Bank of England unveils ‘Project Rosalind’ to support CBDCs; Quant joins as tech vendor

By Puja Sharma

Quant collaborates with the Bank for International Settlements and the Bank of England on Project Rosalind as a technology vendor

Quant, the blockchain for finance pioneer, announced its role as part of the vendor team for Project Rosalind. The project, led by the Bank for International Settlements and the Bank of England, explored how application programming interfaces could be used for central bank digital currency systems.

Project Rosalind, directed by the BIS Innovation Hub London Centre, has been testing how APIs could facilitate retail payments in CBDCs and support the exploration of innovative CBDC use cases. The project looked specifically at a public-private sector collaboration model in which the public sector would provide core infrastructure, and the private sector would produce consumer-facing applications. Collaborating with many participants in the ecosystem, the project has proven that APIs could play a key role in enabling CBDC systems to deliver a range of benefits in terms of payment functionality and security.

Gilbert Verdian, Founder and CEO of Quant said, “For the first time money is ready for the digital age. A CBDC will enable citizens and businesses to automate cumbersome payments and processes and implement logic into money. For commercial banks and other institutions, the opportunity to apply this programmability to create innovative new products that differentiate themselves from challengers and competitors is almost endless. We encourage every bank and financial institution to read the Project Rosalind report and start planning their smart money infrastructure strategy.”

The London Innovation Hub Centre was established by Switzerland-headquartered BIS in 2021 and is one of six international nodes working to develop public goods in the technology space to support central banks and improve the functioning of the financial system.

Another important outcome was innovation through exploring use cases – a world-first – that tested how CBDCs could support a more digitalised economy in the future. Quant has contributed to the work in designing and developing API functionalities to support innovation and to enable private sector programmability.

Quant partnered with UST, a leading digital transformation company, on the project, with Quant providing the underlying infrastructure and blockchain platform, secure smart contracts and interoperability of central bank ledgers, and UST building the frontend Rosalind API layer.

Martin Hargreaves, Product Manager at Quant said, “It was a positive project and the collaboration between the various participants worked well, we’ve now created real-world examples of how CBDCs could be integrated into our day-to-day lives.”

Each participating company suggested a few different use cases to test, and we worked to add innovations to the core of each suggestion. This collaboration meant we could create a lot of high-impact applications of CBDCs through our approach of implementing novel ideas and programming each use case uniquely.

“For example, Amazon demonstrated a checkout experience whereby the customer could select and use a CBDC to pay for an item (similar to selecting and using a debit card, or Apple Pay), and the Bank of Canada completed an example transaction between a parent and their child’s account, whereby the child was paid an amount from their parent’s account once certain chores had been completed. The project has shown a wealth of examples where CBDCs can be used in – and add value to – our lives.”