The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and Bank Indonesia recently announced the winners of the G20 TechSprint 2022 challenge during a live award ceremony in Jakarta.

This year’s competition, under the Indonesian G20 Presidency, was launched in April to catalyze new technologies that “would better enable the development and future use of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).”

An independent panel of 11 experts, convened by Bank Indonesia, “assessed the developed prototypes from the 21 shortlisted teams” and selected the following winners for each category:

Team Dragonfly Fintech Pte Ltd from Singapore won the “Effective and robust means to issue, distribute and transfer CBDCs” category for their solution End-to-End CBDC Solution, which is a proprietary blockchain ledger with unique in-built features and includes a mobile wallet and digital identity platform.

Team Bitt-IDEMIA from the US won the “Enabling Financial Inclusion” category for their solution Secure Offline CBDC Payment Solution, which is a platform that allows monetary authorities to launch interoperable CBDCs while also leveraging on a layer-2 solution to enable offline payments.

Team Partior from Singapore won the “Improving interoperability” category for their solution Project Naucratis: Enabling Connectivity & Interoperability for mCBDC, which is a blockchain-based multi-CBDC network that supports both account-based and token based CBDC models.

Cecilia Skingsley, Head of the BIS Innovation Hub, said:

“This TechSprint has allowed the teams to improve [their] practical work on CBDCs. These technological solutions add to the central banks’ toolbox and provide a springboard for further development of CBDCs. Our heartiest congratulations to the winning teams.”

For more details about TechSprint and the list of Judges, check here.

As covered, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the central banks of Israel, Norway and Sweden are launching Project Icebreaker, a joint exploration of how central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) can be “used for international retail and remittance payments.”

Cross-border payments “continue to be plagued by high costs, low speed, limited access and insufficient transparency.”

The G20 has “launched an ambitious program to improve cross-border payments, aiming to achieve faster and cheaper, as well as more transparent and inclusive cross-border payments.”

One of the workstreams “explores how CBDCs could play a role in enhancing cross-border payments.” The BIS Innovation Hub and other international institutions and standard-setting committees “have been working together to investigate the use of CBDCs for cross-border payments.”

The most recent report was “published last July.”

Project Icebreaker is “a collaboration between the Bank of Israel, Central Bank of Norway, Sveriges Riksbank and BIS Innovation Hub Nordic Centre to develop a ‘hub’ to which participating central banks will connect their domestic proof-of-concept CBDC systems.”