Wholesale CBDC
Central bank money issued in digital or tokenized form for settlement between financial institutions, not the public.
Wholesale central bank digital currency is a tokenized form of the reserves that banks already hold at their central bank. It is distinct from retail CBDC, which would be available to households and businesses.
The case for wholesale CBDC follows from tokenization itself: if securities and deposits move onto programmable ledgers, the safest settlement asset — central bank money — may need to be available there too, so that large transactions can settle with finality and without credit risk.
Central banks are pursuing different routes. Some explore issuing tokenized reserves directly; others look at linking existing real-time gross settlement systems to tokenized platforms. Many projects remain experiments rather than live services.
In practice
- Project Agorá brings together seven central banks under the BIS Innovation Hub to test tokenized wholesale central bank money with commercial banks.
- Several central banks have run settlement trials in which tokenized assets were settled in central bank money on, or linked to, distributed ledgers.
Primary sources
- Project Agorá ↗BIS Innovation Hub
- BIS Innovation Hub ↗Bank for International Settlements
- BIS Innovation Hub Video LibraryBank for International Settlements
Related concepts
All concepts
An independent TokenShares explainer. Informational only; the cited publications are the authoritative sources.