Test phase completed: SWIFT develops platform for CBDCs

38 institutions, six months, one success: SWIFT says it has completed "one of the largest CBDC experiments" in the world.

This week, on March 25, 2023, the second phase of testing was successfully completed. This test lasted six months. It is a solution to connect several CBCDs together - the "SWIFT connector."

According to SWIFT, 38 institutions were involved in the test over a six-month period. SWIFT describes it as "one of the largest CBDC experiments known to date."

Since 2023, SWIFT has been developing several services for blockchains, including Chainlink. SWIFT was founded in 1973 and is now one of the largest payment processing networks in the world. 11,000 credit institutions use it. A CBDC is a digital version of a national currency backed by a central bank. As with other cryptocurrencies, certain properties can be "programmed" into it.

While Bitcoin and Ethereum are considered (more or less) decentralized because of their characteristics, CBDCs have been centralized from the beginning and are therefore controversial. They are subject to state control.

Since 2020, governments around the world have been working to introduce digital central bank currencies, now in more than 130 countries. China is leading the way - with a particularly controversial form. Whistleblower and bitcoiner Edward Snowden described CBDCs as a "perversion of cryptocurrencies."