Blockchain
A Hong Kong-based blockchain firm has launched a digital funds system geared toward bridging the hole between stablecoins and Central Financial institution Digital Currencies (CBDCs).
Pink Date Expertise, the blockchain infrastructure agency which can be main considered one of China’s blockchain efforts, launched the Common Digital Cost Community (UDPN) on Jan. 19 throughout the World Financial Discussion board (WEF) 2023 assembly in Davos, Switzerland.
In response to its whitepaper, the UDPN is a distributed ledger know-how (DLT) platform that will serve an identical function to what the SWIFT community does for banks, however for stablecoins and CBDCs.
Tech engineering firm GFT Applied sciences and the digital asset creation engine TOKO from regulation agency DLA Piper are additionally contributors to UDPN improvement.
“Simply because the SWIFT community created the unique widespread normal for messaging between monetary establishments throughout totally different settlement programs, the UDPN will serve the identical function for the rising technology of CBDCs and stablecoins.”
In response to a Jan. 19 press launch, numerous international tier 1 banks are already concerned in use-case proof of ideas (POCs) to check the community in cross-border transfers and swaps.
The discharge didn’t disclose what banks had been participating within the POCs, however Deutsche Financial institution, HSBC, Commonplace Chartered, The Financial institution of East Asia, and Akbank had been represented on a panel on the UDPN launch in Davos.
A high-level overview of the UDPN structure depicting CBDC programs connecting to off-chain “transaction nodes” which in flip hook up with the on-chain “validator nodes.” Picture: UDPN whitepaper.
The stablecoins for use within the POC had been additionally undisclosed. The networks whitepaper does state, nonetheless, that it solely helps “CBDCs and controlled fiat-backed stablecoin foreign money programs as cost strategies,” including:
“No unregulated public-chain crypto-currencies, comparable to Bitcoin, might be accepted.”
Eight different proof-of-concept checks are scheduled for the community, together with issuing and circulating a CBDC and bank-issued stablecoin and utilizing UDPN as a cost gateway for e-commerce.
The UDPN has been in improvement by Pink Date for practically two years.
Earlier than launching this digital funds system, the corporate was identified for its work on Blockchain-based Service Community (BSN), China’s nationwide blockchain undertaking.
In a now-deleted roadmap posted on Jan. 15, 2021, the BSN stated it deliberate to construct a world CBDC system that “will utterly change the present cost and circulation technique, enabling a standardized digital foreign money switch technique and cost process for any data system.”
The most recent whitepaper makes no point out of Pink Date’s tenure in steering China’s blockchain undertaking, nor of the nation’s personal CBDC efforts with its digital yuan.
Beforehand, in June 2022 Pink Date’s CEO, Yifan He, referred to as cryptocurrencies the “greatest Ponzi scheme in human historical past.”