British baking giants of the likes of Barclays have taken part in a trial that centered around testing tokenized deposits, according to a recent report by Bloomberg.
The trial, which started this February, also involved Mastercard and Visa, the world’s biggest credit card networks.
It will take a while before this technology can be used commercially. The experiment is expected to run for up to three years. The first results of the ongoing trial will be revealed in late summer.
Tokenization is picking up steam in the UK. Last month, a government-backed technology group published a report that encouraged local firms to dip their toes into novel technology that could boost the efficiency of the banking sector. Prior to that, it also asked regulators to introduce clear tokenization rules.
Earlier this month, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which represents the biggest central banks around the globe, also announced a tokenization project called Agora that aims to unite central and commercial banks with the help of shared infrastructure. Bank of Japan and Bank of France are among its early participants.
The main aim of Agora is to fix the main problems of cross-border payments.
Agora is not the only project in the 2024 Innovation Hub work program unveiled by the BIS. For instance, Project Aurum will focus on the privacy aspect of retail CBDCs.
In the meantime, the future of “Britcoin,” the digital pound, appears to be uncertain, according to recent reports. The Bank of England first started exploring it back in 2021, but the project has failed to get significant traction.
