secure-enclave Distributed Ledger Technology (SDLT) leveraging Intel SGX Chip for the secure enclaves, the solution aims to provide a high-performance DLT that is suited for highly secretive financial transactions, ultra large scale CBDCs.
Compared to traditional DLT, SDLT allows for transactions to be committed and encrypted in memory on chain or in ledger.
Giesecke+Devrient advance52
Solution Name: G+D Filia
Solution Description:
G+D Filia solution is a token-based digital currency resembling cash, enhanced with smart features and without the friction of physical money.
It has been designed from the very beginning to allow for consecutive offline payments.
Filia works both on smartphones and hardware wallets, can provide full privacy at the payment layer and supports programmable use cases.
To achieve that, a different approach from the standard DLT platforms were taken.
They do not record account balances or transaction metadata on a blockchain, but only the validity of a particular token together with its denomination.
