Despite pilot, Swiss National Bank has no plans to launch CBDC
Though the Swiss National Bank is set to pilot central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, amid a changing financial ecosystem, it doesn’t necessarily have plans to launch one. The pilot is meant to test a wholesale CBDC for “a limited time” to test transactions with market participants on the SIX Digital Exchange, a spokesperson told Blockworks. The central bank sees signs in Switzerland of the development of a new financial ecosystem where transactions take place with tokenized securities and tokenized money — an environment set to make financial markets more efficient. The SIX Digital Exchange launch ed in November 2021 when parent company SIX issued a tokenized bond that marked “the beginning of a new era,” Thomas Zeeb, SIX’s global head of exchanges, said in a statement at the time. UBS issued a digital 375 million Swiss franc-denominated, three-year bond on the SIX Digital Exchange about a year later — becoming the first such bond by a banking institution to be listed, ...