Developing a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) system is a significant undertaking and there are many areas that central banks need to explore including: How to improve public-private sector collaboration? How to maximize interoperability, encourage competition and enable adoption? How might retail CBDC meet current and future consumer needs in a fast-changing payments landscape?
Project Rosalind, led by the Innovation Hub's London Centre, aims to help answer some of these questions. The project is named after British scientist Rosalind Franklin, whose work was key to understanding DNA sequencing.
A joint experimentation with the Bank of England, Project Rosalind aims to develop prototypes for an application programming interface. Based on a two-tier distribution model (central bank at the foundation of the retail CBDC system and customer-facing activities carried out by the private sector), the objective is to explore how this interface could best enable a central bank ledger to interact with private sector service providers to safely provision retail payments.
It will also explore some of the functionalities required to enable a diverse and innovative set of use cases to be developed by the private sector. Through this experimentation, the project aims to study how best to lay the foundation for building a robust and vibrant ecosystem.
The project is purely experimental and does not reflect any intentions by the Bank of England on CBDC policy, design or launch.
Project updates
Project Rosalind has been completed.
In February, we reached a significant milestone for Project Rosalind. We hosted a global showcasing event, where we successfully demonstrated a set of API functionalities that could enable a close collaboration between the public and private sector in developing a retail CBDC system as well as supporting a robust ecosystem to spur innovation.
The next milestone for Project Rosalind is the completion of the TechSprint in April. Further details and key insights from both events will be included in the final project report expected to be published in the second quarter of this year.
In 2022 significant progress was made on Project Rosalind Phase 1, which focused on developing an experimental open API platform for retail CBDC. This development work is expected to be completed in Q1 2023 and will be followed by a further phase that will focus on testing and validating API functionality, exploring further use cases to understand adoption and support ecosystem building. This phase will be supported by the Rosalind TechSprint. We are inviting organisations to submit expressions of interest to participate in this TechSprint.
To ensure Phase 1 output is fit for purpose, the project team sees a strong case to engage with API users and technical experts at the outset of the project, to embark on a journey of co-creation.