The New York Fed completed a wholesale central bank digital currency simulation test, with an average transaction settlement time of less than 15 seconds

The New York Innovation Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York announced the progress of its pilot program Project Cedar, which uses blockchain technology to improve cross-border payments. Phase 1 developed a prototype of a wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC) to simulate wholesale foreign exchange spot transactions. To test whether blockchain technology can provide fast and secure payment services. Simulation tests show that blockchain-enabled cross-border payments are faster, more synchronized and more secure. In the test environment, transactions on the blockchain-enabled distributed ledger system settled in less than 15 seconds on average. As part of its ongoing wCBDC research, the New York Fed will explore issues related to interoperability and ledger design, including how to achieve concurrency and best execute atomic transactions across different blockchain-based payment systems. At the heart of the Project Cedar solution concept is a distributed ledger infrastructure, a multi-ledger structure in which each currency is kept on a separate ledger, run by its own simulated central bank. The Phase 1 prototype includes design choices such as a permissioned blockchain network, utilizing an unspent transaction output (UTXO) data model, and Rust as the primary programming language.