Central Bank of France and Switzerland Runs Cross-Border CBDC Trial in 'Project Jura'

The Banque de France and the Swiss National Bank are working with a private sector consortium for the trial of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in a project dubbed Jura. The two central banks are collaborating with BIS Innovation Hub along with a group of partners, including Accenture, Credit Suisse, R3, SIX Digital Exchange, UBS, and Natixis, for the CBDC-based cross-border payments model for transactions in the wholesale markets. Through this initiative, the banks aim to explore the potential benefits and challenges of wCBDC in settling cross-border payments and digital financial instruments. “It is essential for central banks to stay on top of technological developments,” said Andréa M Maechler, member of the governing board at Swiss National Bank. The central bank is already working on the settlement of tokenized assets with wCBDC as part of “Project Helvetia.” This experiment will be exploring cross-border settlement with digital euro and digital Swiss franc and a French digital financial instrument on a distributed ledger technology platform. It will involve the exchange of the financial instrument against a euro wCBDC through a delivery versus payment (DvP) settlement mechanism and the exchange of a euro wCBDC against a Swiss franc wCBDC through a payment versus payment (PvP) settlement mechanism. The transactions will be settled between banks housed in France and in Switzerland, respectively.