THE BANGKO SENTRAL ng Pillipinas (BSP) is completed the testing phase for Project Agila, its pilot project for a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
In a statement on Thursday, the BSP said it has completed testing for Project Aguila, along with other participating financial institutions.
“Wholesale CBDCs are expected to improve liquidity management, reduce settlement risks and support financial stability,” said BSP Governor Eli M. Remolona, Jr.
“Insights from this project will guide the BSP’s CBDC roadmap. Our goal is to leverage new technologies to improve effstrength and resilience of the national payment system,” he added.
The project aims to “fifinancial institutions to transfer money to each other, even outside business hours, including evenings, weekends and holidays.”
“These transactions can be securely supported by open-source distributed ledger technology through the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.”
The BSP previously said the project was likely to be launched in 2029, still within Mr Remolona’s six-year term.
Since 2021, the central bank has been exploring use cases for wholesale CBDCs.
“Project Agila is a proof-of-concept of the BSP’s CBDC at the wholesale level. The evaluation with financial institutions included functional, performance, security, exploratory, end-to-end and programmability testing,” the central bank said.
The project also aims to “explore and test the potential of CBDCs, while evaluating whether this technology can help improve the country’s high-value payment system.”
The BSP previously said it is open to studying retail CBDCs, but does not yet see the need to do so.
CBDCs are a form of digital money denominated in the national unit of account and are direct obligations of the central bank.
Wholesale CBDCs can be issued to commercial banks and other financial institutions to settle interbank payments, securities transactions and cross-border payments, among other things. — Luisa Maria Jacinta C. Jocson