Norway’s central bank has released open source code for the country’s central bank digital currency sandbox (CBDC) on GitHub.
Norges Bank’s official CBDC partner Nahmii said on its blog.
“Our work with Norges Bank has focused on defining and commissioning a production sandbox environment with open source services (Grafana, BlockScout and Hyperledger Besu). This allows testing of basic token management usage scenarios, including ERC-20 token mining, burning and transferring,” Nahmii was told.
In addition to deploying appropriate smart contracts and access controls, Norges Bank’s sandbox includes a custom frontend and network monitoring tools (BlockScout and Grafana). The frontend also displays a summary of transactions in the network with filtering capabilities”.
Nahmii stressed that the current version of the code, by design, does not support the main Ethereum wallet MetaMask and is only privately available to users with the relevant credentials.
Last Friday, Norges Bank tweeted that Norway’s CBDC prototype infrastructure was based on Ethereum technology.
The central bank had previously hinted at this in a blog post on CBDC in May. Norges Bank said the Ethereum cryptocurrency system is to provide the “core infrastructure” for the central bank’s digital money issuance, distribution and burning – DSP. “The prototype will be used to test a number of important features for the DSP,” the bank said.
Norges Bank formally announced plans to test the CBDC and find preferred solutions for the CBDC by trying out various designs over two years in April last year.
In November 2021, the central bank released a working paper outlining possible CBDC options, including those based on blockchains such as Ethereum, Bitcoin and Bitcoin SV. Norges Bank stressed that interoperability is one of the most important issues when considering different technical solutions.
The International Monetary Fund published a report stating that 97 countries, or more than half of the world’s central banks, were studying or developing CBDC as of July 2022. On the other hand, only two countries have fully launched CBDC projects to date, including Nigeria and the Bahamas, the IMF said.
In September, the IMF said it was working on a project related to an interoperable CBDC platform that connects multiple global CBDCs and enables cross-border transactions.
