The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has invited organizations to apply to participate in the second phase of Project Rosalind, the joint initiative with the Bank of England to develop an API for a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC). Applications close on February 10 and there will be a TechSprint through March.
Rosalind is one of the first projects of the London BIS Innovation Hub.
The initial phase of Project Rosalind is now drawing to a close. It involved the development of an API prototype for a consumer-focused CBDC. The API’s objective is to enable payment service providers (not just banks) to integrate with the API to support consumer access to the retail CBDC.
The second phase will explore the use cases for the CBDC. Hence the invitation is to organizations that wish to develop innovative applications based on a CBDC by creating front end prototypes.
The BIS is requesting applications to include improvements to existing applications or “something entirely new.”
The API functionality includes creating accounts and allowing users to query balances. Both push and pull payments are supported, as is programmable money.
All CBDC transactions are processed individually by the central bank, and the accounts are directly held with the central bank. However, the payment providers will be responsible for AML and keep the personal information and transaction details, neither of which will be available to the API and hence cannot be accessed by the central bank.
Given APIs are essentially integration points, the goal of Project Rosalind is to explore:
- interoperability between systems and different forms of money
- privacy
- a token versus account based CBDC
- FAPI, which enables secure access to the API
- and the ISO220022 messaging standard.
Separately, the Bank of England is in the process of selecting a provider to develop a wallet for its digital pound experiments.
