FINOS, Hyperledger Foundation, DDP to drive development for CBDCs

By Edlyn Cardoza

Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) has the power to transform economies — connecting people, governments, businesses, and organisations locally and globally through technology that could not have been imagined even 20 years ago and with more advances on the way.

Experimentation is central to answering any question, especially one with as many stakeholders, variables, and “unknowns” as CBDCs. Without open-source development and collaboration between stakeholders, each will have to invest significant resources to build code independently and will have no way to avoid duplicating efforts or mistakes.

“To achieve success, we must experiment, question, interrogate, and evaluate without fear of failure. We must share information openly and freely across borders, industries, and institutions to create a rich dataset that drives innovation and decision-making.

That’s why we are thrilled to announce that Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), Hyperledger Foundation and The Digital Dollar Project (DDP) are joining forces to create an open community dedicated to experimentation, information sharing, and discussion around CBDCs, ensuring that central banks that decide to embark upon researching or deploying CBDCs are doing so with the best available secure technology.

Each organisation’s unique community will contribute to building a neutral place to collaborate, use, share, and build technologies that advance the exploration of CBDCs. Our aim is to bring together a global forum of practitioners and stakeholders to engage in open collaboration and development and to forge private-public partnerships for experimenting, sharing knowledge, and working together on open standards and research,” said the company in a press release.

FINOS is a nonprofit whose mission is to foster the adoption of open source, open standards and collaborative software development practices in financial services. It is the centre for open source developers and the financial services industry to build new technology projects that have a lasting impact on business operations. As a regulatory compliant platform, the foundation enables developers from these competing organisations to collaborate on projects with a strong propensity for mutualisation. It has enabled codebase contributions from both the buy- and sell-side firms and counts 30+ major financial institutions, fintechs and technology consultancies as part of its membership.