Today it was announced that the winners of the G20 TechSprint are Bitt–IDEMIA, DragonFly Fintech and Partior. The topic was central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).
The hackathon was operated by the Bank of Indonesia in conjunction with Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub and attracted 100 projects. These were reduced to 21 finalists across three themes.
Singapore’s Dragonfly Fintech won an award for its end-to-end solution. The Bitt-IDEMIA project was in the financial inclusion category. And Partior won the interoperability theme.
Partior is the payments joint venture between JP Morgan, DBS Bank and Temasek, and its winning CBDC solution is a multi-CBDC offering that supports both token and account-based CBDCs.
For the competition, Bitt’s Digital Currency Management System (DCMS) was combined with IDEMIA’s secure offline CBDC wallet.
“Our solution gives everyone access to CBDC, even to those who cannot afford a smartphone. We help fulfill the vision to make digital cash available anywhere and anytime, with or without network coverage,” said Jerome Ajdenbaum, VP of Digital Currencies at IDEMIA.
IDEMIA’s offline wallet supports consecutive offline payments with immediate settlement using a Layer 2 solution. The recipient can be either online or offline. The card looks like any payment card and has a tamper-resistant hardware chip that allows balance management, user authentication and key storage.
France’s IDEMIA is known for its biometrics solutions and is reportedly up for sale by its private equity owner Advent International for $4.6 billion.
Meanwhile, Bitt has multiple CBDC projects on the go. It has the contracts for the Eastern Caribbean DCash solution and won the contract for Nigeria’s eNaira, which is live. It also has a tokenized money project in Ukraine with Stellar, but that was announced before the war.
In July, Bitt took on the CBDC team from Criteo, which had multiple CBDC projects after Criteo was one of three winners of last year’s Singapore’s Global CBDC Challenge.
Update: the article was updated to clarify that Bitt-IDEMIA won the financial inclusion category only.
