7 febbraio 2022 Peiying Chua Heikes  - Yong En Koh Financial Regulation

MAS Global CBDC Challenge Report

February 2022

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (“MAS”) has published its Global CBDC Challenge Report (the “Report”) presenting unique CBDC solutions from 15 finalists across 8 jurisdictions. The 2021 Global CBDC Challenge (the “Challenge”) was organised by the MAS in collaboration with international partners, to catalyse the development of a set of technologies to enable issuance of retail CBDC. The Challenge, which ran for a total of 20 weeks, invited participants to address 12 problem statements relating to: (i) CBDC Instrument; (ii) CBDC Distribution; and (iii) CBDC Infrastructure; covering topics such as inclusivity, interoperability and programmability. The proposals from the finalists sought to address multiple problem statements through a variety of technology approaches including hardware wallets, digital identity and asset tokenisation solutions.

We set out below highlights of The Regulated Liability Network solution.

The Regulated Liability Network:

  • The Regulated Liability Network (“RLN”) represents a collaboration between regulated financial institution participants working to realise the vision of regulated, global, token-based, multi-asset networks connected using distributed ledger technology. The RLN envisions programmable instant settlement of regulated tokenised liabilities anywhere, anytime.
  • The RLN is a proposed Financial Market Infrastructure that tokenises regulated liabilities like central bank money, commercial bank money and Electronic-Money.
  • The RLN records the liabilities of each participating regulated institution and makes them fungible within the network.
  • The RLN achieves interoperability and inclusion through the tokenisation of regulated liabilities.
  • The RLN consists of a logical/legal partition for each participating institution. For example, tokens within the central bank partition are CBDCs. Within the same network are partitions for each of the regulated private entities containing their tokens representing their liabilities.
  • Whereas traditional payment systems perform messaging between institutions where the money is held, in RLN the money is on the network, which operates around the clock, and is programmable via smart contracts.
  • The RLN leverages the ‘multi-asset’ nature of distributed ledger technology and is able to incorporate regulated assets as well as liabilities (e.g. bonds).