Project Rosalind, a joint experiment on central bank digital currencies conducted by the BIS Innovation Hub London Centre and the Bank of England, has demonstrated that a well-designed Application Programing Interface (API) that allows devices to communicate with each other could work with different private-sector applications and central bank ledger designs.
The project developed 33 API functionalities and explored more than 30 retail central bank digital currencies (CBDC) use cases, according to BIS.org.
The use cases included peer-to-peer transfers, retail payments for goods and services, and small-value business transactions. Some use cases explored the potential for private-sector programmability and the use of micropayments within the central bank digital currencies ecosystem.
"We believe that Rosalind can make a significant contribution to how organizations across the globe are thinking about and engaging with the design of retail CBDC systems," Francesca Hopwood Road, head of the BIS Innovation Hub London Centre of BIS, told BIS.org.
"The Rosalind experiment has advanced central bank innovation in two key areas: by exploring how an API layer could support a retail CBDC system and how it could facilitate safe and secure CBDC payments through a range of different use cases," Road said, according to BIS.org. "Active collaboration with the public and private sectors to identify and explore these use cases has been at the heart of this. We believe that Rosalind can make a significant contribution to how organizations across the globe are thinking about and engaging with the design of retail CBDC systems."
Project Rosalind also studied "privacy models, security, standards, offline payments, private sector programmability, and ecosystem roles and responsibilities," according to BIS.org.
Central banks, academia and the private sector collaborated on the research.