Norwegian Central Bank Uses Ethereum to Build National Digital Currency

The Norwegian central bank has achieved a major milestone in its digital currency efforts by releasing the open source code for the country’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) sandbox.

This sandbox, available on GitHub, is designed to provide an interface for interacting with the test network, enabling features such as ERC-20 token creation, burning, and transfers, allowing it to interact with Norges Bank’s official CBDC. Partner Nahmii said in a blog post.

Nahmii emphasized that the current version of the code, by design, does not support the leading Ethereum wallet MetaMask and can only be accessed privately by users with proper credentials.

The Norges Bank sandbox includes the appropriate smart contract and access control deployments, as well as custom frontends and network monitoring tools such as BlockScout and Grafana. The front end also displays a filterable overview of transactions on the network, Nahmii said.

The Bank of Norway tweeted last Friday Mention Norway’s CBDC prototype infrastructure is based on Ethereum technology.

The central bank previously mentioned Ethereum in a CBDC-related blog post in May. The Bank of Norway said the Ethereum cryptocurrency system is expected to provide the “core infrastructure” for the issuance, distribution and destruction of digital central bank money, also known as DSP. “The prototype will be used to test many important features of the DSP,” Bank said.

As previously reported, the Bank of Norway officially announced its plans to conduct a CBDC test last April. It hopes to find a desirable CBDC solution by trying different designs for two years.

In November 2021, the central bank published a working paper referring to possible CBDC designs, including those based on blockchains such as Ethereum, Bitcoin and Bitcoin SV. Norges Bank emphasized that interoperability is one of the most important issues while considering various technical solutions.

Related: Reserve Bank of India preparing CBDC pilots with public sector banks and fintechs

The news comes as the International Monetary Fund releases a report showing that as of July 2022, 97 countries, or more than half of the world’s central banks, are considering or developing CBDCs. it was done. On the other hand, so far he has only two countries that have fully launched CBDC projects. It includes Nigeria and the Bahamas, the IMF said.

The IMF announced in September that it was working on a project related to an interoperable CBDC platform that would connect multiple global CBDCs and enable cross-border transactions.